You know the guys I mean: the Instapundits, the Power Liners, the Hugh Hewitts and Jeff Jarvises; the passel of right-wingers who blow so hard so often about the power of blogs to displace and demolish the hated MSM. Cause it's all right here, isn't it, in the Gannon story? A bunch of bloggers, led by the Daily Kos community, undertake an extraordinary piece of collective citizens' journalism to expose a media fraud.
Another victory for the blogspace over the institutional media! Another example of how the massively-interlinked community of bloggers can gnaw at a story, refusing to let it drop, until they force accountability in the offline world! (I hyper-ventilate a bit, because that's the preferred style for Insty's boys.) And yet no word, not a peep, from Insty, Jarvis and the gang. Come on, Jeff, Hugh, the Daily Kos people have done exactly the kind of thing that always seems to get your rocks off. So why aren't you blog triumphalists joining the celebration?
[Modified and cross-posted from Reading A1.]
Granted, Gannon/Guckert is a relative small fry, in spite of having been an accredited White House correspondent: and besides, after having made a meal of Dan Rather and CBS over the forged TANG papers, maybe the boys are busy digesting. Urp, sorry, no, can't eat another bite—nope, not even if it's wafer-thin.
Alas, here I have to call a Sadly, No! on myself. As it happens, there's been blog triumphalism aplenty on the right these last two weeks, sucking up a lot of the oxygen. The deal: speaking at Davos last month, Eason Jordan, CNN's Chief News Executive, may have said—or may have said something that could be interpreted as saying—that journalists who have come under fire in Iraq have in some cases been targeted and killed by American troops. The tempest-in-a-teacup of "journalism" that ensued (they like to call it a "blogstorm" in the Instysphere) wasn't, in fact, about trying to ascertain whether the supposed accusation was true or not: it was about forcing Eason Jordan to put up or shut up what Hugh Hewitt calls, tellingly (and on only hearsay evidence) his "malicious blast at the troops." Yesterday, Jordan, via Howard Kurtz in the WaPo, come forth with what appears a reasonable and issue-ending clarification—and let's let Jeff Jarvis, a bit chastened but triumphalist nevertheless, clean up in its wake:
Meanwhile, Jay Rosen sends an email to blogging friends (which I assume he'll turn into a post soon) that talks about how bloggers filled out the story with journalism while the press remained silent. (Says Jay: "That is not necessarily bad that the press remains silent. If it's a non-story, remaining NON is just fine." I agree.) Sisyphus gets the WEF to admit it has a tape of Jordan's comments and tries to get them to release it. He "commits an act of journalism in a shockingly simple way. Email the right guy." ... Yes, there was a snitfit, a blogstorm -- and until there was clarification, that's what it takes sometimes. And there was also journalism. Both were pressure to get to the bottom of the story. ...
This is about the death of off-the-record at any event citizens attend. The WEF is now trying to decide whether the event was or wasn't off the record. Doesn't matter anymore, folks; that's irrelevant. The citizens in the room haven't agreed to play by your rules the way journalists have. If they hear something, they'll repeat it. If Jordan had, in fact, said that journalists were targeted as journalists by soldiers -- which he didn't; just speaking in the hypothetical here -- then how can anyone expect the citizens, the citizen journalists, the bloggers in the room to remain silent? They shouldn't.
So, let's see if I understand the difference here between the Gannon story and the Eason Jordan foofaraw—beyond just the fact that CNN's bigger than Talon News, which I'm confident would cut no ice with crusaders like Hewitt and Jarvis:
- A CNN executive is caught making remarks, possibly imprudent, and bloggers leap in to enforce a speech code on him, wresting a clarification in response;
- A phony reporter, operating under a pseudonym, is mysteriously accredited to the White House for a shady conservative news outfit with funding ties to the Texas GOP—and bloggers search out his identity and expose him and his organization.
Clearly, we have somewhat divergent ideas of "citizen journalism" operating on the two sides here.
When bloggers work together to damage the credibility of a "liberal" media organization: Huzzah, for the Day of the Blogs is at hand! When they work together to damage the credibility of a conservative outlet—and, in the process, lay another brick in the larger, not to say epochal story of the Bush administration's covert domestic propaganda machine—er, not so much. Thanks for clearing that up, Jeff.