"We" are now a reality, and "we" are in the midst of fabulous changes.
Beckel was having a hissy fit last night. What the heck you can't have all that freedom of speech.
The MSM does not have a lock on the opinion market. Free speech will be the end of the MSM.
"We determine what is news and what is not." - Dan Rather
It's not as if they are making it difficult. The trophies are there for the taking. They have provided us with a target rich environment.
A "rampant, unedited dialogue" bump...
The Times is acting like the blogosphere picked off Eason Jordan at random. just to show we could. That ducks the question of whether Jordan's behavior was an insult to journalism, and the Times itself, were it an honest newspaper, should have been calling for Jordan's head even before we did.
And isn't it interesting that the slanderous and libelous statement by Steve Lovelady, Managing Editor of Columbia Journalism Review, keeps cropping up? Either we are "slavering morons" and a "lynch mob," or people who agree with Lovelady are journalistic fools.
Which do you think it is? Click below to participate in the "slavering morons" thread.
Congressman Billybob
dis is funny!
the luddites strike again.
P.S. The sky is falling
The year 1979 was when Alvin Toffler wrote perhaps his most famous book, The Third Wave. One chapter in that book, "De-Massifying the Media," foretold of the day that as communications technologies improve the concentrated power of mass media companies will wane. The modern public Internet has pretty much validated that chapter of the book, and then some.
Hmmm... Oops. Seems he forgot about the part where McCarthy was proven right, and if anything, he didn't go far enough!
TKS [ jim geraghty reporting ]
[ archives | email ]
WHAT TO SAY NEXT TIME SOMEBODY CALLS BLOGGERS A LYNCH MOB [02/16 02:56 PM]
The great Eugene Volokh uses about five minutes of logic to dismantle the "blogs are a lynch mob" argument.
"The trouble is that here the analogy is extremely weak. What's wrong with lynch mobs? It's that the mob itself has the power to kill. They could be completely wrong, and entirely unpersuasive to reasonable people or to the rest of the public. Yet by their physical power, they can impose their will without regard to the law.
But bloggers, or critics generally, have power only to the extent that they are persuasive. Jordan's resignation didn't come because he was afraid that bloggers will fire him. They can't fire him. I assume that to the extent the bloggers' speech led him to resign, it did so by persuading the public that he wasn't trustworthy.
So Jordan's critics (bloggers or not) aren't a lynch mob: If they're a mob, they're at most a "persuasion mob." What's more, since they're generally a very small group, they're really a "persuasion bunch.""
There we go. I think the Pajamahadeen would relish the title of a "persuasion bunch."
February 18, 2005
Jack Kelly: Bloggers Aren't The McCarthyites In Eason's Fables
*****************************************************************
Jack Kelly wrote an impressive column three days ago for the Jewish World Review that I missed. He addressed the mass-media spin on Eason's Fables as a McCarthyite witch hunt perpetrated by a bunch of overzealous wannabes. Kelly points out that the real McCarthyite lost his job as a result of the journalism he once represented:
Web loggers who criticized Jordan are "sons of Sen. McCarthy," said Bertrand Pecquerie, director of the World Editors Forum. "It is very worrying to see this marriage between self-proclaimed citizens' media and mainstream journalists' scalp hunters," he said. ...Pecquerie and Lovelady have their allegations of "McCarthyism" backward. Sen. Joseph McCarthy (R-Wis) became famous in the 1950s for making hysterical and (mostly) unfounded accusations that individuals in the State department and the Army were secret communists. It was Jordan who made hysterical and unfounded accusations against the U.S. military, and it is "mainstream" journalists who are now making hysterical and unfounded accusations against web loggers. ...
But the key fact is not that Eason Jordan is now looking for work, but that bloggers were trying to uncover the truth about what he said, while "professional journalists" were trying to suppress it. For us, the "people's right to know"— which we invoke in self-righteous tones when we're prying into the private lives of people who are not journalists — takes a back seat to protecting the reputations of members of our club.
I've read some good columns on our efforts to just get the truth out about Eason Jordan, but Jack Kelly may have the best retort against the McCarthyism charges I've yet read. In fact, we have been somewhat remiss in not specifically pointing out what Kelly reminds us -- that Eason Jordan, with his vague but grandiose allegations about military atrocities and utter lack of substantiation, represents real McCarthyism.
That particular charge, coming with mind-numbing frequency from the Left, has lost most of its meaning, and so hardly registers any more when heard. But in thinking about it seriously, what enraged the blogging community most about Jordan was that McCarthyite quality of his repeated charges. Both had no evidence, although both were in uniquely powerful positions to make that evidence known had it truly existed. Both used their allegations for political gain; in Jordan's case, promoting anti-American views allowed him the political capital to extend CNN's commercial interests. Both men used the US military as their target. Both men tried to vaguely dissemble when challenged on the merits of their case, and in the end both men crumbled when the spotlight of public exposure trained fully on the facts. In fact, video undid both men, although in McCarthy's case it was the video that was seen by Americans, while in Jordan's case it was the video that remains hidden from their view, at least in part with the silent consent of a news organization supposedly dedicated to ensuring access to information.
One key difference: for Joe McCarthy, the mainstream media finally had the nerve to say, "Enough!" In Eason's Fables, the mainstream media remained an enabler and provided cover for Jordan, literally to the very end. The bloggers, myself included but hardly alone or even first, stepped up and exposed Jordan for what both he and McCarthy were: fools who tried to aggrandize themselves by using slanderous accusations against the US military. That the Left cannot tell the difference between that and the people who ultimately exposed the lies shows exactly how far they have slid into irrelevance and unreality.