James D. Miller
I am a little late to the bloggfest as it were so I don't know for sure but it seems to me that Trent Lott was gone after big time by MSM. I could be wrong.
So, we should all fold up our tents, pack up our equipment or what ever and stop going after people that accuse the US Military of targeting journalists in Iraq and covered up Saddam's misdeeds for many years. We are just bad people for taking such actions againts such small misdemeanors.
POWER TO THE PEOPLE!
This IS scary! We can't allow these blogs to create this "chilling effect" and prevent news people from making false accusations about our armed forces! They have every RIGHT to invent stuff about what our people are doing in combat! What is this, 1984?!?!?!
The author's a little late on this. PC started doing this over a decade ago. I guess that it's a concern now that liberal icons are being affected.
Jordan's comment that he didn't want CNN to be "unfairly tarnished" completely overlooked the fact that he had unfairly tarnished the U.S. military, and not for the first time.
It's a new day, and if you appoint yourself as the truth tellers, you damn well better tell the truth.
This comparison is a minimization of what Eason Jordan did. He committed treason in my opinion - you don't lob false accusations at your own nation's military in a time of war, certainly not on foreign soil and in a public forum in which you aim to influence people. Lott was just stupid, and Summers merely clumsy.
Sure, you're forgiven.
Now pack your s**t and get the hell out.
more of a "truth effect"
This boy talks about Larry Summers, who didn't need blogs to get in hot water, and omits Dan Rather altogether. Maybe he should stick to his game theories and leave real life to others.
A chill wind blowing..... /Tim Robbins
The best book I've digested in quite a while is, "The Wisdom of Crowds", by James Surowiecki. He practically predicts the whole deal. The power of the bits of brain of many will trump the certified brains of the few every time. Check it out.
Will the internet cause people to stop talking?
Oops...He accidently forgot about Robert Byrd saying the N-work on national TV...
Trent Lott, on the other hand, was brought down by the MSM. A few bloggers paid attention to his birthday remarks to Thurmond. On the other hand, the MSM was delighted to have a lever to take him down.
The President of Harvard was not even touched by the blogosphere. The lame-brained attack on him came from card-carrying feminists in and around his own institution.
The article compares apples, oranges, and short-hair cats -- a comparison that holds no water whatsoever. Along the way, it demonstrates a lack of knowledge about the current tension between the MSM and the "new media." I thought TechStation was more accurate than that.
Congressman Billybob
And your not wrong it was the MSM that went after Trent not the Bloggers. The MSM can't even keep their lies straight.
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 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
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