Posted on 02/15/2005 5:49:59 PM PST by Jack Bull
Another subject people are asking me about is Eason Jordan, and, "Rush, why haven't you talked about this much?" The main reason I haven't talked about it, and I'll be very honest, is because it started out as a blogger issue. The whole first week -- well, whole first week, three to five days, three to four days of the first week -- it was a blogger issue, and, folks, I have to tell you, it didn't surprise me. Now, maybe I need to take a longer vacation, but Eason Jordan? Here's a guy who wrote a piece in the New York Times, an op-ed explaining that they suppressed news about the brutality of the Saddam regime so as to not get kicked out of Baghdad, so as to not have their bureau kicked out. So -- admittedly in the New York Times, -- Eason Jordan said (summarized), "Yeah, we sort of hid the brutality of this regime because we needed a bureau there." Now, my reaction was: "What good's a bureau there if you can't tell people what's going on? Why do you want to be there?" I don't know how many of you know this, but Eason Jordan credited Fidel Castro with the invention of CNN International.
Eason Jordan was lecturing in 1999 the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard, and he admitted that the idea for CNN International was inspired by Castro. Castro was watching CNN and he loved it, thought it was fabulous, and he wanted to meet the guy responsible for it. It was Ted Turner. So Turner who had never been to a communist country at that point went down to meet with Castro, and Castro said (summarized from the Spanish), "You gotta make this available all over the world," and Eason Jordan was happily proclaiming that Fidel Castro was responsible for the creation of CNN. As Jim Geraghty at NRO writes today, "If you call CNN with a complaint or a suggestion they'll hang up on you or not listen to you, but if Fidel Castro calls, they'll act on it." Now, that's what he says. So Eason Jordan says that he's got evidence -- well, he didn't say evidence -- Eason Jordan says that the US military was targeting journalists. Well, where was that news on CNN? If he knew that, why were they suppressing that? Why was that not a news story? Why won't they release the tapes of what he said? You know, I think the bloggers are being credited for getting him fired.
I don't think he got fired. He quit. And that's, you know, all well and good, but, frankly, there's a part of me that wishes he hadn't. I mean, Dan Rather doing forged documents at CBS is what ought to be the norm, is it not? That's who CBS is. Dan Rather and forged documents: that's CBS. Eason Jordan as a news executive even though he'd been demoted over the years with the changing regimes there. I don't know, folks. I just didn't see it was that big a deal. And I'll tell you this. I think we're going to run into trouble if every time somebody on the left says something we make it our business to get 'em thrown out of work. Don't need to do that. Let 'em speak. Let 'em be who they are. We're benefiting more from that than anybody could possibly imagine, and I think it would have made a much -- you know, CNN didn't go forward to do a story on what Jordan said. They made no effort to release any information to back up what he had said. He didn't make any effort to make the tapes of his remarks public or any of that, that wouldn't have surprised anybody anyway.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT RUSH: It appears, ladies and gentlemen, speaking a little bit more here on the Eason Jordan situation, it appears to me, and I've been around long enough, because all this stuff has happened to me, so the stuff that's happened to me when I see it happen to others, I claim expert status. And I'm an expert on this. It seems to me that bloggers have become the new bogeymen in the mainstream media. You remember Matt Drudge when he first came online shortly after Lewinsky, shortly after breaking the story that Newsweek spiked? What did the mainstream press lament and complain about Matt Drudge? "Weeeell," they said, "He has no editor. He has nobody editing this stuff. Well, he's just free to put whatever he wants out there! There's no check and balance. Why, he has no credibility." The same thing they said about me when I started. "Oh, he's just on the radio, and this guy, there's no editor! There's no check and balance. He says whatever he wants. He lies! He makes it up," blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. So now they're doing the same thing to the bloggers. First off they're pajama-clad and now they have no editors and they're not even funny and they're just a bunch of know-nothings and they're just a bunch of blowhard pointy-head academics that couldn't succeed at anything else and that's all they are. This is all being said by the mainstream media.
Now, I'm going to add something to that, I think the mainstream media is happy to be out there picking on the bloggers, and in some cases Peter Jennings loves some of the bloggers. Peter Jennings actually I saw the other day was praising some of the work the bloggers do, not on the Eason Jordan thing. I think certain elements of the mainstream press love the bloggers in the sense that they can take attention away from the power of talk radio by crediting the bloggers for having all this influence. When they credit bloggers for a whole bunch of influence -- and there was a story I guess the Washington Post, New York Times, forget which -- Bloggers credited for shaving the head of Eason Jordan. I think so they loved writing the story in one sense because they didn't have to say talk radio did it. I think they're really worried about talk radio and they look over here at the bloggers and they can give the bloggers some credit here and there as a means of relegating talk radio to (brief William F. Buckley, Jr. impression), uh, irrelevance, which they have wanted to do for the last 16 years and have been unable to do. So the bloggers are their latest attempt to do that. But beyond that, most of what they say about the bloggers is not crediting. It's not complimentary or any of that. They're out there saying the same things that they said about me and the same things they said about Drudge are now being said about the bloggers.
Meanwhile, who is it that's on the fritz? It's the mainstream press. You talk about making it up? You talk about no editors? How about the editors at CBS and the forged document stories? You know, at Fox News, I have to tell you this, they haven't had to retract one story, major story that I can recall since they've been on the air. CNN's had to retract Tailwind. CNN's had to have Eason Jordan out there explaining why they didn't tell the truth coming out about Baghdad. We don't retract anything we do here because we never lie and make things up on this program. But the mainstream press is on the fritz, be it Jayson Blair, be it Janet Cook -- whatever her name was, Janice Cook, whatever -- be it bad spelling, poor grammar, faulty analysis, whatever, the mainstream press never looks at itself. Oh, take that back! They're constantly looking at themselves, and their introspection is always one of excuse-making. I just I find it amazing. The mainstream press as it exists today was constructed, when do they claim that they came of age, the current mainstream press? World War II, right? That's what put TV on the map. Murrow, Douglas, Edwards, Howard K. Smith, Harry Reasoner, all those guys go back to the golden age. You have to go back. That's where World War II produced these guys. So 1940 was 60 years.
Sixty years of the mainstream press. There hasn't been a new model of mainstream media introduced since and they've yet to call in a repairman for their fixes. Who are they to be passing all this judgment out. "Weeell, you can't trust the bloggers! Weeell, you can't trust Limbaugh. Weeell, you can't trust Drudge! There's no editing out there?" Can we trust CBS? CBS just the Friday before the Super Bowl, the Friday before the Super Bowl did the Donovan McNabb story on me as though I had said what I said that week! They went back and got tape that's a year and a half old and tried to pass it off as tape from two weeks ago, CBS Evening News Dan Rather, played the tape for you yesterday. So I find it amazing that these people continue to sit on their lofty perch and pass judgment on whether anybody else has any credibility here. But make no mistake about it here: They're trying to do to the bloggers exactly what they tried to do to me and what they tried to do to Drudge and in the case of me and in the case of Drudge they have failed, and they will fail where the bloggers, the blogosphere, whatever you want to call it, is concerned as well. This is how they deal with competition, by the way, is to try to besmirch the competition and discredit it. Same way liberals deal with conservatives: Try to discredit rather than debate the ideas and maybe do something and try to do it right.
Yes, Schadenfreude is OK as long as we are on the weaker side of the battle and as long as it is essentially comic.
Maybe I'm wrong, but when I hear Freepers say "Pass the popcorn," or "I'm enjoying the Dem meltdown," they seem to be saying it in a human kind of way, compared with the spewing hatred you too often see from the other side.
The day the Republicans get a monopoly on power will be the day to worry about. But it's a long way off as yet.
I listen to Rush every time I get a chance because I like him. He makes me laugh. And think.
Now, having established that little factoid...
Rush, my immediate thought while listening to this segment today was, "He sounds downright jealous. And small."
I can't help it. That's what it sounded like as I was sitting there in my car listening.
I hope I'm wrong. I don't like having those thoughts about Rush. It makes me uncomfortable because I know he's better than that.
Fair enough. But what I heard was Rush warning bloggers that the MSM will go after them like they did Drudge and himself. I heard respect and offered that prediction based upon what they have done in the past.
Yes, he eventually got around to that, and when he did I was relieved.
Maybe my reaction was because of how he started the whole conversation.
Another subject people are asking me about is Eason Jordan, and, "Rush, why haven't you talked about this much?" The main reason I haven't talked about it, and I'll be very honest, is because it started out as a blogger issue. The whole first week -- well, whole first week, three to five days, three to four days of the first week -- it was a blogger issue,...A "blogger issue?" He never explained what he meant by that. What exactly is "a blogger issue?" The logical inference here is that it didn't rise to the level of being "a radio issue."
I can only state what it sounded like and only Rush knows for sure. It sounded as if "the blogger issue" had not yet risen to the EIB standards and as such, was not worthy of his attention.
Like I said earlier, I'm one of his biggest fans. And it's always been obvious to me that all of his "half-my-brain-tied-behind-my-back" comments are just his schtick, so to speak, and he probably isn't really that egocentric in real life.
But hey, so what if he is? After all, he's Rush Limbaugh. And he's our Rush Limbaugh. Let's just thank God he's not a liberal. ;-)
No, he blew this big time.
Furthermore, the EasonGate issue is absolutely HUGE. CNN is RUNNING from this turning them for an upside down shaking just like CBS, EXCEPT, CNN is running a worldwide anti-American organization, and Jordan's blunder opened the window up for all to see. (CBS is more of arm of the DNC... (include ABC in that too).
It's just not bias at home, or in Baghdad, it's the revelation of CNN not being a true news organizaion but a global propaganda machine to shape opinions, and if they must, makeup the news, for the desired effect. This is much bigger in my opinion, that shifting eyes/ears away from talk-radio.
BTTT.
Eason was astoundingly negligent in that one of the following cases must have been true:
"As long as old-media institutions react to the blogosphere with such contempt, they'll never be able to understand what is going on. Indeed, the old-media doesn't recognize journalism when it literally smacks them in the head. When left-wing bloggers took down the Talon News reporter, they did it the old fashioned way - they got ahold of records and published the contents for all to see. Talon News was not brought low by bloggers, but by reporting."
Oops I quoted the wrong part of the article somehow. Here is my favorite part:
If the world's "real journalists" see the blogs as "salivating morons who make up the lynch mob," that's because it is exactly what "real journalists" look like when we are hot after a story. Ask a CEO whose had to face the press chasing him down over some accounting issue. Ask a politician who has had to deal with the rumor of sexual impropriety. The words "lynch mob" and "salivating morons" will trip right off his lips.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.