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
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!
"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?
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"!