Internet Changes Everything

Bloggers, the new US media watchdogs

Bloggers, the new US media watchdogs - Yahoo! UK & Ireland News

WASHINGTON (AFP) - First CBS's Dan Rather, then CNN's Eason Jordan, Internet bloggers have come of age as media watchdogs with their part in the downfall of these influential, high-profile media heads.
Jordan, a top CNN executive responsible for the network's coverage in Iraq, resigned Friday following remarks suggesting the US military was deliberately targeting journalists.

The January 27 comments were initially ignored by mainstream reporters, but picked up and trumpeted across the Internet by an army of bloggers.
Jordan's downfall follows that of veteran CBS television news anchor Dan Rather, who announced he will resign in March after bloggers exposed documents he used in a report critical of President George W. Bush's National Guard service as forgeries.

Jordan made his controversial remarks while participating in a discussion panel at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. Organizers have not released a transcript of the event.

Jordan acknowledged the remarks were "not as clear as they should have been," but insisted in a statement that he "never meant to imply US forces acted with ill intent when US forces accidentally killed journalists."

He resigned after two weeks of ferocious criticism on conservative weblogs such as captainsquartersblog.com, nationalreviewonline.com and easongate.com, a slick site dedicated entirely to the controversy.

In the 'old days' of just a few years ago media criticism would appear in the monthly Columbia Journalism Review or in specialized newspaper colums, said Paul Grabowicz at the University of California at Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism.

Now such criticism moves at lightning speed and grows so quickly it cannot be ignored, he said. And despite the heated rhetoric there is also often solid original reporting.

"The ground is shifting and the media is having a difficult time adjusting," Grabowicz said.

Though many of the blogs attacking Jordan are managed by staunch conservatives, the controversy cannot be written off as a right-wing attack on the "liberal" media.

Two left-leaning Democratic legislators at the Davos event swiftly criticized Jordan's remarks. And his performance defended panel moderator David Gergen, a Republican who worked with the first president George Bush.

"They went after him because he is a symbol of a network seen as too liberal by some. They saw blood in the water," Gergen, the editor of US News and World Report, told the Washington Post.

The conservative Wall Street Journal editorial page at first blasted Jordan, but on Monday dismissed the incident as a "kerfuffle."

Jordan "made an indefensible remark from which he ineptly tried to climb down at first prompting. This may be dumb but it wasn't a journalistic felony," the piece read.

The Journal then chastised CNN for failing to show "the good judgement and sense of proportion that distinguishes professional journalism from the enthusiasms and vendettas of amateurs."

Edward Morrisey, also known as "Captain Ed" at captainsquartersblog.com, wrote that bloggers didn't want Jordan's head just because he worked for CNN.

"We wanted accountability for a corporate executive that went overseas on multiple occasions to issue slanderous allegations against the US military simply to drum up business and gain a competitive advantage for access in countries already hostile to the United States," Morrisey wrote Monday.

Mainstream journalists agressivly report only on "acceptable targets" that fit their political beliefs such as "the US military, the Israeli military, the Bush administration and Republicans in general," wrote Morrisey, reflecting the views of many conservative blogs.

Blogs have become an important part of Internet life, according to two surveys in November by the Pew Internet and American Life Project.

Some 27 percent of Internet users read blogs, according to the survey, which reports that some eight million US adults say they have created blogs.

Yet despite its influence, 62 percent of Internet users do not know what a blog is, according to the Pew survey.

A separate survey in December by the software company Perseus Development reported that 4.12 million blogs were created in 2004 by the top eight blog-hosting services.

But of the 3,600 blogs surveyed, 66 percent had not been updated in two months, and many had never updated after they were created.

February 14, 2005 at 09:57 PM in Browsers | Permalink | TrackBack (19) | Top of page | Blog Home