Another moderate bites the dust. This should be the last post on this particular line, which has consumed too much of my attention here in the last week: but it seems like a necessary footnote to my "blogstorm troopers" post.

At PressThink over the weekend, Jay Rosen responded to my criticism of him as an "enabler" of the Hewitt/Jarvis/Malkin agenda in the Eason Jordan case:

Judge for yourself. In my first post about Eason Jordan I said I was reserving judgment, and I provided links to eyewitness accounts so readers could judge... or reserve. In my second I gave some background on the political nature of Jordan's job, and the diplomacy it requires. In the third I published without comment the statement of an eyewitness, Richard Sambrook of the BBC, generally seen as friendly to Jordan. Am I enabling his agenda? ...

Yet I think the fear and disgust in A1's phrase, "Blogstorm troopers" is part of the blogging story now. ... Whether you agree or not in the case of Jordan's remarks, suspicion of the blog swarm is not crazy or wrong, and fear of mob-like actions by bloggers and others online is going to continue to speak to people, for the same reason invasions of privacy by the press always speak across ideological divides. It doesn't take much to imagine the mob coming at you.

The first paragraph seems like a studied missing of the point. To call Rosen (as I did, with much reluctance) an enabler for devoting sustained and exclusive attention to a (marginal) topic makes no claim about content: indeed, I specifically mentioned that Rosen was reserving judgement about the merits. In this case, pro or anti or agnostic hardly matters. Given the typical length of posts at PressThink, and Rosen's rather deliberate posting schedule, the (unusual) attention he's devoted to "Easongate" in and of itself communicates to his elite readership that the story is important: and important precisely within the frame imposed on it by Hugh Hewitt and his pack. (Read Jay's inaugural post on the affair if you want quick confirmation of this point.) What's odd is that in any other context, about another writer, that's just the kind of point Rosen himself would characteristically make.

And that second paragraph is just laughable. I sympathize with anyone suffering invasions of privacy, of course, even J. D. Guckert, whether bloggers or the traditional press are the invading forces: but that has nothing to do with what I was talking about. Blogstorms like the Eason Jordan one, where the agenda of the principals is clearly not journalistic investigation but the extension of right-wing political control over the mass media, are a danger to our political life and ultimately to the freedom of the press. I should have thought that a press critic, at least one who cares about that foundational democratic freedom, might want to take note of such a criticism, which is hardly trivial or motivated by simple, personal "fear and disgust." I'm afraid Rosen's incompetent response makes my point about his blindness in this matter much more eloquently than I could have myself.

Not so much an enabler, perhaps, more like a fellow traveller. Seems that palling around with the Hewitts of the blogworld has been more intellectually corrosive even than I feared. (I take particular displeasure in noting who represents the "left" in this typically hallucinatory comment from Hewitt, which Rosen quotes at the top of his post's "Aftermatter": "The folks paying attention are spread out across the political spectrum, from Jay Rosen, Jeff Jarvis, and Mickey Kaus on the left to all the usual suspects on the right." Do you have so little self-respect that you're really prepared to take Hugh's marching orders this way, Jeff?) And I'm guessing, on the basis of his response here, that when Rosen does at last turn to consider the question of "Jeff Gannon" it's going to be on the safe ground prepared by Jarvis and Insty and their ilk. I'm sure Jay will be happy to lecture us non-Hewitt-approved lefties then about mobs and the politics of personal destruction.

posted by michael  10:46:08 PM  
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