James D. Miller
Posted on 02/14/2005 9:00:31 PM PST by cleo1939
And your not wrong it was the MSM that went after Trent not the Bloggers. The MSM can't even keep their lies straight.
Not to belabor the point, but I thought about your exchange some more with Lovelady, and it was clear that Lovelady was a boy sent to do a man's work, and he got sent home with a spanking. Good job again!
Jordan would have got off scott free - again - if not for his public admission that it was his policy to cover up Saddam's atrocities in return for a Baghdad bureau of CNN. He said it was to protect his reporters lives, but how many thousands of Iraqi lives were lost to Saddam's regime during CNN's years-long coverup? WHY didn't Jordan, as an alleged human being, quietly notify the proper authorities? He's a Clintonista, and he could have notifed the CIA while Clinton was in office. He didn't. After offering the lame excuse that he was just making the best of a bad situation, the matter was quietly dropped. But not forgotten.
Just recently he made comments to people eager to see Americans die. What did Jordan do? After unsuccessfully trying to wait for this storm to blow over - aided by his silent colleagues - he offers the lame excuse that he was misunderstood. If any Americans die as a result, he'll be complicit in that too. Anyone with a shred of human decency would agree.
No, it's OK to fire someone for making comments that a liberal finds offensive, but if a conservative finds a comment offensive, then it is a with hunt, censorship, and McCarthyism.
"I plead for a new social order under which a few offensive spoken remarks, even if highly odious and taken in context, are forgiven. Most everyone has some fairly nasty thoughts and occasionally these thoughts turn into speech. If we allow a few obnoxious comments to destroy someone's career, many will avoid engaging in freewheeling discussions."
Two points:
1. Jordan's WEF comments (if they were as reported) failed on not one, but two, bases. If his assertions were true, he was in possession of vitally important news that, as a professional journalist, he was obligated to investigate. Not having done so is tantamount to a cover-up. If his assertions were baseless, then he was guilty of demeaning the U.S. military without cause in a time of war before an influential international body. There is more than Jordan's personal opinion involved here, there is professional accountability. In my humble opinion, he would deserve termination in either instance. I now presume the tape would confirm this, otherwise there would have been no reason to have resigned.2. Recall that Jordan also authored an odious op-end in the New York Times, "The News We Kept To Ourselves". In this case, Jordan admitted to suppressing reports of Saddam Hussein's brutality and atrocities, essentially degrading CNN into a propaganda outlet, simply to maintain the access of a Baghdad bureau. Again, in my opinion, this constituted another serious breach of professional ethics and should have resulted in his termination. I've no doubt that this episode played strongly in the minds of his tormentors, who otherwise may have cut him some slack.
In any event, Jordan made serious misjudgments about his professional responsibilities and shot off his mouth about them, in public, twice (at least).
Nobody in the business should regret Eason Jordan's departure. Nor should it have any "chilling effect" -- beyond signalling that fools will not be tolerated in today's news environment. And that is a good thing, is it not?
"Will blogs produce a chilling effect?"
Only if the Truth produces a chilling effect...
Personally, I don't see anything wrong with that...
Further to your point, if anything, the blogosphere was supportive of Summers, who simply raised the hypothetical line of inquiry regarding whether there might be innate characteristics associated with gender, certainly a reasonable thing to do in an assembly of scholars.
As you have pointed out on other ocassions, the whole point of the blogosphere is that it is a marketplace of ideas that allows free (and diverse) exploration of ideas - the same kind of thing that Summers was apparently attempting during his recent "incident"!
Chortle! GREAT shot!
I was just going to say that. LOL
It is amusing, to me, that the MSM is sooo concerned considering they've brought people to their knees simply for calling themselves a Republican!! Talk about fear, our Reps in WA are STILL hiding in corners because of them.
Suddenly they get the same treatment they've dished out to everyone, public and private citizen alike, and they are worried about the chill wind blowing? Pfft.
Note to MSM: We don't have the ability to fire anyone. We didn't tell Jordan to accuse our troops of targeting journalists for murder nor cover for a Butcher. We didn't tell Rather to lie to the American people using fradulent documents to attempt to take down a sitting President. Put blmae squarely where it lies. On your shoulders.
The difference between conservatives and leftists is that conservatives tend to use our brains more. Possibly because we have more functional brain cells, having chosen not to live in an antidepressent and psychodelic drug-induced haze. Also because we never effectively managed to learn to have someone else do our thinking for us and are therefore are familiar with independent thought
You post was a good thing! Wow!
I thought everybody would be interested. A reporter from the Boston globe, who was an embedded reporter, rips Jordan pretty good over at Poynter:
"By way of disclosure, I was embedded with the tank company that fired on the Palestine, and was within 100 yards of the tank that fired on April 8, 2003. Sgt. Shawn Gibson saw what he thought was an Iraqi forward observer in a tall building. We had been alerted that an Iraqi FO had eyes on our position an hour earlier. The tankers had been in combat for up to 30 hours by the time Gibson fired, and after a particularly heavy pre-dawn counterattack was repelled, continued to be plagued with mortar fire and RPGs -- including fire from the east bank of the Tigris and from tall buildings. In a month of combat operations with A Co. 4/64 Armor, I witnessed numerous examples of restraint when the tankers put themselves in danger in order to avoid killing civilians. Any suggestion that American soldiers have purposefully killed journalists in Iraq is repugnant, ignores the facts and reflects a disturbing bias. The failure of a major media watchdog publication's editor to get this is also disturbing."
http://poynter.org/forum/?id=letters
er...Boston Herald
Yeah, get this: now they are waving around "lists of gay people" in the government just like it was Joe McCarthy's "I have a list of 122 Communists in the State Department." Nothing more than rumor and in this case a rumor taken from a fricken' American NAZI web site! They are so far into paranoia that I think they can never recover in this generation. All this, when they preach tolerance and acceptance of homosexuality, it seems they are the ones getting their panties in a wad over people's alleged "gayness." It's clearly pejorative to them.
Possibly because we have more functional brain cells, having chosen not to live in an antidepressent and psychodelic drug-induced haze.
I agree and I am 100% convinced that the over-prescribing of Zoloft, Paxil, and Prozac (and other illegals) have twisted some people's thinking over the years. They are now incapable of understanding rational thought because their higher cognitive functions have been blunted by drug use. They can hold two completely opposite thoughts in their heads and firmly believe in both: "you should accept and tolerate gays" and "he's gay -- he should be fired from his job!"
Ummmm-kay. Why am I a bit suspicious of Prof. Miller's motives, here?
Ah, I've got it. Over the last four years, the left has banded together chanting a cacophony of hate speech steadily rising to the deafening level . We (the internet forums, or "bloggers" as we are inevitably referred to) point out that a few of those hate speeches are irresponsible and un-American LIES, and suddenly, it's the bloggers who are a new danger.
Chilling Effect, Professor? Nah.
How about Leveling Effect, or Moderating Effect, or even Accountability Effect? Much different from "chilling". And a college professor should know this!
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Lets hope we chill leftwing media attacks on the truth
James D. Miller
Maybe, just maybe, if the MSM wouldn't make crap up, the bloggers would leave them alone. Thats too much to ask, probably.
It was OK for MSM to give public and private figures a rectal exam for politically correct thought, but not for anyone else--especially those right wing nuts in the blogosphere.
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