Big Media mum on Assassigate? Well, what'd you expect?
I was, so far as I'm aware, on the leading edge of the blogstorm that fell upon Eason Jordan's latest slander of the U.S. military as assassins of Big Media reporters in the field. Which is kind of like being a water droplet on the leading edge of a tsunami, but that's my story, and I'm sticking to it.
In my peroration, I wrote the following:
Jordan deserves to be thrown out of World Economic Forum on his lying ass. Failing that he should be mercilessly vilified throughout the blogosphere until he bitterly regrets the day he even booked his flight to Davos, Switzerland.
You will note, however, that no expectation was expressed on my part of Big Media performing a self-Heimlich maneuver to expel the noisome foulness that is Eason Jordan from its innards. Yet the biggest outrage in the megablogs is being reserved for precisely this failure.
Captain Ed:
[D]espite the obvious concern at CNN, they still have posted nothing on the story, not even their own statement. The Washington Post, where Howard Kurtz was rumored to have been working on this story, likewise has nothing on its pages or website this morning, more than 36 hours after it achieved national prominence from broadcast and bloggers. Likewise, the "Paper of Record" managed to avoid recording anything on this story. The Los Angeles Times provides nothing on its West Coast pages.
What about CNN's competitors? MS-NBC gives us a goose egg. Ditto for CBS News, although that may well be a case of professional courtesy. ABC News gives Eason a pass. Even Fox carries nothing on the controversy.
Here we have the man running a major news organization who has accused the US military, on at least two separate occasions in the last three months, of atrocities specifically aimed at journalists -- and the news media remains completely silent about it? Does that make any sense to you, other than a deliberate media blackout? Hell, even Eason Jordan responded, if completely inadequately - doesn't that make the newspaper or the web sites?
Hugh Hewitt:
Even though attention will turn today to the President's speech to the exclusion of almost everything else, let me underline two recent media events which deserve more scrutiny than they have thus far received.
The first is the genuinely scandalous assertion by CNN's Eason Jordan, made at the World Economic Forum, that the United States military has targeted and killed a dozen journalists. The account of Jordan's remarks -including his backpedaling and the crowd's reactions--is available at ForumBlog. Thus far no major media outlet has demanded an accounting of Jordan, but the idea that a major figure from American media trafficsin such outlandish and outrageous slanders on the American military deserves attention and criticism, not indifference. It is no wonder that anti-American propaganda gains traction in the world when American news executives set fantasies such as this one in motion.
TKS' Jim Geraghty actually gave Big Media the benefit of the doubt, for an extra day. Now he's pissed as well.
I said last night on Hugh's program that Thursday morning papers would be the measuring stick, to see if anyone in the mainstream media would pay attention to Eason Jordan's remarks and his bombshell accusation that the U.S. military was targeting journalists in Iraq...
Well, today there’s nothing....
A lot of news stories like this are essentially quote sandwiches – one quote stacked on another, with explanatory paragraphs in between. There are plenty of angry bloggers and CNN critics, as well as the brief statement from CNN and now Jordan’s comment on Carol Platt Libeau’s blog. Folks, that is all the ingredients you need to write the standard, “a controversy is brewing” story. Heck, Iraqis have been accused of being CIA agents based on less information. (Then again, that is under the shoddy standards of the New York Times.)
To my both older and younger colleagues, I am once again put in the position of having to deliver another reality check, to wit: Whom do you think you're kidding?
This is like the blogosphere's conniptions at the CBS Rathergate whitewash. Bloggers were actually stunned and shocked and surprised that the Tiffany network cut Andrew Heyward and Dan Rather a pass, as though they were a legitimate threat to Big Media's very existence if Les Moonves didn't immediately bend to their will. Clearly this was the expectation given the size of the blogstorm that arose at the time.
But guess what? CBS carried out its whitewash and moved on. And the demands of the blogosphere were ignored.
Now Eason Jordan steps in it big time. I opined that he splattered his "GI Joe is a media assassin" charges in order to try and take the Iraqi elections off the front pages and pre-empt the State of the Union address. Instead it got out to the blogosphere, and now Assassigate is all we can talk about. And CNN and the rest of BM are now mum.
Can any of us really claim to be outraged by this? Doesn't outrage grow in part out of, well, shock and surprise? CNN isn't going to publicize a story that makes itself stink to high heaven because they're not going to embarrass themselves, and they want Eason Jordan to stay right where he is doing things just like this. Captain Ed explains why:
...CNN does not compete well within the US any longer, and for good reason, as we now know. They are, however, tremendously influential internationally; they are America's BBC, in more ways than market share. In order to maintain that position, Jordan has to cultivate an image of CNN as a hypercritical gadfly to American policies, especially those of American conservatives.
ABC, CBS, NBC, NYT, WaPo, et al are not going to jump on this because they are ideologically sympatico, and because they know that next time it'll be one of them. They've "circled the wagons" out of common interest.
What we bloggers have to understand is that we are powerless to keep them from getting away with it. They WILL get away with it. We can't make Big Media act against its own self-interest. And we shouldn't expect them to out of a sense of fair play and professional ethics that they so clearly do not possess.
Rather, we should expect Big Media to do precisely what they're doing: betraying their own country and its interests, slandering traditional institutions that they hate, making a living from same, and quietly making their getaway when one of them gets caught.
The blogosphere is like a swarm of fireflies, and Big Media is like a grizzly bear. When the bear poops in the woods, we can gather around and collectively shine our light on the big steaming pile, but we can't clean it up, or force the bear to clean it up, or stop the bear from moving on to poop someplace else. And we sure as heck shouldn't expect that the bear will clean it up of his own accord.
We're pests, in other words. Nuisances. The bear might bat at us occasionally, but it knows it still has the upper hand.
When we all start remembering that, our collective blood pressure will take a turn for the better.
In my peroration, I wrote the following:
Jordan deserves to be thrown out of World Economic Forum on his lying ass. Failing that he should be mercilessly vilified throughout the blogosphere until he bitterly regrets the day he even booked his flight to Davos, Switzerland.
You will note, however, that no expectation was expressed on my part of Big Media performing a self-Heimlich maneuver to expel the noisome foulness that is Eason Jordan from its innards. Yet the biggest outrage in the megablogs is being reserved for precisely this failure.
Captain Ed:
[D]espite the obvious concern at CNN, they still have posted nothing on the story, not even their own statement. The Washington Post, where Howard Kurtz was rumored to have been working on this story, likewise has nothing on its pages or website this morning, more than 36 hours after it achieved national prominence from broadcast and bloggers. Likewise, the "Paper of Record" managed to avoid recording anything on this story. The Los Angeles Times provides nothing on its West Coast pages.
What about CNN's competitors? MS-NBC gives us a goose egg. Ditto for CBS News, although that may well be a case of professional courtesy. ABC News gives Eason a pass. Even Fox carries nothing on the controversy.
Here we have the man running a major news organization who has accused the US military, on at least two separate occasions in the last three months, of atrocities specifically aimed at journalists -- and the news media remains completely silent about it? Does that make any sense to you, other than a deliberate media blackout? Hell, even Eason Jordan responded, if completely inadequately - doesn't that make the newspaper or the web sites?
Hugh Hewitt:
Even though attention will turn today to the President's speech to the exclusion of almost everything else, let me underline two recent media events which deserve more scrutiny than they have thus far received.
The first is the genuinely scandalous assertion by CNN's Eason Jordan, made at the World Economic Forum, that the United States military has targeted and killed a dozen journalists. The account of Jordan's remarks -including his backpedaling and the crowd's reactions--is available at ForumBlog. Thus far no major media outlet has demanded an accounting of Jordan, but the idea that a major figure from American media trafficsin such outlandish and outrageous slanders on the American military deserves attention and criticism, not indifference. It is no wonder that anti-American propaganda gains traction in the world when American news executives set fantasies such as this one in motion.
TKS' Jim Geraghty actually gave Big Media the benefit of the doubt, for an extra day. Now he's pissed as well.
I said last night on Hugh's program that Thursday morning papers would be the measuring stick, to see if anyone in the mainstream media would pay attention to Eason Jordan's remarks and his bombshell accusation that the U.S. military was targeting journalists in Iraq...
Well, today there’s nothing....
A lot of news stories like this are essentially quote sandwiches – one quote stacked on another, with explanatory paragraphs in between. There are plenty of angry bloggers and CNN critics, as well as the brief statement from CNN and now Jordan’s comment on Carol Platt Libeau’s blog. Folks, that is all the ingredients you need to write the standard, “a controversy is brewing” story. Heck, Iraqis have been accused of being CIA agents based on less information. (Then again, that is under the shoddy standards of the New York Times.)
To my both older and younger colleagues, I am once again put in the position of having to deliver another reality check, to wit: Whom do you think you're kidding?
This is like the blogosphere's conniptions at the CBS Rathergate whitewash. Bloggers were actually stunned and shocked and surprised that the Tiffany network cut Andrew Heyward and Dan Rather a pass, as though they were a legitimate threat to Big Media's very existence if Les Moonves didn't immediately bend to their will. Clearly this was the expectation given the size of the blogstorm that arose at the time.
But guess what? CBS carried out its whitewash and moved on. And the demands of the blogosphere were ignored.
Now Eason Jordan steps in it big time. I opined that he splattered his "GI Joe is a media assassin" charges in order to try and take the Iraqi elections off the front pages and pre-empt the State of the Union address. Instead it got out to the blogosphere, and now Assassigate is all we can talk about. And CNN and the rest of BM are now mum.
Can any of us really claim to be outraged by this? Doesn't outrage grow in part out of, well, shock and surprise? CNN isn't going to publicize a story that makes itself stink to high heaven because they're not going to embarrass themselves, and they want Eason Jordan to stay right where he is doing things just like this. Captain Ed explains why:
...CNN does not compete well within the US any longer, and for good reason, as we now know. They are, however, tremendously influential internationally; they are America's BBC, in more ways than market share. In order to maintain that position, Jordan has to cultivate an image of CNN as a hypercritical gadfly to American policies, especially those of American conservatives.
ABC, CBS, NBC, NYT, WaPo, et al are not going to jump on this because they are ideologically sympatico, and because they know that next time it'll be one of them. They've "circled the wagons" out of common interest.
What we bloggers have to understand is that we are powerless to keep them from getting away with it. They WILL get away with it. We can't make Big Media act against its own self-interest. And we shouldn't expect them to out of a sense of fair play and professional ethics that they so clearly do not possess.
Rather, we should expect Big Media to do precisely what they're doing: betraying their own country and its interests, slandering traditional institutions that they hate, making a living from same, and quietly making their getaway when one of them gets caught.
The blogosphere is like a swarm of fireflies, and Big Media is like a grizzly bear. When the bear poops in the woods, we can gather around and collectively shine our light on the big steaming pile, but we can't clean it up, or force the bear to clean it up, or stop the bear from moving on to poop someplace else. And we sure as heck shouldn't expect that the bear will clean it up of his own accord.
We're pests, in other words. Nuisances. The bear might bat at us occasionally, but it knows it still has the upper hand.
When we all start remembering that, our collective blood pressure will take a turn for the better.
posted by JASmius at 8:50 AM
<<< Home