Radio blogger - BlogTV
This afternoon, on the Kudlow and Company program on CNBC, Hugh Hewitt, Glenn Reynolds, aka The Instapundit, and Rocket from Powerline all talked about the very bizarre dismissal of Eason Jordan, and the even more bizarre editorial from the Wall Street Journal today, blaming the blogs for the firing instead of looking at what CNN and Jordan did to deserve what they got.
Here's the transcript.
LK: Now a story we've all been waiting for. My blogger heroes. This is the principled crew that found the story and stayed with it. Quite unlike the mainstream media. Aside from blogging, by the way, Hugh Hewitt is a nationally syndicated radio talk show host. Glenn Reynolds is the founder of Instapundit.com and teaches law at Tennessee. And John Hinderaker is the co-founder of Powerline. All three are in fact lawyers. Please don't hold that against them. Please don't it against me that I'm an economist. We're all just kinda doing our jobs. You know, fellas, let me start with Hugh. The reason I stayed with this story, and I was late to it, you guys were earlier, but once I realized he was sliming the military, Mr. Eason Jordan. And it was this sorta left-wing, anti-military bias, and therefore he shouldn't have that exalted position. That was my motivation. Tell me where you are coming from on this.
HH: Very much the same thing, Larry. I think people have to speak up for the troops when they are slandered. He had done it before. That's the point I want to make. It's not just that the tape is concealed. Eason Jordan in Portugal, in November, said that the American military had targeted and killed ten journalists, and that the American military had tortured journalists. He said he believed those reports. That one got past the blogosphere and the mainstream media. So I'm glad, when Davos happened, we were ready and able to get the information from people like Rony Abovitz to go out and follow up on it.
LK: I mean John Hinderaker, I'll speak for myself. I'm a conservative. I'm part of the right-wing conspiracy, and proud to be so. When I see this kind of bias against our military that defends us around the world, I say hey. It's time to fight back. Is that your motivation?
JH: Yeah, I think it was, Larry. I mean, CNN has been at this for a long time. You can go back to Tailwind and various other stories that they have done. And as Hugh says, Eason Jordan has done this before. The mainstream reporting on this story has been absolutely terrible. They've really covered up the fact that Eason Jordan is a serial slanderer of the American troops, and that's a key fact here.
LK: I think it was you or someone. He actually made a speech against the Israeli military along similar grounds.
JH: Same thing. In 2002, and here again, he claimed the Israeli military has shot a CNN person, implying it was intentional. And if you go back and look at the original CNN news story filed by the people caught in a crossfire between Arab guerillas and Israeli soldiers, that's not how they reported the story at all. So in that instance, we know he is wrong.
LK: Right. Well, Glenn Reynolds, one of the baffling things to me, this guy...either CNN let him go, or he resigned...I don't want to get into that. Where the heck was the tape from Davos, because I think so many of the bloggers just said, "Show us the tape so we can evaluate this thing on the merits of the case." The tape never appeared. Was this a CNN coverup, plain and simple?
GR: It's pretty plain, I think, the blogosphere wanted to see the tape made public more than it wanted to see Eason Jordan leave CNN. CNN apparently would rather see Eason Jordan leave than see the tape made public. And to me, that's really the biggest issue here.
LK: That's a key point, though. Go behind that. I mean, it's almost like the bloggers have now been given superhuman power, which probably no one deserves, but the reality is CNN was wrong and it bungled it's case along the way, didn't they?
GR: Jay Rosen says it very well today on his blog. He says, "The solution if you mispeak," which is the claim about Jordan, "the solution is to talk more. To commicate more. What CNN did instead was they dug a hole, climbed in, and pulled the hole in after them." That just doesn't work, and it leads people to assume that whatever you're hiding is worse than what people already know. And you'd think journalists would know that.
LK: It really had that sort of flavor. Hugh Hewitt, coming around to you. Now this is the counterattack. Somebody named Steve Lovelady, from the Columbia Journalism Review blogsite, was talking about "spittle-flecked morons", I guess that means, I don't know what that means.
HH: He went out of control, Larry.
LK: They're calling you, "lynchmob" and all this stuff. What is all that about?
HH: That's called jealousy in most books. In fact, the journalism done by the blogosphere, I've been a journalist for fifteen years, but the journalism done on the blogosphere over the last two weeks, has been much better than the journalism done by the Columbia Journalism Review, The New York Times, which did not mention the issue until Friday. It never appeared on CNN. It only appeared in Howard Kurtz's article in the Washington Post. But meanwhile, the bloggers, they're not amateurs like the Wall Street Journal called them today. They're very talented professionals like John and Glenn and myself. And we go after facts, and we interview primary witnesses, and we post the entire transcript. We did the good journalism here, and a lot of the screams you hear from the left, and the Columbia Journalism Review guy is just a lefty, are not criticisms of technique or professionalism. They are jealous outrage at having found that the control over the information flow has slipped irretrievably from their hands. Now there's some responsible people on the left. Glenn mentioned Jay Rosen. There's also for example Jeff Jarvis at BuzzMachine.com. There are many good left/center-left bloggers. But the ones who are complaining about our demand to see the tape, the ones who are complaining about our original journalism, and good fact-checking, are the ones who are upset not about the story getting out, they're upset about the loss of control of the left-leaning media.
LK: All right. Well done.
BREAK
LK: We are back with our star bloggers...Hugh Hewitt, Glenn Reynolds, and John Hinderaker. Gentlemen, thanks. Glenn Reynolds, let me go to you. What issues, particularly, what issues turn you on. What issues do you want to focus on, with respect to your blogging in the near term?
GR: Well, I think I'm going to look at a lot of things I've neglected for a while like science policy and such. And I'm going to keep paying attention to the war. Because I think war correpondents used to have the only voice from the war front, and I think now that we have troops with blogs, and e-mail, and I've got my own photo correpsondent in Afghanistan who sends me reports and pictures, it's a chance to kinda end-run that stuff and see what's really going on.
LK: Glenn, aren't there a lot of really good bloggers on the ground? I mean I think through your sites and the other sites, I picked up all those fabulous Iraqi bloggers right there who suggested the election was going to be a great success when the mainstream media was opposed to it.
GR: Absolutely. Absolutely. And they're totally on top of the story in a way that the foreign correspondents just aren't.
LK: John Hinderaker, I believe just from my brief experience, blogging is a force for good. We need this kind of journalistic competition on the internet. Tell me what some of these safeguards should be. What some of the guidlines would be if you were advising a young blogger just starting out.
JH: Well, I don't know if there's any particular guidelines or safeguards. I mean one thing about the blogosphere is that it does have mechanisms for self-correction. If somebody makes a mistake, readers are all over it, other bloggers are all over it. And one thing about bloggers is we link to our sources. We don't just make stuff up. We don't just state opinions or conclusions. We link to our sources so the reader can see what we are talking about. What we're basing our conclusions on. The reader can follow the link, look at the original source. And I would recommend to anybody starting out in blogging to always link to your sources, and as long as you do that, you're being straight with the reader, and the reader can see what the basis of your statement is.
LK: And Hugh Hewitt, do you think Michael Barone is right? He wrote in a recent article that the left bloggers just hate George Bush. That's essentially their agenda. Then he says the right bloggers want to undermine the credibility of the mainstream media. It strikes me as a bit of a limited vision, but I wanted you to weigh in on it.
HH: Well Michael Barone is almost always right about everything, Larry. He is one of the most respected and authoritative commentators. But I think he ran out of space. In fact, I've seen him on the blogosphere explain that. Had he had more space, he would have explained that when the next Supreme Court nomination comes around, the blogosphers is going to own that controversy. They're going to vet that nominee. They're going to surface all of the opinions instantly, whether it's over at Powerlineblog or Instapundit, or any of the blogs on the left. And I think he's wrong about the left wing blogosphere as well. While there's a great deal of hatred for George Bush there, there is some remarkably good writers on the left. People whose politics I don't agree with like Joshua Micah Marshall at Talkingpointsmemo. You've got Matt Yglesias who blogs at the American Prospect and under his own name. These are very competent, skilled political commentators, and that's why it's so much more interesting on the internet. The authoritative, passionate voice of very careful, sober-minded professionals are out there. And they clash at very close range. It makes for great commentary and information. |
