And Then There Were None

Eason Jordan resigns.

Who should go next? Accepting nominations in the comments….

Comments

[UFP]

How about Maureen Dowd? I can't imagine that anyone with any intelligence, regardless of political persuasion, finds any insight at all in her columns.

[lunacy]

I second that motion!

[AllenS]

Dan Rather should have resigned before Eason Jordan.

[Ken Shultz]

"Who should go next?"

Donald Rumsfeld.

...Hey, he's on the payroll too!

[William Teach]

Not Mo. She is funny, and pathetic. How about Keith Oberman?

[plunge]

If we are being fair, John Stossel has had his share of, I dunno, lying to his viewers.

[Joey]

Matt Welch?

[Joey]

Come on, guys. I'm TOTALLY kidding!

[Jim Walsh]

How about EVERY POLITICAL RADIO TALK HOST IN THE GODDAM COUNTRY?!?!?

Damn, I should go back on the Prozac...

[Rob Kiser]

Death to the Talking Heads: The Implosion of the Main Stream Media

Today, Eason Jordan of CNN was forced to resign. Barely a month ago, CBS fired or asked to resgin Mary Mapes, Betsy West, Josh Howard, Mary Murphy, Mary Mapes, and Dan Rather, after the blogs pointed out that they were using forged documents.

People are tired of being fed liberal inuendo and half-truths by the talking heads under the false guise of objectivity. Main Stream Media, as we know it, is dead. They just don't know it yet.

The bloggers are evaluating every story in the world, and, once a story catches on in the blogs, moving with inconceivable speed in all directions. In short, the MSM is facing the most perfect journalistic system ever conceived in the history of the world, and they think that they're up against a bunch of pajama clad hacks. (I don't even wear pajamas. 😉

So, turn off your television. Cancel your subscription to that dead-tree newspaper. And welcome to the world of real, honest journalism.

http://www.peeniewallie.com

[Gary Gunnels]

Rob Kiser,

Except when they are hired by the Bush administration and create false identities when covering saame administration? Or was it the porn sites? 🙂

[meade]

Tony Blankley.
C'mon, the guy is taking a paycheck from the Rev. Sun Myung Moon and is proud of it.

[Douglas Fletcher]

Paul Harvey?

[Phil]

Brit Hume?

[Nobody Important]

Except when they are hired by the Bush administration and create false identities when covering saame administration? Or was it the porn sites? 🙂

Comment by: Gary Gunnels at February 12, 2005 02:36 AM

Nowhere is Rob Kiser defending Armstrong Williams nor Jeff Gannon.

I can only assume that you believe Kiser's sin is omission -- not condemming the right-wing talking heads in his blog post about Eason Jordan and the decline of the liberal Main Stream Media.

I can't speak for Rob Kiser, but considering that 90% of the DC/NY "Main Stream Media" consistently vote Democrat, I'm not going to fret too much over the other 10% right now. On one side, we have a major anchor and a major network news director. On the other, some nobody (no relation) who was friendly to the administration -- which wouldn't have been that big of a deal if the Republicans weren't so hell-bent on making an issue out of homosexuality.

Was giving Gannon press credentials a silly move by the Administration? Yes. But in the big scheme of things, so what? It's not much worse than given them to a news organization that defends its shoddy reporting as "fake, but accurate." What is "the press" anyway?

If "Jeff Gannon" (or whatever name he's using today) had been the news director of CNN or anchor of CBS, I'm sure it would be a different story. I doubt Talon News has as much influence as ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, Time, Newsweek, NY Times, Washington Post, NPR, Doonesbury, Boondocks, or Sesamee Street.

Kiser concludes his post with:

So, turn off your television. Cancel your subscription to that dead-tree newspaper. And welcome to the world of real, honest journalism. Here's some of my favorite blogs to get you started:

http://www.instapundit.com
http://www.powerline.com
http://www.easongate.com
http://www.reason.com
http://www.fark.com
http://www.slashdot.org

Sounds like good advice to me.

Disclosure: I know Rob Kiser. Does that change anything?

[Legend]

Yes. And it would be even worse if it turned out that you share the seme IP address. Hey, you asked.
Now a question for you - Where can I read Seymour Hersh ? Take your time and think hard before you answer.

[my_view]

O'Reilly then Dowd. That's the fair and balanced way.

[Rob Kiser]

Gary - "Except when they are hired by the Bush administration and create false identities when covering saame administration? Or was it the porn sites? :)"

I'm not 100% sure what this means. I personally don't think it's a big deal that the president wanted to get someone in the whitehouse press briefing rooms that wasn't a rabid, foaming liberal. The odds of finding a conservative journalist at random are probably like hunting for a wisconsin quarter with the extra turned up leaf. They're out there, but they're few and far between.

The beauty of the blogs is that no one owns them, and the aren't conrolled by any single power, at least at this point. They don't clearly fall under the direction of the FCC or the FBI or the DEA or the NTSB. As such, they're basically the embodiment of the "free press" our founding fathers originally advocated.

The blogs wouldn't be important, if it weren't for the collosal consolidation of thought that has occurred in the Main Stream Media(MSM). Specifically:

Newspapers - Most large U.S. cities are single-paper-cities. Legal monopolies (technicllay Joint Opperating Agreements) allowed by ill-conceived Newspaper Preservation Act of 1970). No competition of ideas in the editorial department. If you don't agree with me, you won't work here. Next.

Radio Stations - A massive consolidation of radio stations is undeniable, and bad for the medium. Clear Channel owns something absurd like 60% of all radio programming in the United States. So, if your thoughts disagree with theirs, you're not likely to be heard on the radio any time soon.

Television - Ditto with the radio stations. Massive consolidation of ownership equates to massive thought consolidation. Collin Powell's little boy ran the FCC into the ground during his tenure. When the rest of the country could clearly see that consolidation of thought would be detrimental to the medium, Powell punted and allowed still greater concentration of television station ownership.

All of these three mediums are, unfortunately, a one way push of ideas. From producer to consumer. Shut up and take it...here it comes. This is the news...I'm going to read it to you know.

The only chance people had to refute the inuendo and half-truths was to write letters to the editor. Then, the editor would decide if they got printed or aired. It was a rigged game, and the people were sick of playing.

Enter the Blogs. The blogs are a breath of fresh air. It's a chance for people to participate in a true two-way communication where a guy can hammer out a scathing rebuttal in his home office, and be the talk over the office water coolers all over the world the next day, if his ideas and facts check out, and make logical sense.

The line that separates news producers from news consumers, the journalist from the reader, the publisher from the subscriber, has been unequivocably eradicated, as Eason Jordan and Dan Rather learned the hard way.

No longer will the talking heads be allowed to lecture down their pretentious noses to the huddled, unquestioning masses. Those days are over.

The MSM has lost their ability to censor the consumer of the news. Their relationship has been changed. The genie is out of the bottle. There's no turning back. The MSM will be forced to adopt or to wither completely.

How Can The Old Media Survive?

Because people will still want to read their newspaper on the train into work and have the news read to them in the evening, the dead tree papers and the talking heads will still have a place in our society, but it will be radically different than the way it is today.

The talking heads will have to re-introduce themselves to the very basic principles of journalism. Make a least a half-hearted attempt to be fair and balanced for a start.

They will have to open their own windows into the blogosphere, allow viewers to post comments, and read them.

They will have to use the blogosphere to help identify stories from conception through resolution. They will have to work with the blog swarm, instead of against it.

They will have to post their stories online, and cross-link to other competing news sites to lend credibility to their "facts". Currently, their facts are often not entirely true, and they have suffered a tremendous loss of credibility due to this.

They can still have reporters writing stories, checking facts, but they will do this in very close concert with the blogosphere. Something similar to what Michelle Malkin did with the Eason Jordan story. She came to it somewhat late, but then hit the ground running. She got the big players to go on the record with quotes. That's journalism. That's what drives the blogs.

So, this is the only place where the MSM can add value to journalism. Using relationships to get people to go on the record with quotes, producing informed balanced opinions, etc. Then, the talking heads will essentially read their own blog on the air. The newspapers can print the blogs onto dead-trees.

This is how the old media can co-opt the new media and survive. If they don't do this, then they will find themselves as flatfooted as CNN, that didn't have a blip on Eason Jordan until he was forced to resign. Then, they were in the awkward position of reporting that he had resigned over an issue they had chosen not to cover. This will not be allowed to continue. If CNN and the other news channels don't wake up, then other news channels will rise to repleace them.

http://www.peeniewallie.com

[Phil]

If "Jeff Gannon" (or whatever name he's using today) had been the news director of CNN or anchor of CBS, I'm sure it would be a different story. I doubt Talon News has as much influence as ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, Time, Newsweek, NY Times, Washington Post, NPR, Doonesbury, Boondocks, or Sesamee Street.

He was apparently important enough for the White House to give him access to classified CIA stuff so he could tell everyone that Valerie Plame worked for them. That's a pretty big scoop for some nobody, especially consdering the political goings-on around that.

So, turn off your television. Cancel your subscription to that dead-tree newspaper. And welcome to the world of real, honest journalism. Here's some of my favorite blogs to get you started:

http://www.instapundit.com

The next time Glenn Reynolds does anything even remotely resembling journalism, let alone honest journalism, will be the very first time.

[David Rossie]

It's often said that bloggers become too full of themselves when they join together in the hunt against "MSM." I think it's fairly obvious that blog-commenters have caught that bug as well. Come on guys, grow up. Blogs are mostly for opinion journalism; most of the news stories that instapundit and the other big bloggers link to come from MSM websites.

[Brad Reed]

*sigh*

OK, not to douse water on the "Bloggers Are the Most Important Things Ever, EVER" crowd (FYI, I love blogs, I think they serve an important purpose), but relying on Instapundit or Powerline for your news really doesn't make sense, since they're mostly reacting to:

a.) Articles in the "eeeeeeeeevil" MSM
b.) Posts by other bloggers commenting on articles in the "eeeeeeeeevil" MSM.

This isn't to say that bloggers on both sides of the political divide aren't good at pointing out biases, conflicts of interest, etc., but remember-they're opinions. If we get to the point where conservatives get all their news from Powerline and liberals get all their news from the Daily Kos, we're in big, big trouble.

(I see that David Rossie beat me to the punch- cheers, dood :-))

[Jim Walsh]

"Clear Channel owns something absurd like 60% of all radio programming in the United States. So, if your thoughts disagree with theirs, you're not likely to be heard on the radio any time soon."

The overwhelming majority of commentators on Clear Channel stations are conservative. If you're consistent, you should still have a problem with radio, though I bet you don't.
(Oh, I see...it's a monopoly of OUR guys! In that case never mind...)

"Something similar to what Michelle Malkin did with the Eason Jordan story..."

Malkin never contributes anything of substance to any story. Other than her really stupid comments, I've never seen anything in her columns that I didn't already see a hundred other places.

Bottom line: You can count on two fingers the number of "bloggers" who truly have something interesting and constructive to say. Blogging is about mental masturbation, i.e. tooting one's own horn and grooving on one's own wonderful self. Not that there's anything wrong with that, but let's not take ourselves too seriously, OK?

[Brad Reed]

Jim Walsh is totally right, of course. There are some good bloggers who post interesting and substantive commentary (Drezner, Yglesias, Volokh, Drum), but most of them (LGF, Kos, Atrios, Malkin) are just a bunch of yapping puppies, whom I'm increasingly tired of.

[gimpel the fool]

Peter Jennings, back to Canada!

[Stevo Darkly]

All I know is, from now on I celebrate September 9 as B.O.M.B. Day (Bloggers vs. Old Media Bastille Day) to celebrate the day Dan Rather took one in the nuts, forcing Big Media to realize they've now got millions of fact-checkers looking over their shoulders, who have a place to complain other than the "letters to the editor" columns in the BM. (And I'm always looking for an excuse to hoist a drink in celebration.)

Speaking of which: On another H&R thread I can't find now, someone alleged that some Christians want the environment to collapse so the Second Coming can happen, citing a statement by "James Watt, Reagan's Secretary of the Interior, in testimony before Congress." Watt's alleged statement, oft-quoted, was, "after the last tree is felled, Christ will come back."

FYI, turns out there is no record that Watt ever actually said this. Just a few days ago, Bill Moyers had to apologize for using the unsubstantiated quote. Story in Editor and Publisher.

[Gary Gunnels]

Rob Kiser & Nobody Important,

Why did the guy have to lie about his identity then?

Nobody Important,

Of course I didn't claim that he was defending either of them. I was merely pointing out (by example) the obvious: some liberals and some conservatives have a problem with truthfulness in the media. 🙂

Rob Kiser,

The beauty of the blogs is that no one owns them...

Except the people that own them.

[Gary Gunnels]

Jim Walsh,

You are exactly right; neither liberals (Democrats) or conservatives (Republicans) have a monopoly on underhandedness. Bushophile "true believers" can't get that through their heads.

[Joe Bonforte]

plunge: "If we are being fair, John Stossel has had his share of, I dunno, lying to his viewers."

I don't suppose you have, I dunno, links that would substantiate that? Or keywords I could use on Google to find articles that support that? Or is it just your own opinion because you don't like the way he skewers the left?

[free form]

Bill O'Reilly and Dan Rather can both go in the same handbasket, and Ann Coulter can carry it.

[Stevo Darkly]

I have only heard of Stossel being accused of "lying" about one specific thing, when he did a report on organic foods. He said tests revealed no residue of pesticides on either organically grown or conventionally grown foods. Then someone revealed that the test Stossel cited had not actually been conducted.

It turned out someone on Stossel's staff provided him with a summary of a test that found [this is not a direct quote, but my own summary of the finding] "no bacteria residue was found on the non-organic produce" but instead the info was given to Stossel as "no insecticide residue was found on the non-organic produce." Stossel reported the latter, erroneous statement on the air.

When the error was discovered, Stossel retracted it on the air, and ABC apologized.

I had a vague memory of reading this somewhere, but when I just now Googled it, while I found an abundance of Web sites alleging Stossel's "fraud," I had a hell of a time finding the explanation from Stossel's side. Eventually I found this piece by Wendy McElroy:

http://www.lewrockwell.com/mcelroy/mcelroy21.html

I note that McElroy's piece conjectures that the error was due to an assistant's mistakes, but the place I read it originally (if I could only remember where) said this was indeed what happened.

Just found more detail here:

http://www.supportjohnstossel.org/why.htm

[kevrob]

Peter Jennings, back to Canada! - gimpel

It's too late for that. Jennings finally became a U.S. citizen. Now I will have to retrain my b.s. detector, which used to go off every time he would refer to my country using "we", "us" and "our".

Kevin