Monday’s New York Times article, “Resignation at CNN Shows the Growing Influence of Blogs,” seems to argue that “bloggers” are taking down journalists in “mainstream media,” but that overlooks what’s really happening.
In the article various conclusions about blogging and the recent resignations of Dan Rather, CBS Evening News Anchor, and now Eason Jordan, Chief News Executive of CNN, are offered, with most suggesting that this is a match of bloggers vs. members of the mainstream media. It isn’t. It’s about conservative bloggers taking down members of the mainstream media who make themselves easy targets by saying stupid things. Let me be clear that Dan Rather should have been much more careful in defending what is most likely a forged document providing evidence that President George W. Bush did not fulfill his National Guard duty - all the more so because of the timing of this piece right before an election. Likewise, Eason Jordan should have known better than to accuse the U.S. military of targeting 12 journalists killed in Iraq without evidence to back it up.
In both cases there was pretty damning evidence that would have made a similar case for both journalists, but not the case they made.
Dan Rather could have presented the case against Bush with what is known about his time with the National Guard. It is no secret that evidence points to George W. Bush not fulfilling his National Guard duty in a way that people, without privileged connections, would have had to at the time. People don’t remember him attending training in Alabama that should have remembered (it was a small unit). He failed to take his physical when he should have, and when it would have been normal to do so, losing the ability to fly the aircraft he was supposed to be training on. He got out early to attend Harvard without making up time lost. It’s there.
In the case of Eason Jordan it is documented, as the New York Times “Blogging” article mentions, that U.S. troops shelled Baghdad’s Palestine Hotel in April 2003, despite it being a well-known residence of journalists (and marked on military maps) killing two journalists. In a different location the same day, U.S. troops also fired surface to air missiles that hit an Al Jazeera reporter doing a live broadcast on the roof of one of Al Jazeera’s buildings that had been identified to U.S. officials as a site of its operations. Jordan could also have cited the abusive and torturous treatment by U.S. military officials of three Reuters and one NBC employee in Iraq. While the U.S. military denies that reporters were targeted, and denies the accusations of torture against press members, these - and likely other cases - could serve as examples for an argument about the mistreatment of reporters, or at least the indifference towards them, by the U.S. military in Iraq.
Instead of making the case they could, Rather and Jordan tried to make the case that, in the end, they couldn’t. That’s sloppy, and because of the business they’re in, they deserve grief for it. But let’s be very clear, they were taken down by (mostly) conservative bloggers. That wouldn’t be so notable except we don’t see the counter example. Where are the conservative journalists from mainstream media that have resigned because of inaccuracies and untruths? Why does Robert Novak, who publicly unveiled the identity of undercover CIA agent Valerie Plame, facilitating illegal action and compromising U.S. national security, still have a job at the Chicago Sun-Times?
The New York Times should call it like it is - conservative bloggers are attacking journalists in mainstream media, sometimes causing casualties, in an attempt to make a mainstream press that is already too timid and conservative, more so. Blogging may be the method, but conservative ideology provides the motive and, in an America under conservative leadership, the means.
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