Michelle Malkin, who is a CQ favorite as most of you know for many reasons, takes on the weekend's "lynch-mob" meme that the mainstream media is using for its Eason Jordan coverage. In today's New York Post, Michelle pulls no punches in telling the media elite that they have lost their monopoly on information, and that they fail to recognize real journalism when they see it:

The resignation of CNN executive Eason Jordan last Friday night caused near-fainting spells in the journalism world. And now the backlash against the blogosphere — the legions of Internet citizen journalists who pressured Jordan to come clean about controversial remarks he made at a World Economic Forum panel in Davos, Switzerland on Jan. 27 — has begun.

Take Bertrand Pecquerie, director of the World Editors Forum, the organization for editors within the World Association of Newspapers, please. Mourning Jordan's decision to step down, Pecquerie likened bloggers to the "sons of Senator McCarthy" and "scalps' hunters."

Steve Lovelady, managing editor of the Columbia Journalism Review Daily Web site, blasted Jordan's Internet critics in an e-mail to New York University professor Jay Rosen's blog PressThink (available at journalism.nyu.edu/pubzone/weblogs/pressthink): "The salivating morons who make up the lynch mob prevail."

Also on Rosen's site, reader William Boykin fumed: "Jordan has just been tire-necklaced by a bloodthirsty group of utopian, bible-thumping knuckledraggers that believe themselves to be bloggers but are really just a street gang." And these unhinged heavy-breathers accuse bloggers of being a lynch mob?

Hard-nosed, aggressive journalism requires that sacred cows suffer examination, and sometimes that examination reveals ugly truths. Journalists used to know this. Unfortunately, they now apply it only to those who fit their political beliefs as acceptable targets -- the US military, the Israeli military, the Bush administration and Republicans in general. When the sacred cows of the Left come under the exact same kind of aggressive journalism but unfettered by editors with political agendas, then we have balanced coverage and the promise of the full truth getting out to the public.

That, supposedly, had been the mission of the mainstream media. Based on their hysterical reaction to our demands for accountability from media executives, just as the media rightly demanded accountability from corporate executives cooking their books, that mission has been eclipsed. And if it has been eclipsed, as this "lynch-mob" excuse and the media blackout on Eason's Fables that preceded it demonstrates, one has to wonder what exactly eclipsed it. From our point of view, their mission appears to track quite closely with the American Left's mission of isolationism, growth of the federal government, and stepped-up attempts at redistribution of wealth.

We didn't want Eason Jordan's head because Eason Jordan works for CNN. We wanted accountability for a corporate executive that went overseas on multiple occasions to issue slanderous allegations against the US military simply to drum up business and gain a competitive advantage for access in countries already hostile to the United States. Jordan's big mistake was assuming that Rep. Barney Frank and Senator Chris Dodd had the same agenda that Jordan does. Fortunately for America, these liberal politicians won't stand for the slander of our men in uniform, and I for one will never forget that.

Perhaps the media will learn the lesson of accountability to its readers and viewers after Eason's Fables, even though they failed to do so after Memogate. Based on the clueless responses seen so far, they can look forward to a couple of more blogswarms before they figure it out.

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» 'The sound of bloghounds baying' from Controversy.com
A column in the New York post and in expanded comments on her blog, Michelle Malkin thrashes the mainstream media (MSM) backlash against bloggers' role in the Eason Jordan controversy. It's also a good recap of what really happened in [Read More]

Tracked on February 14, 2005 10:36 AM

» Lynch Mobs? No, more like antibodies from Angry in the Great White North
Are the bloggers acting like lynch mobs? I think the metaphor is inaccurate. I would say that they behave like the antibodies of the media, identifying, attacking, and ultimately destroying lies. [Read More]

Tracked on February 16, 2005 9:36 AM