Comments on: Affirmative Action for Bushies

By: The Mahablog » Under the Radar

The Mahablog » Under the Radar — Sat, 18 Nov 2006 20:57:58 +0000

[...] We all remember that Ben Domenech didn’t last long in the WaPo position, for which he was colossally unsuited. Still, the fact that a 24-year-old pedestrian writer and college dropout was given such a position at all is wonderfully illustrative of how the Right is becoming a tad inbred; for more on this see DHinMI at Kos. [...]

By: alyosha

alyosha — Sat, 25 Mar 2006 04:41:38 +0000

But in fact there is no MSM. No one answers for it. It has no address... I understand the point you're trying to make, but I would argue that there is indeed an unarticulated common set of beliefs and behaviors that this country's traditional media institutions collectively embody and demonstrate, with enough consistency to cause others to both see certain patterns and find fault with them. The right finds their own set of faults with the MSM; the left has theirs. As for Domenech, good riddance. Another right-wing underachiever.

By: Swami

Swami — Sat, 25 Mar 2006 02:43:20 +0000

Well, let’s give Ben credit for having enough sense to know when to cut and run. He was fraud and he knew it. Maybe he can land a gig with Central Command writing about military success stories in Iraq…I hear they’re hiring “talented” writers.

By: Don Surber

Don Surber — Fri, 24 Mar 2006 21:53:32 +0000

Hey, Jim Brady, Hire Me

Whoever you get: Vet!
Cheers,
Don Surber
Poca WV

By: Craig

Craig — Fri, 24 Mar 2006 21:23:54 +0000

I hope Jay Rosen is not suggesting the MSM was wide awake and alert in 2002 and 2003; there was a reason why hundreds of thousands of Americans starting reading the BBC, The Guardian, the Knight Ridder Washington Bureau and a few lonely bloggers. I, for one, got tired of reading small very curious stories in the back pages of newspapers while the front pages told a different story and that small story in the back pages would not even appear on any of the network news shows (I’m speaking of things like energy dept. experts, the guys who actually know how to make a bomb, dismissing the administration’s aluminum tubes story).

For several years, Bush and other conservatives weren’t too worried about the MSM until it started showing signs of doing its job again.

By the way, there was a fundamental reason why the Knight Ridder Newspapers were scooping the larger outfits: not being a glamor outfit, they had almost no access to the top tier of Bush Administration officials and had to talk to lower level career people who knew all too well what was going on (and let’s keep in mind how often those low level officials were right).

One last point. The MSM has suffered from the star system for the last twenty-five years; this has caused a number of problems, the most significant being the reduction of the kind of staff that used to do more legwork on stories. Doing the legwork is where bloggers can be useful, though obviously some bloggers are better at it than others.