Jay Rosen, the highly influential A-List "PressThink blogger" has taken it upon himself to trash Markos by going back to an old (February 10) Kurtz column. Rosen first quotes Kurtz....
Howard Kurtz, Washington Post, Feb. 10:
Markos Moulitsas, a San Francisco liberal who writes the popular Kos site, said of Gannon: "He has been extremely anti-gay in his writings. He's been a shill for the Christian right. So there's a certain level of hypocrisy there that I thought was fair game and needed to be called out."
Asked if digging into someone's personal and business activities was proper retaliation, Moulitsas said: "If that's what it took to really bring attention to him, it's one of those unfortunate facts of reality in the way we operate today."
Then Rosen comments...
One might reasonably ask: which is it, Kos? A matter of justice (correcting for hypocrisy) or a matter of realpolitik (if that's what it takes...)? Is it not obvious that one is an excuse for the other?
Beware this hypocrisy thing. It may have effects on the maker of the charge that the charger is unaware of.
http://journalism.nyu.edu/pubzone/weblogs/pressthink/2005/03/31/tnn_vs.html#comment17441
A couple of points:
First off, Rosen is taking Kurtz's word for what Kos said (and most importantly for the questions that Kos answered. I doubt that the question to which Kos responded "If that's what it takes" was about "retaliation", because I've never seen Kos take that kind of position.)
Secondly, Rosen is going back to a February 10th article in which "Jeff Gannon" tells a series of lies, and Kurtz spins like crazy to make the investigation of Gannon look like an "outing campaign". Rosen doesn't even notice how Kos is described as a "San Franscisco liberal" while his good buddy (and notorious right-wing propagandist) Glenn Reynolds is described in the same piece as a University of Tennessee law professor who is allowed to describe the investigation of Gannon as "despicable".
According to Rosen, Howard Kurtz says it, and because Howard Kurtz is a white male big media type, it must be true.
Rosen is your typical self-important A-List blogger, who is more concerned with protecting his own prerogatives and "authority" than examining what is really happening with grass roots journalism. For instance, Rosen posted obsessively about the whole Eason Jordan thing, and virtually ignored the much more important and serious Gannon controversy when it was breaking.....finally doing a single "Gannon" after his own hypocrisy was made evident by lots of the people commenting on the Jordan threads.
And the "Gannon" piece really wasn't about "Gannon", "Gannon" was being used simply as an example of one of Rosen's pet theories, i.e. the "de-certification" of the press. This stands in stark contrast to his wall to wall coverage of the Eason Jordan issue, where he obsessively detailed every piece of "new information" that might have shed light on the Jordan non-story. (The fact that Rosen had to go back to a Kurtz piece to find something to smear Kos with shows how low Rosen will go to make a point, and how uninterested he is in the facts surrounding the Gannon story. If Rosen wanted to talk about Gannon again, he could have talked about the NPC Panel controversy.)
But the killer here is that Rosen is making the effort to trash Kos in a thread devoted to the question of "diversity" in the blogosphere by referencing a white male big media columnist (Kurtz) who has consistently displayed a clear an overwhelming bias against the progressive blogosphere. Rosen's own hypocrisy, and his contempt for those are actually changing the way that news is reported without sucking up to academics like Jay Rosen, is on clear display here.
The big difference between Kos and Rosen is that Kos is an A-List blogger who rejects the whole idea of there being an A-List and refrains from the relentless self-promotion of characteristic of egomaniacal academics like Jay Rosen (and other A-listers like Jeff Jarvis, Wonkette, Reynolds, and Sullivan) To people like Rosen, character, qualifications, and expertise are irrelevant---once a complete idiot like Zephyr Teachout is on the "blogging and the media A-List" she is above criticism. Once a "Jeff Gannon" gets White House press credentials, he is untouchable.
Thank god we have people like Kos!