Category: Business

Another week, another blog controversy, and once again Hugh Hewitt is in the middle of it. This one deals with an alleged conflict of interest on the part of Daily Kos, and it’s been spread into the MSM by an article in the WSJ and into the nutcase media by Hugh Hewitt’s “Black Blog Ops” appearance on the O’Reilly show. Anybody who reads this site knows I’m anything but a fan of Markos Moulitsas Zuniga. I once contributed to a left/right blog he set up to cover the last election, but quit when I sensed it wasn’t serving my interests. Not a fan at all. That being said, the allegation that Markos’ ties to the Dean Campaign were not adequately disclosed is every bit as much a load of crap as Hewitt’s attack on the MSM for reporting on the efforts by creationists to inject religion into biology classes in Pennsylvania. Anyone who read Kos on a regular basis during the election year knew he had ties to Dean, and anyone who’s read Kos even once knows he’s a Democratic Party activist and fund raiser. Hewitt is completely off base (once again) on this controversy and he’s got no business trying to pass himself off as some sort of authority on blogs for the purpose of flogging his own book on the O’Reilly show by helping the Falafel Man trash bloggers generally. Hewitt’s popularity is a testament to the rampant stupidity in American society. He’s a man of no insight, a panderer, and a wart on our democracy.

And don’t even get me started on O’Reilly, the only man in America capable of making Air America look good. Bloggers, especially those of us in the political center and to the right, had better realize who our friends are in this world. Self-promoters like Hewitt, O’Reilly, and Armstrong Williams are not among them.

Incidentally, the attempt by the ethically-challenged former gossip columnist Chris Nolan to reduce the Kos controversy into an inside-politics conspiracy to keep Dean out the Democratic Party chairmanship is no more persuasive than another tinfoil hat theory I’ve heard that right-wingers drummed it up for a similar reason or to take the heat off Williams. Zephyr Teachout raised the issue because she thinks it has important implications for blogging, and if you look at it closely it doesn’t incriminate Kos or Dean. Her thinking was just her thinking, so if anybody looks bad it’s mainly she, not Dean, Kos, or the Party.

UPDATE: As if on cue, Zephyr digs a deeper hole for herself. What a sad case that woman is.

There is another way to look at the Rathergate story, however. While the left sees it as simply rushing a story onto the air before all the nasty details were spruced up and the right sees it as liberal bias, it can be seen, quite convincingly, as personal animosity on Rather’s part against the Bush family, going back to Dan’s attempt to ambush Poppie Bush on Iran/Contra only to have his ass handed to him on a platter concerning his walking off the set in a snit when a football game threatened to run over into this time slot. While we can never tease these explanations apart completely, personal animus has to be at least part of the story.

That, and Dan’s just a weird bird with enough power to play out his personal problems on the air at the most critical juncture in a presidential campaign.

John Fund has a nice little column on my buddy Stefan Sharkansky’s work to keep the Washington governor’s election honest:

The new media–talk radio, bloggers and independent watchdog groups–have followed up their success in exposing Dan Rather’s use of phony memos by showcasing another scandal: Washington state’s bizarre race for governor, which features a vote count so close and compromised it allows Florida to retire the crown for electoral incompetence. If Democrat Christine Gregoire, who leads by 129 votes and is scheduled to take the office Wednesday, eventually has to face a new election, it will have been in large part because of the new media’s ability to give the story altitude before it reached the courts.

The issue is far from settled, and Stefan’s work has given it a prominence that the Seatlle media wanted to avoid at all costs.

It’s interesting that the blogosphere is all abuzz with news of the CBS Rathergate report, which resulted in the firing of four CBS News employees (see Instapundit, Buzzmachine, RatherBiased, Rathergate, Real Clear Politics, Red State), but the Big Six leftwing sites (Eschaton, Dreary Kos, Kevin Drum, Tapped, Marc Cooper and Josh Marshall) are all completely silent about it. Do they hope it will all go away if they can just shut their eyes long enough?

Apparently.

UPDATE: Jeff Jarvis is hopping mad about how the report marginalizes the bloggers who broke the story and how it excuses Dan Rather’s “perspective.” We concur.

UPDATE: Even Instapundit notices the blackout; check him out, he needs the traffic.

UPDATE: Incidentally, this report is a whitewash. It finds most of the facts, but doesn’t make the obvious conclusions about bias that the facts indicate. I’m very disappointed in CBS News, but I didn’t really expect all that much either. Blaming Mary Mapes for Rather’s behavior is rather boorish, however.

UPDATE: New watchdog at CBS News. Never again.

NEWS FLASH: Atrios breaks radio silence with a bit of denial. I’m so impressed I could sneeze.

UPDATE: Welcome to Glenn’s readers. I’ll post something on breast-feeding shortly just to make everybody happy. Meanwhile, here’s the main page.

UPDATE: Now Sundries Shack, My View of the World, Slant Point, and Alarming News hear the crickets chirping.

UPDATE: After everybody has gone to bed, Kevin Drum sneaks a post onto Political Animal endorsing the “sloppy journalism but no evidence of bias” line. Give me a break. A commenter observes that racing to be the first to air a story they knew was false doesn’t really rate as competitive journalism. It was politically-motivated bias, nothing more and nothing less.

UPDATE: Marc Cooper finally weighs in with some constructive suggestions for CBS News from Jay Rosen mixed-in with the party line (“bias? what bias? we ain’t got no bias”.)

Jeff Jarvis thinks CBS News is beyond redemption and should be sold.

RatherBiased.com has some good news:

CBS News just announced that Dan Rather will be stepping down from “CBS Evening News” anchordesk on March 9, 2005.

Not a moment too soon.

UPDATE: Who’s your pick to replace Dan? I think CBS should go with either John Stewart (to maintain Dan’s bias) or Howard Stern. Howie would bring the dwarves, hookers, and porn stars to the show and appeal to the crucial teenaged boys with ADD demographic, no small feat these days; come to think of it, so would Stewart.

Bloggers are trumpeting their role in bringing Dan down, but I think it’s just a case of his finally being old enough, 73, for a job on 60 Minutes.

So CBS had planned to run the story about 380 tons of explosives missing in Iraq (out of 600,000 total) this weekend in order to sink the Bush re-elect effort, but the NY Times beat them to the punch. Unfortunately, NBC News has busted them:

An NBC News crew that accompanied U.S. soldiers who seized the Al-Qaqaa base three weeks into the war in Iraq reported that troops discovered significant stockpiles of bombs, but no sign of the missing HMX and RDX explosives.

Reporter Lai Ling Jew, who was embedded with the Army?s 101st Airborne, Second Brigade, said Tuesday on MSNBC TV that the news team stayed at the Al-Qaqaa base for about 24 hours.

?No move to secure the weapons?
?There wasn?t a search,? she said. ?The mission that the brigade had was to get to Baghdad. That was more of a pit stop there for us. And, you know, the searching, I mean certainly some of the soldiers headed off on their own, looked through the bunkers just to look at the vast amount of ordnance lying around.

The fact that this story comes from a UN official desperate to shut down the Oil-for-Palaces scam is very disturbing, but not so disturbing that the Soros Brigade of Marshall, Brock, and Black didn’t run with it.