The above caption is not sarcasism.

I caught the tail end of Judy Woodruff’s Inside Politics on CNN. Howard Kurtz was on discussing the impact of political blogs along with another woman who’d I’d never seen before, but who was introduced as CNN’s internet reporter. While I didn’t see the whole thing from what I saw it was informative, balanced and respectful. They talked about the huge number of blogs, noting that while some blogs are wacko’s there are many that are very informed and educated. They also delved into the collective power of blogs, as well as the speed with which info is disseminated and scrutinized. Bloggers’ role in Easongate was referred to at some length, as well as Rathergate. The general conclusion was that blogs have added a whole new level of accountability to news reporting. Get this: At the end Judy asked Kurtz if they still have jobs, and Kurtz replied, “I hope so.” He wasn’t smiling.

Does this show have a transcript? If so, someone’s got to get a copy.

UPDATE: Video is here, hat tip Instapundit (via the talented Kimsch). Note the video actually starts at the ending, not sure why, with the “I hope so comment”. It also seems to have portions clipped out, but you get the picture.

Reese Schonfeld, CNN Co-founder just said on Neil Cavuto that CNN caved to pressure and “fired another one, like Arnett, without the goods.”

I don’t know if there’s going to be a transcript at Fox News.

He also said that Eason Jordan said what he said “to protect journalists”.

JohnnyDollar’sPlace has a transcript from an interview with Reese Schonfeld earlier today on Fox & Friends.
Here’s a piece from the earlier interview:

DOOCY: Right. So here’s a guy who had made those comments in the op-ed piece a couple of years ago, and really stirred up a hornet’s nest. And now he says this. Did he really have much of a job over there? I mean, was he a guy who was a marginal character and they said, it’s not worth the heat?

SCHONFELD: I thought they had marginalized him after that. I’m surprised that he got to speak at Davos. I mean, they should have learned enough not to send him out and let him open his mouth anywhere. You know, CNN, the Confused News Network.

Bold mine.

The MSM has created its storyline regarding Eason Jordan. I suggest you read Powerline and Malkin, both providing excellent summaries and analysis of recent events. The storyline is that Jordan “slipped up” in making the unfounded allegations. His immediate retraction should have been sufficient to correct the slip, and now he is being unfairly victimized by bloodthirsty bloggers. The problem for the media is that the facts don’t support the story line. In fact they show the opposite. Regrettably for certain members of the media, it appears that they have crossed the line from “spin” or, to use milder terms, reporting from a particular “perspective,” to willful deception.

Every story falls somewhere along the continuum of “truth reporting”. One end of the spectrum is the ideal, which all reporters should strive to achieve. Its simplicity belies the practical ability (or willingness) to achieve it. It involves researching all possible angles and perspectives of a story and dutifully reporting to the public the all the material facts. All too often we encounter stories that don’t meet these simple criteria. Rather, facts are reported from a particular angle or perspective. While the core of the story may be “true,” particular perspectives or certain factual contexts are omitted, thereby creating a false impression of events. Opinion is often interchanged with facts. The story is laced with hypothetical situations or predictions. Experts assist with “future telling.” Using these non-factual methods of reporting increases the likelihood of bias, as each one of these methods are, to some extent, within the control of the reporter. The further one moves away from the ideal, the easier it is for the reporter to create a story rather than report it. At a certain point, even the core of the story no longer reflects the truth. In many cases the lack of truth is inadvertent or at least not specifically intentional. Occasionally the story is willfully deceptive, in which material facts are intentionally withheld, and facts used in the story are knowingly misrepresented.

In the instant case, Eason Jordan made a series of public allegations involving US troops targeting journalists. While Davos was the most recent incident, a number of other instances have since been uncovered by bloggers and have been made well known to the press. Those are the core facts. It’s that simple. The secondary “facts” – that bloggers unfairly victimized Jordan, fall by the wayside. It can’t be unfair if it’s true (presuming of course that the purpose of reporting is to uncover and report the truth). Further, the extent to which Jordan retracted his Davos statement also becomes irrelevant if what he said was part of a pattern. Indeed the retraction takes on the opposite meaning. Not a genuine recognition of error, but an attempt to mask the obvious.

At the core of the media’s story is that Jordan simply slipped up. The problem is that lightening doesn’t strike the same place twice. Once is a slip up. Twice is a pattern. In this case it happened more than twice. Not only has the media refrained from reporting Jordan’s previous similar statements, which absent more would have been terrible one-sided reporting, they took the next step and advanced a story which directly contradicted the deliberately withheld facts. Of course simply reporting the one incident wouldn’t be enough to exculpate him. He needed a defense – the inadvertent slip up. Welcome to the opposite end of the “truth reporting” spectrum.

What makes the media’s reporting of the Eason Jordan story so remarkable is how transparent this all is. The facts are simple. This is not a complex financial transaction with money trails going in different directions. This is about what Eason Jordan said, and when he said it. It is also about how easy the media had access to these facts, indeed how the facts were handed to them on a silver platter. This last part is particularly damning. In law it is often difficult to separate willful blindness or intention (both have the same level of culpability) with mere inadvertence or negligence. In this case, thanks to the blogosphere, inadvertence can be ruled out. Is there any doubt that the MSM is guilty?

UPDATE: Some members of the MSM are getting it.

I always thought the Mary Kay Letoureau/Vili Fualauu story was sickening – but this just takes the cake. Fox News reports that they have set a wedding date.

“It’s been long overdue,” said Noel Soriano, a longtime friend of the family who confirmed Sunday that they will marry this spring. “It’s going to be fabulous, seeing them get hitched finally.”

No. It’s just sick.

Lorie Byrd at Polipundit has put out a call to all bloggers to come to the aid of Farouz Farzami, an Iranian Blogger facing persecution. Let’s use the power of the blogosphere. Spread the word and be part of the Freedom for Farzami Blogstorm.

Here it comes. Eason Jordan the victim of McCarthyism. Apparantly his “freedom of expression” has been violated.

I’m no rights expert but I think freedom of expression means we can say what we want without fear of persecution from the state. It doesn’t mean we can say what we want without fear of any consequences whatsoever. I’m free to walk into my boss’ office and call him an a*% hole, but I better be prepared to look for a new job.

Likewise, the head of the most powerful news organization in the World is “free” to claim that US troops murder journalists, but he better be able to back up the story or else face the music. It’s not called McCarthyism, its called accountability. I suggest the MSM get familiar with these concepts pretty quick, ’cause it’s a whole new media world they’re living in.
Hat tip: Powerline.

It seems that the Gannon Story is gaining some traction in the MSM. Just to recap. Eason Jordan, the head of CNN news makes public statements that US troops are murdering journalists (just the latest in a series of similar statements). The other big recent media “story” is that of Jeff Gannon, who it seems, operates under a fictitious name and runs a small conservative blog, got access to White House Press briefings. That the media would be completely silent on the Jordan Story, and give any play to the Gannon story speaks volumes about the prism through which the MSM views the world.

What was the wrong that Gannon committed? A wrong that the media evidently thinks is more deserving of coverage than public proclamations by one of Media’s most powerful individuals that US troops are intentionally killing journalists? Well it’s difficult to say but it appears to stem from softball questions Gannon asked at a White House press briefing and worse yet, that Gannon had “conservative leanings”, even, God forbid, conservative ties. The media likes to use the term “balanced” about their reporting. It implies even handedness, looking at both sides of an issue, letting both sides be heard. The Gannon story provides a great opportunity to see how the term “balanced” is practically applied by the MSM.

I’ve seem my fair share of Bush’s press briefings. The vast majority of questions are premised on assumptions that are critical of the administration. In some cases, the questions are premised on an accusation or allegation that is unfounded or untrue. In many instances these accusations come directly from the Democrats and not from any independent reporting done by the news organization itself.

In the world of “balanced” coverage wouldn’t one expect some questions from the press that weren’t critical? Of course. But how is “balance” put into practice by the MSM? In the context of a steady stream of negative news about Bush, where he is repeatedly asked tough, even unfair questions from the press at the briefings, it happened. The question that rang out around the world. A question not premised on criticism of the administration, but on criticism of the, dare I say it, Democrats. Not only was the question not expected, or even accepted by the liberal media, this poor Gannon guy faced a literal inquisition, first from liberal blogs, and now in the mainstream.

It appears that “balance” means balancing scathing coverage of Bush, with really, really scathing coverage. Look no further than the branding of Fox News as a conservative mouthpiece. Real analysis of media coverage leading up to the election (conducted by analyzing the number of positive and negative stories about the Bush administration) actually showed that Fox had more “negative” stories about Bush than positive, but had more positive coverage as compared to the other major news sources. Not only is the MSM not balanced, they’re downright intolerant.

PoliPundit links to Byron York’s description of Terry McAuliffe’s “Farewell Tribute” last Thursday night.

Byron says, “How do you pay tribute to a man whose main legacy was losing elections?”

It reads like a parody but it’s true.

Almost, almost feel sorry for the man. Can’t wait to see what the new guy will do.

A comparison of the “scandals” being pursued by blogs from the left and blogs from the right reveals a lot about their respective roles vis-a- vis the mainstream media. If you read the lefty blogs, they are every bit as convinced about the Gannon issue being a big story, as conservative bloggers are about the Eason Jordan issue. However, by any objective measure the Gannon story is nowhere near as significant. On one hand you have the head of one of the most powerful news organizations on the planet making public statements that U.S. troops are murdering journalists, and on the other is an unknown blogger who was given a press pass.

Why the focus by the lefty bloggers on such ridiculously small issues? Simple, that’s all they have. Not because there aren’t news stories that tend to favor their liberal causes, but because those stories are already being reported by the MSM. It is precisely because the MSM has such a left leaning bias that conservative blogs gain their strength. They are filling a monstrous void left open by the MSM. If this story were reversed and, say an administration official, and not Eason Jordan made the same statements, the lefty blogs wouldn’t be scrambling to get the story out. It would be plastered all over every paper in the country, and being covered by CNN et al on a constant 24 hour news cycle. That’s why liberal blogs are so extreme. There is no void for them to fill. Only small cracks.

Jeff

(cross posted at PoliPundit)

Last night I watched CNN’s Aaron Brown do a very solemn piece about Lynne Stewart, the lawyer who was convicted of assisting her client conduct terrorist activities. The solemnity did not appear to be based on the alarming fact that a US attorney would threaten her fellow citizens this way, but on the punishment that Stewart faced for her crimes. CNN’s piece made particular mention of the fact that she faced many years in prison and further noted that Stewart had children. It is completely revolting (though not surprising) that CNN would focus on her loss, given the hundreds of children in recent years who have learned of their parents’ death at the hands of terrorists, perhaps the very terrorists Stewart assisted. What was further revolting was the “thought provoking” discussion CNN attempted to raise about how Stewart was prosecuted using video taped evidence of her meetings with her client.

CNN showed Stewart, apparently a victim herself, giving a tearful and impassioned speech to the press about the evils of government denying its citizens the right to counsel, without in any way scrutinizing what Stewart was saying. The problem is there is no thought provoking issue here. Solicitor and client privilege does not extend to communications in the furtherance of a criminal activity. This isn’t cutting edge, ground breaking jurisprudence either, but a longstanding rule of law. The foundations of this rule are not simply based on the policy that a lawyer must not be shielded from his or her own criminal activity, but are based on protecting the sanctity of the solicitor and client privilege itself. If the privilege is allowed to become a tool for committing wrongs its very existence is threatened. Lawyers who abuse the privilege do so with the knowledge that they are jeopardizing others’ right to effective legal assistance in the future.

That Lynne Stewart would continue to tearfully proclaim the sanctity of the very privilege she was threatening, like the terrorist hiding behind civilians in the battlefield, shows just how much she has become like her clients.

That CNN would, to any degree, portray her as a victim of the justice system shows just how far CNN’s leanings have become like those of Stewart and her clients.