Well, it seems we anonymous bloggers are starting to really get under the skin of the traditional journalism community.
Glenn Greenwald has a great piece up from Saturday reporting on how CNN has apparently gone on the warpath against us.
Of course Greenwald does not hesitate to point out there is a tad of hypocrisy going on here.
CNN anchors attack the scourge of anonymity
CNN's Kyra Phillips and John Roberts spent a good five minutes yesterday expressing serious concern over what they called "the dark side" of the Internet: the plague of "anonymous bloggers" who are "a bunch of cowards" for not putting their names on what they say, and who use this anonymity to spread "conspiracy," "lunacy," "extremism" and false accusations (video below). The segment included excerpts from an interview with Andrew Keene, author of Cult of the Amateur: How Today's Internet is Killing our Culture, who explained that the Real Media must serve as "gatekeepers" to safeguard the public against the dangers of anonymity on the Internet. Roberts demanded that bloggers should "have the courage at the very least to put your name on it," while Phillips announced: "something is going to have to be done legally. . . . these people have to be held accountable, they're a bunch of cowards."
Greenwald then points out the sheer hypocrisy of this.
Indeed, what's especially noble about establishment media journalists such as those on CNN, what vests them with so much deserved Credibility, is how much they hate anonymity because of how cowardly and unaccountable it is. There are several examples from the last 24 hours alone which demonstrate these high journalistic standards. Here is a Washington Post article from yesterday by Philip Rucker on the criticisms of the Obama administration from the Left:
"As a party, we respect the role that people like [Markos Moulitsas] and his blog play and understand that their role is to try to push the envelope further than it might be pushed otherwise," said a senior Democratic official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. "This has been the busiest and most successful Congress since the Great Depression and it's been accomplished with big majorities. I don't think anyone can argue that it would be better if Democrats are in the minority or have smaller majorities."
...
UPDATE: As several commenters noted, this is the same Kyra Phillips responsible for one of the more disgusting television moments of the last decade. In April, 2003, she interviewed the doctor treating Ali Abbas, a 12-year-old Iraqi boy who had just lost 15 relatives, including his father, pregnant mother and three siblings, as well as both of his arms, in an errant American missile strike on the Baghdad suburb where he lived. While this child had burns all over his body, some of them infected, putting him in constant pain, Phillips asked his doctor this question:
Doctor, does he understand why this war took place? Has he talked about Operation Iraqi Freedom and the meaning? Does he understand it?
Really.
We have a current crop of mainstream "journalists", who are really no more than uncritical transcribers, water carriers, and stenographers, reporting what they are told breathlessly with no critical evaluation, and as the recent Sherrod dust-up shows, unless shoved off the bridge by us anonymous bloggers, not even doing basic research on stories before destroying peoples' lives with their "reporting".
And aside from the constant drum-roll of reports from "anonymous sources", for the past few decades we have the increasingly popular source, "some say".
As I have pointed out repeatedly in posts on Network Neutrality, boys and girls, the powers that be are NOT HAPPY that we have an open Internet that facilitates almost instant communication, communication that is being used to undercut and undermine the lies of those in power consistently and increasingly effectively.
And the corporate media have watched that same revolution destroy the tightly controlled delivery networks for both entertainment and news.
And they will do anything in their power to put the genie back in the bottle.
If we let them.
I say this anonymously of course, so it really has no value. But, just sayin'.
P.S. FWIW, the spellchecker for these comments does not know the word "bloggers", the plural. It will accept the singular, "blogger". It underlines it in red. That just proves our illegitimacy, don't you think? Or maybe it is just a reminder of how dangerous we are, so we cannot be recognized??