The Health of Blogging, Left and Right
LGF
They utterly ignored the Eason Jordan story, but mainstream media is all over the lefty blogs’ trumped-up tempest in a teacup—the ridiculously overblown Jeff Gannon scandal.
Jim Geraghty proposes a thought experiment related to this non-story.
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Suppose a reporter from a liberal web site with an e-mail list of about 300,000 people asked a question at a presidential news conference. Suppose the question is, “Mr. President, how do you expect Congressional Democrats to work with you when your ideas and proposals are so divorced from reality?”
Suppose this reporter wrote under a pen name. Suppose conservative bloggers, irritated by the tone of his question, began digging into his background and found... stuff comparable to the Jeff Gannon/Guckert stuff.
1) How much attention would the mainstream media pay to this reporter and the revelations about his history? Would Howard Kurtz write two articles in the Style section, and how quickly?
2) How would left-of-center blogs react to their counterparts on the right digging into this liberal web-reporter’s past?
3) How uniform would the reaction from right-of-center blogs be? Would some reflexively defend the dirt-diggers? Would anyone on the right say, “this is stupid, no one has ever heard of this guy, there’s no point in gleefully humiliating this guy because we didn’t like his question”?
1) Mainstream media would ignore it until the issue was forced, just as they ignored Rathergate and the Eason Jordan affair.
2) Lefty blogs would scream bloody murder; “racism,” “witch hunt,” “McCarthyism,” etc. etc. ad nauseam.
3) Right-of-center blogs would evaluate the story on its merits, as always.
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