Posted on 11/12/2007 1:44:47 AM PST by Enchante
When The Bee's Bobby Caina Calvan volunteered for a six-week reporting stint in Iraq, he didn't have the faintest notion he would be nominated for an award.
Just a few days into his assignment, conservative blogger Michelle Malkin did the honors, nominating Calvan for "Jerk of the Year."
That was just the beginning of the accolades. In a matter of days, bloggers and their flock of sheep across the country were calling Calvan an "immature human," "a pompous ass," "disrespectful," an "embarrassment," and an "anti-American military" ideologue.
There were more, but you can't print them in the newspaper.
What was Calvan's great transgression?
He got into a spat with an American soldier manning a checkpoint who questioned Calvan's identification before finally letting the reporter and his Iraqi helper back into Baghdad's secure Green Zone.
Calvan then wrote about the encounter in a snarky, arrogant way – including his attempt to "bully" the soldier – on his new personal blog, which was intended to keep his family and friends updated about his work and life in Iraq.
Except the blog wasn't so private, as Calvan found to his everlasting embarrassment and chagrin.
(Excerpt) Read more at sacbee.com ...
But of course he is unbiased towards the war.
Pray for W and Our Victorious Soldiers
Knight Ridder doesn’t even exist any more. His press identification is out of date. It’s McClatchy as of right now, but who knows what it will be the next time he ventures out of the Green Zone? McClatchy’s stock is in freefall.
Sorry..I’m just so mad I can’t see straight.
LMAO! Oh man, you have nailed it, POST OF THE THREAD! If this clown had bothered to search the internet for "Knight Ridder" he would have seen this!
The media has the unmitigated GALL to accuse others of having a "political agenda???"
"They were trying to discredit our reporting coming out of Iraq."
Oh, you discredited yourselves when the whole thing began, you media scum. You don't need us to do it for you. I've watched you and your media cronies twist, distort and outright LIE about Iraq for almost four years now.
Talk about "political agenda." Oh, brother!
This editor’s arrogance is breathtaking. Calvan had basically taken his lumps, apologized, and the whole thing had simmered down...until this a-hole blows it back up with this condescending, sneering column. “Right-wingers?” “Sheep?” Nice, Mr. Acuna, niiiiice. And you wonder why your fishwrap is circling the toilet.
}:-)4
Knight Ridder doesn’t exist any more as I understand it. They were bought out and merged with McClatchy. They don’t have a separate presence anymore. I don’t understand why he still was trying to use Knight Ridder credentials in the first place. Didn’t McClatchy replace them when they merged or did this guy forget or mislay his McClatchy ID?
Can you imagine the MSM response if the guards had let in a terrorist who bullied his way in without proper credentials and blew up a bunch of reporters in the Green Zone? They’d crucify the poor guard and his superiors. Neither the Public Editor or the Washington Bureau Managing Editor have a clue based upon what the Public Editor wrote. Calvan was a green assh*le reporter these people are experienced assh*les who should know better but don’t.
I suppose all three of them use the same techniques when stopped by a policeman when they are speeding.
Those are great points!
amazing, they are in such a financial freefall yet they still employ bozos like this “public editor” writing such idiotic columns, or the new editor of the Sac Bee who so distinguished /s herself with the Duke lax case...... and their pitiful shareholders wonder why such a “news” organization sees its stock swirling around in the toilet bowl.....
Ping to post 50
littlegreenfootballs.com had a great thread on this. There’s a link to another thread along the same lines. This was not just “brushed aside” by most people.
http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/ne...t_id=1003671462
McClatchy Bans Personal Blogs For Rotating Iraq Reporters
By Joe Strupp
Published: November 12, 2007 4:30 PM ET
NEW YORK Criticism of a personal blog item by McClatchy’s Bobby Caina Calvan, who has been on loan from The Sacramento Bee for an Iraq reporting stint, has prompted the chain’s D.C. bureau to ban personal blogs for those who work temporary duty in Iraq.
David Westphal, McClatchy Washington editor, whose bureau also oversees the paper’s foreign reporters, told E&P that reporters who serve temporary six-week tours in Iraq have been asked not to blog about their work on their own private sites.
“This only affects non-Washington bureau people,” said Westphal. “This is a group of people who come in and rotate.”
Westphal said reporters such as Calvan, who are based at McClatchy papers and serve six-week stints in Baghdad, create a unique problem because they are not technically employed by the D.C. bureau and they are on temporary assignment.
“That make it more important to make sure we have a say so in what is reported by them out of Iraq,” Westphal explained. “We are trying to find a way for them to blog on our site. It might be incorporated into the bureau chief’s blog, a way to get that amplification out there.”
Westphal made clear that Calvan was not disciplined in any way, nor should he have been. “This is not about Bobby, it is about us.”
Bee Public Editor Armando Acuna said that a recent item on Calvan’s non-work blog about a run-in with a U.S. soldier in Baghdad sparked the rule change.
“He got into a spat with an American soldier manning a checkpoint who questioned Calvan’s identification before finally letting the reporter and his Iraqi helper back into Baghdad’s secure Green Zone,” Acuna wrote in a Sunday column. “Calvan then wrote about the encounter in a snarky, arrogant way – including his attempt to ‘bully’ the soldier – on his new personal blog, which was intended to keep his family and friends updated about his work and life in Iraq.
“Except the blog wasn’t so private, as Calvan found to his everlasting embarrassment and chagrin,” Acuna added. “A day after his Oct. 23 blog posting, Calvan woke up at 5 a.m. in his Baghdad hotel room and signed onto his computer.”
“My e-mail started going crazy,” he told Acuna, according to the column. “That’s when I started receiving all this hate mail.”
Acuna wrote that Calvan’s item “&hellip was now whizzing around the very public blogosphere, put there by right-wing critics breathlessly passing it around like the discovery of a deep, dark secret, a digital Rosetta stone deciphering the media’s true heart. Even the mainstream media got into the act. On Oct. 25 USA Today’s ‘On Deadline’ Web site wrote about the controversy, including running an excerpt from Calvan’s blog.”
When complaints reached the level of Web readers blaming McClatchy and accusing the chain of biased reporting, Mark Seibel, foreign editor, pulled the blog.
“It was used by people with a political agenda,” Seibel told Acuna. “They were trying to discredit our reporting coming out of Iraq.”
Seibel could not be reached for comment Monday.
Acuna adds that “e-mailers by the dozens from all over the country sent their complaints to Calvan, my office, to Bee senior editors, McClatchy corporate headquarters and the Washington Bureau. A few had letters to the editor printed in The Bee.”
Eventually, the D.C. bureau cancelled such personal blogs for its reporters, Acuna said, noting Seibel said, “We don’t want to be surprised again.”
The blog controversy comes at a time when the McClatchy D.C. bureau has been pushing foreign correspondents to write blogs that are part of the Washington bureau’s official Web site. Those have not been affected.
Westphal said he did not necessarily object to what Calvan wrote on his blog, or what he did in Baghdad, but stressed that such items need to be able to be reviewed by McClatchy editors since they pertain to work he did as their reporter.
“We need to have it run through Washington,” he said. “For those who are there temporarily, we would have a review process.” When asked if Calvan’s posting would have been edited or blocked from being posted by an editor, Westphal said, “I don’t know, I suppose there would have been a conversation about it. What I objected to was that we didn’t have a review process in place.”
Joe Strupp (jstrupp@editorandpublisher.com) is a senior editor at E&P.
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