Liberal Media Goes After the Bloggers

[Adam's Apple]

Feb. 15, 2005
Media lynch mob tries to out-blog the bloggers (and fails miserably)
By Jack Kelly

Real fear is mixing with snarky disdain in the mainstream media's attitude toward web loggers in the wake of the resignation last Friday of Eason Jordan as CNN's top news executive.

"Bloggers as News Media Trophy Hunters," said the headline in the New York Times Monday, the first time many of the newspaper's readers were made aware of a controversy which had been roiling for nearly two weeks.

"The New York Times media beat reporters got beaten badly on the Eason Jordan story — by (gasp!) web logs and cable news — and so how do they react? By catching their readers up on what they missed? Of course not. They react by lashing out at web logs," said Jeff Jarvis, whose views were misrepresented in the Times' story.

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.

"The salivating morons who make up the lynch mob prevail," said Steve Lovelady, who edits the web site of the Columbia Journalism Review. For those of you unfamiliar with the controversy — that is to say, for those of you who get your news from the "mainstream" media — in a panel discussion at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland Jan. 27, Jordan said the U.S. military was deliberately killing journalists in Iraq. Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass), a fellow panelist, demanded proof, which Jordan couldn't supply....

Blogger Tim Schmoyer (Sisyphean Musings) learned a videotape had been made of the session and tried to obtain a copy. After initially agreeing, the World Economic Forum refused on the grounds that the session was "off the record."

Bloggers demanded release of the videotape. Last Friday, several U.S. senators joined in that call. Jordan abruptly resigned which, presumably, he would not have done if the videotape supported his story.....

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.

Bloggers are entitled to mount Eason Jordan's scalp on their lodgepoles, next to those of Dan Rather and Sen. Trent Lott (R-Miss), all of whom lost jobs because bloggers kept reporting and commenting on stories the "mainstream" media initially ignored, and (except in the case of Lott) would have preferred to go on ignoring.

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.

What happened to Eason Jordan — and what happened to Dan Rather before him — shows that we can no longer cover up the stories we don't want you to know about — and there are consequences when the cover-ups fail. That's why there is panic mixed in with our disdain.

We feel about bloggers the way Custer must have felt when he charged that village at the Little Big Horn and discovered it was much, much bigger than he'd imagined it to be. The bloggers' wigwam is large, and growing. There is plenty of room on the lodgepole for more scalps.

Jack Kelly, a former Marine and Green Beret, was a deputy assistant secretary of the Air Force in the Reagan administration.

© 2005, Jack Kelly

 

[musicman]

Plenty of room indeed - and coiffed scalps are the BEST!