Posted on 11/25/2004 7:52:43 AM PST by HighWheeler
Hoo-boy. It's a hot time in the old blogtown.
The pajamahadeen are firing their virtual bullets into the cyber-air in celebration of CBS anchor Dan Rather's announcement on Tuesday that he was retiring as the top talking face of the network after 24 years.
"This has been a simply outstanding month," crowed a poster on http://www.freerepublic.com. "Bush won, Arafat died, we're kicking ass in Fallujah, and now this!"
Typically, the above-quoted "Freeper" didn't get that Rather may be down, but he certainly isn't out. When he steps down as front man for The CBS Evening News on March 9, he will stay on as correspondent for the still much-watched 60 Minutes, as well as perform other assignments.
So it was a bit premature to be celebrating the defeat of the veteran journalist who has inspired anti-liberal websites such as http://www.RatherBiased.com and http://www.BoycottCBS.com, not to mention Doonesbury's ridiculous foreign correspondent Roland Hedley Jr., an R.E.M. hit and "Rather-gate."
As comic Jon Stewart recently pointed out, last September's 60 Minutes II fiasco, which had Rather questioning President George W. Bush's National Guard service with documents that could not be authenticated, was the only scandal of the election campaign to have merited a "-gate."
Which brings us to those pajamahadeen, the online brigades who claim credit for bringing those documents into question — and forcing Rather to apologize for his reporting.
The right-wing bloggers proudly dubbed themselves that — a play on muhajadeen, as in Muslim guerrilla fighters — when former CBS exec Jonathan Klein, in the wake of the scandal, complained to Fox News that "bloggers have no checks and balances.
"You couldn't have a starker contrast between the multiple layers of checks and balances (on network news) and a guy sitting in his living room in his pajamas writing."
By checks and balances, Klein meant the rigours of professional journalism — and not the opinionating of the blogosphere.
Ironically, bloggers mostly feed off the work of professional journalists who do the legwork. But, like parasites too stupid to realize they are killing off their hosts, the pajamahadeen don't get it every time they dig more dirt for our mass grave.
"Network news is dying and good riddence (sic)!" jubilated one of them yesterday.
It's true that journalism's checks and balances have been known to fail. When they do, news organizations crash and burn in spectacular fashion. But, much like the thousands of airplanes that land safely every day and don't make the news, major disasters are few and far between.
Still, the credibility of the corporate media continues to plummet.
In March, the Washington-based Project for Excellence in Journalism published The State of the News Media 2004, which documents an increase in superficiality and sensationalism, the declining reach of newspapers and network newscasts, cutbacks in newsroom resources and, most significantly, rising public distrust and disdain for our reportage.
Then, in June, the Canadian Media Research Consortium, a national project led by three University-based organizations to promote research on the media, (http://www.cmrcccrm.ca) came out with its Report Card On Canadian News Media. While it showed that Canadians are significantly more positive about our news sources than Americans are, citizens here believe that "powerful people or organizations" have too much influence on the media agenda.
One thing is clear from both studies: The shift from mainstream media to alternate sources such as the ethnic press, cable networks and the Internet, are threatening the future of the solid, stolid mainstream journalism.
And we don't know how to deal with it. Recently, for example, the news came from the U.K. that staid old papers are going tabloid, while the Washington Post will lighten up — all to attract elusive younger readers.
As for the newscasts of the type that Rather hosts, well, one look at the commercials for arthritis pills will tell you plenty about their demographics.
Paradoxically, young people are crowding into journalism schools, many of them in search of network TV stardom.
Still, the pajamahadeen are waging war on the mainstream media.
That includes the paper you're reading, even if you're not reading it on paper, since it is the actually selling of this paper which pays for the content you may now be reading gratis.
By the end of today, who knows how many bloggers will have had at this column? Many of them often shoot me down — and some do a pretty good job. (See letitbleed.blogs.com)
But, just like trigger happy celebrants in the Middle East, who have yet to figure out that what goes up must come down, they can't see that, by firing up at us, they will also kill themselves.
Bookmark.
EXACTLY, there were many many comments on how Dan Blather is not actually stepping down, but just doing a side show looking like he actually was. CBS may of been embarrased, but they don't act like they really care to do anything major about it. They will replace Dan with a liberal clone but perhaps a shrewder one. The job of top new man is to try to look fair and balanced while spouting the company line to the gulible fish viewers. Our job is to show that the bait they use is poisoned with lies/half truths/ and sometimes fake documents.
Both Klein and the author of this article, Antonia Zerbisias, make the crucial mistake of confusing the FreeRepublic Forum with a "Blog".
Once again, their arrogance, their ignorance and their extremely weak system of what they claim are "checks and balances" blinds them.
The solitary blogger is in the business of posting his own writings on his own web page. He owns his own "Vanity Press". Such an individual is, indeed, without a system of checks and balances and is limited to his own fund of knowledge.
By contrast, the FreeRepublic Forum is an interactive community of tens of thousands of members with hundreds of thousands of man-years of real world experience in just about any civilian or military occupation or profession you could name. From landing an F-14 on the deck of a carrier at night to making a living as a typist in the early 1970's to practicing medicine to being a journalist, somebody on FreeRepublic has been there and done that.
The "checks and balances" on FreeRepublic are built in as no Freeper can post false factual information without ten other Freepers eagerly piling on in order to shoot down the original mistake.
By contrast, the Kleins and the Zerbisias of the news media muddle through with their limited funds of knowledge with nobody to give them guidance except an editor and, sometimes, with an alleged "expert" who may or may not have a clue about their chosen topic.
Thus, you have Dan Rather making an idiot of himself by quoting a self-proclaimed "handwriting expert" (who used to claim that he could analyze the personality of a person by his or her handwriting) without any training in typed document forensics as the CBS News "expert".
Can so-called "checks and balances" get any more pathetic than that?
Rather (no pun intended) than being "parasites" off the "legwork" of the media writer, the thousands of members of the FreeRepublic Forum provide the factual legwork that media writers are incapable of doing due to their ignorance and/or lack access to qualified experts and/or to laziness and/or to their bias.
We are not "parasites on a host", Ms. Zerbisias. We are the real checks and balances that your news organizations cannot provide or refuse to provide.
Every time that you or any of your colleagues publishes a lie that that your editor intentionally winked at or that your limited supply of researches was too ignorant to catch, we will be on you like pit-bulls on a pork chop.
You no longer have a monopoly on what the American public is allowed to read, Ms. Zerbisias. The factual lies that your editor allows you to print from either ignorance or hubris will be found and they will be crammed right back down your throat.
Deal with it.
The benefit to digging your own grave is that you can make sure it suits you.
Perhaps if jounalism would return to "who - what - where - and when, and lay off the bias of why and how, the news media would flourish. Gentlemen, leave the free speech of the bloggers alone, and police your own ranks. Pleae report the facts as they happen, not as you see them.
When he steps down as front man for The CBS Evening News on March 9, he will stay on as correspondent for the still much-watched 60 Minutes, as well as perform other assignments.
CBS could have promoted him to head janitor or put him out picking s**t with the chickens or banned him to outer Mongolia I still will not go to CBS for any imformation that is required to be unbiased or factual!
For me CBS is fini!
ABC, CNN, NBC and MSNBC are just as unbelievable!
Whose NEXT?
We re like the Minutemen militias in the American Revolution. Like them, we take up arms to defend our nation and our families and our freedoms from those who corrupt them via the MSM.
Like the Minutemen, we will be satisfied to return to other pursuits when and if the MSM comes to its senses and returns to straight reporting.
(s)so if the democrats/leftists ever retake congress, they will immediatly pass an assault weapons ban which includes personal computers. Feinstine will demand licensing, fingerprinting, and background checks for internet users.(/s)
If tar and feathering Dan Rather isn't an accomplishment, I don't don't know what it. Shut up and take it Antonia.
We re like the Minutemen militias in the American Revolution. Like them, we take up arms to defend our nation and our families and our freedoms from those who corrupt them via the MSM.
Like the Minutemen, we will be satisfied to return to other pursuits when and if the MSM comes to its senses and returns to straight reporting.
Nah...if we chase you away, all we may be left with are true REPORTERS, not manipulating, patrician JOURNALISTS.
You feed, we'll do our OWN digesting.
Yes, and well said!
It is...this is the Star. There are 4 daily papers in Toronto. The Star...mouthpiece and overall socialist rag for the liberal party of Canada. The Globe and Mail...NY Times copyist. The National Post...Conrad Blacks paper which was then bought out by liberal party supporter Izzy Farber. This is why Mark Steyn no longer appears there. The Sun...successful tabloid which is the right wing paper sort of like the current NY Post. I would say since it was bought out by the Quebecor media conglomerate a few years ago it no longer is a reliable bastion but still has plenty of conservative punch. BTW Antonia is female gang. A lot of posts here think she is male.
Listen up ANTONIA ZERBISIAS! You IDIOTS in the press have been in error on almost every single news story. You people are an embarrasment! Brainless! A bunch of ignorant sheep and now it appears that you people are really a bunch a suicidal LEMMINGS!
More shi'ite from Al Qanada..
A brief moment of candor.
Great idea, it's already being implemented. That's pretty much how Matt Drudge got his start. There's this now-famous guy, JimRob, who probably has a press pass. The way to do it is to start your own website/blog/whatever and break a story. Getting a press pass is as easy as laminating 2 pieces of cardboard together with some cool looking logo on it.
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