It seems people have taken my advice to go and read more Mark Twain (because anyone who’s anyone reads my blog comments, as is only natural) as the Gilded Age is popping up all over the place:
Washington’s new gilded age: MSNBC
Flaunt What You Got: DC’s New Gilded Age- WaPo
From Kos, found via Steve Gilliard:
Of course, there never were any Dean bloggers paid to act as spokespeople for the campaign. Yet this survey is perpetuating the lie that we were. And on a survey distributed amongst other journalists, no less. Several reporters who got this instantly recognized who the questioned refered to and passed it on to me.
Jerome Armstrong and I asked Ross to correct the question and issue a retraction, and Ross has refused. It’s telling that every single reporter we’ve had to contact to correct the record has done so immediately, and with full apologies. Professor Ross, mister blog ethicists himself, is the first to refuse. That’s the first irony. The second is that it was his college — the Columbia Journalism Review’s Campaign Desk, that gave me and Jerome the first mainstream defense in response to the WSJ hit piece. They awarded it the first ever Lipstick on a Pig” award for spectacular hackery.
But really, it’s telling that while most working journalists have been more than willing to correct the record, it’s the campus ethicists that run most afoul of those ethics they claim to uphold.
Update: Oh, and I forgot to mention. Why did Ross call us out? From an email to me:
I had a bunch of examples that seemed anti-business and anti-Republican so I wanted something different.
So the GOP and WSJ efforts to find moral equivalency on the Left to the Armstrong Williams and other such scandals worked. That’s why Jerome and I fought the original WSJ story so hard. Once it’s in print, it’s impossible to kill. It’s like playing whack-a-mole.Fact is, the examples of unethical behavior are all on the Right, and so he threw us into his little survey for “balance”, even if such balance doesn’t come close to existing.
This is the best example I’ve seen so far of how this need for “balance” leads journalists astray. Because it’s somehow become unfair to single out one side, even if this is no more than the simple truth, they make shit up. If Ann Coulter is a rabid nutcase, Michael Moore has to become one to. Bush is a coward? Then clearly we need to mention the allegations against Kerry, true or not.
New (Since 9 May 2005!), cool and filled with Hollywood magic ™ as it may be, the
Huffington Post blog reminds me of nothing so much as NRO’s the Corner, or any of the other given rightwing gasbag “blog”. It has the same blank faces and dull posts from people you are supposed to know from somewhere, the same corporate blandness of presentation and layout and the same uninspired, almost randomly balanced blogroll.
The blogroll is especiallyrevealing, recent controversy notwithstanding. Let me look at your blogroll and I’ll have a good idea what your site is about, what you think is interesting, who you think are good people to link to and whether or not I’ll find your site interesting.
Most of the Huff’s blogroll is blandly centrist, with the usual media friendly “celebrity” blogs (Adam Curry, ’nuff said) or the soft inoffensive left (Ezra Klein e.g.) but to have Little Green Fascists or Powerline on the rolls? Szeesh. Wasn’t this supposed to be some sort of vaguely progressive site?
Woah. Philadelphia Blog Attytood obviously has more stomach for the smug and self-obsessed than I have and has actually been reading Arianna Huffington’s group blog. In doing so he’s come across this nugget of pure political gold:
“…the overhyped site has been up and running for less than 24 hours, and already one of its many “group bloggers” has accidentially dropped a scoop right in Attytood’s lap.
The highly rated news anchor for the ABC affiliate in Pittsburgh (in a key battleground state, you’ll recall) admits in his very first post that — in so many words — he’s a conservative mole in the mainstream media, that he’s actively helping a Karl Rove acolyte to train new right-wing journalists, and that one of his “star pupils” is none other than the notorious “Jeff Gannon,” the gay-hooker-turned-bogus-pro-GOP journalist.
The TV newsman is named Scott Baker, and for nearly a decade he’s been the anchorman on the 5 p.m. and noon newscasts on WTAE (Channel 4) in Pittsburgh, a Hearst-Argyle station that carries ABC programming.
But Baker has another job — one that he doesn’t list on his resume, although he does (sort of) ‘fess up in his Huffington Post post. It turns out he teaches journalism to young conservatives at the Leadership Institute School of Broadcast Journalism, founded by Karl Rove associate and former national Young Republican director Morton Blackwell. And anchorman Baker is not just their star instructor — he’s also a graduate.”
A neat little illustration of the porousness between US journalism, paid lobbying and politics – not that the UK is much better; after all we are the country in which a Prime Minister elected on barely a third of the potential vote can appoint an unelected crony to the cabinet. But I digress. This is a very juicy nugget of information, if true.
Why am I getting David Neiwert’s –of Orcinus fame– spam?
Because some berk is sending spam to liberal weblogs, it seems like.