Eric Alterman writing in Huffington Post says that there's a war going on between new and old media, represented in this corner by Daily Kos and in the other, separated by Alterman playing the breathless announcer, The New Republic.
The story's now cross-posted at MSNBC -- http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/3449870/ -- where it's going to reach a much wider audience. My gut tells me this is part of an ongoing campaign to raise hackles and provoke cat fights. It may just be an effort to raise TNR's flagging fortunes by stirring up some stink.
But, it reminds me of a good story about that time seven or eight years ago when the infant on-line media first reached up to knock The New Republic off its well-feathered perch.
Has everyone forgotten the TNR scandal in '98 with Stephen Glass?
In 1998, Glass was a 26-year-old junior editor at TNR who made up then very cutting-edge stories about computer hackers, drunken Young Republicans, and other edgy characters. It came at a time that TNR was already in decline and had fired Michael Kelly, its editor. An on-line publication of Forbes caught onto Glass' scam in April. By June, it was the middle of the end for The New Republic.
The beginning of the end for TNR was years earlier, after that once proud organ of New Deal radicalism moved to a comfortable place on the Middle-Right, a direction dictated by its guru, Marty Peretz, and its owners, and the leadership of the Democratic Party under Pam Harriman and her proteges. Marty was the tutor at Harvard for among others, Albert Gore. For a while, in the mid-1990s, The New Republic touted itself as "the in-flight magazine of Air Force One". Sounds almost laughably dated today. But, it suggests something of the hubris and arrogance of the radical centrists who want to again seize control the Democratic Party.
The movie about the self-evisceration of TNR, "Shattered Glass" was on IFC a few minutes ago.
While "Shattered Glass" was on in the background, I was surfing DU and came across a post that said TNR was gunning for DKos, and that some sort of threats were made in response. It was one of those strange deja vu moments when you're snagged in time between the past and the future: http://www.democraticunderground.com/...
Huffpo has this editorial today by Eric Alterman concerning some extreme craziness erupting between The New Republic ("Old Media") and The Daily Kos site ("New Media")
Unfortunately, Alterman is so bogged down in analyzing the definition of "death threats" while alluding to the fact that an email under discussion in his piece was a forgery- without explaining further-- that his whole story seems so garbled and I'm at a loss to what his ultimate point really is.
I think he is attempting to shore up a defense of the liberal blogosphere, but I can only hope he will indeed get around one day to what he calls a more "central fact of the drama."
From: Of Death Threats and 'Death Threats'
(...)
For reasons I cannot fully explain, I became briefly obsessed on Friday afternoon with the Boston Globe's report of "death threats" against The New Republic's Jason Zengerle by members of the Kos community who did not like his reporting on Jerome Armstrong and Moulitsas Zúniga. The article, which was written by Globe intern, Michael M. Grynbaum, here, struck me as playing to all the clichés the mainstream media offers about the liberal blogosphere, but nowhere more than in the reporting of alleged "death threats" against Zengerle, which when I read it, I knew simply could not be true. (Why the article made no mention of what struck me as a central fact of the drama--Zengerle's employment of an accusatory e-mail that turned out to be a forgery--also piqued my curiosity/annoyance, but remains another story.)
Anyway, on Friday afternoon, I made a few calls and reached both Globe Washington bureau chief Peter Canellos and Jason Zengerle. (I could not reach the article's author, Grynbaum, who was not in the office, and does not have voicemail on the system.)
(...)
whole article:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/....
(bold-face mine)
And here is the Boston Globe story under discussion:
Bloggers battle old-school media for political clout
Online journals gaining greater influence, scrutiny
By Michael M. Grynbaum, Globe Correspondent | July 6, 2006
WASHINGTON -- When a writer for The New Republic, the 92-year-old doyen of elite Washington opinion journals, accused the nation's most prominent political blogger of using his online clout to hush up a potential scandal involving a former business partner, he knew there might be some backlash from the so-called ``new media."
But he didn't expect death threats."
the rest: http://www.boston.com/.... /
I ask myself if it's in fact a case that the email was a forgery? why the careless employment of that by TNR and the Globe is not the real story?
Will the liberal blogosphere (seemingly much disdained by the "old media" exerts) be seeing a retraction, a correction, a disclosure, an explanation from any of these involved "old/new media" parties?
**
One gets the obvious message here. TNR, which during the Clinton years was something, is trying to get its revenge against the on-line media that has replaced it. Or, is there an effort here to set all against all?
We all have something embarrassing in the past, or if we're lucky, in the future.