All Blog Posts from Public Eye

Bahgdad Diarist Legit: As reported in this space last week, a rapid-fire media controversy was brewing in blogistan over The New Republic’s “Baghdad Diarist.” A lot of people disputed the claims of the writer, which included playing with a skull and the mockery of a disfigured woman by soldiers. Well, the New Republic went into immediate damage control mode and investigated the complaints, with the Washington Post reporting their final verdict:

The New Republic said yesterday that it has corroborated each of the allegations in an essay written by an American soldier in Iraq by checking with other members of the man's unit.

With the exception of one "significant discrepancy," for which the magazine expressed regret, the New Republic is standing behind the account of Scott Thomas Beauchamp, an Army private whose reports of petty cruelty were aggressively challenged by conservative bloggers.

Reporting from the other side of the planet in a war zone is difficult enough. Trying to do so anonymously leaves a publication vulnerable to such charges.

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This week’s budding controversy at The New Republic is an interesting example of how journalism has changed in the Internet age. The rapid-fire pace of news gathering and disseminating has sped up the entire journalistic process ... and its detractors.

For example, check out this week's timeline in The New Republic case. The magazine – which fell prey to a dishonest contributor a decade ago, a story made into the movie “Shattered Glass” – is facing new allegations.

Saturday, July 21: The Washington Post’s Howard Kurtz reports on allegations being made about The New Republic’s “Baghdad Diarist” – an ongoing series (3 so far) of reports filed by a soldier in Iraq. Critics had begun to assail the contributor for potential falsehoods in his reporting

Tuesday, July 24: The New York Times advances the story, featuring a quote from the magazine’s editor committing “the full resources of the magazine” into investigating the concerns.

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Bloggers have a way of swarming. And a swarm is pretty much what happened when one blogger pointed out a factual error in a recent post from Washington, D.C., bureau chief Jay Carney on Time's new Swampland blog. Rick Perlstein at The New Republic outlines the play by play here. In a nutshell, what happened is this: after one blogger found an error, other bloggers took a close look at Carney's post and pointed out a few more in the comments section. Eventually, "the commenters unraveled the entire foundation of Carney's argument."

There was, as typically accompanies these types of dustups, some rude back and forth between author and commenters. But ultimately, writes Perlstein, "Carney was rude and wrong. The barbaric yawpers of the netroots were rude and right."

The whole tiff is but one example of how bloggers are ushering in a "new, more uncomfortable media world," writes Perlstein, "one in which, to judge a piece of writing, we must gauge not the status of the writer, but his or her words themselves, unattached to the author's worldly rank." And that's "all right" with him.

It's also created a world in which traditional media are competing with more than just themselves – bloggers are, increasingly, seen as rivals.

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It looks like The Anchoress wasn’t the only advocate of citizen journalism who found last week’s “Outside Voices” commentary by Samuel Freedman worthy of a response. Dan Gillmor, editor of the citizen journalism blog, Bayosphere, takes issue with many of Freedman’s points in this post:

I’m a fairly prominent proponent of citizen journalism, and I do agree it’s part of a wider democratization. But far from seeing it as a “shattering of the power of the unelected elite” and a total circumvention of the professionals, I’ve repeatedly said this is about expanding the number of voices. I wouldn’t mind shattering the arrogance that Freedman’s essay exemplifies, but one of my goals is to spread and share the power for everyone’s benefit.

Terry Heaton lodged similar complaints at his blog...

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If, like me, you spend a good deal of your time reading blogs, you are all too familiar with one phrase (and its abbreviation) and the vitriol that so often accompanies its mention: mainstream media. MSM.



My personal favorite analysis on the subject comes from William Wolfe, who attempted to parse the hatred at McSweeney’s:

Reasons Bloggers Hate the Mainstream Media.


The MSM is too liberal.

Professor always calls on the MSM.

Bloggers got stood up at prom. By the MSM.

But it was Franklin Foer who, in a recent piece in The New Republic, (predictably) struck a chord when he took a swing at the MSB (mainstream blogosphere) for taking swings at the MSM (got all that straight?):

"The mainstream blogosphere (MSB) is only too happy to bury the old media regime, because it has an implicit vision for a new order, one that would largely consist of ... bloggers. In other words, they envision a universe that resembles the nineteenth-century partisan newspapers or the Fleet Street model, where writers and thinkers break from the illusion of "objectivity" and print the "truth." (I acknowledge that the liberal blogosphere is hardly a monolith and that blogs don't always lend themselves to coherent thought, but common themes and arguments are clear enough.)"

Following the “flurry of responses, not all of them friendly,” to the piece, Foer addressed what he felt was readers' literal-minded interpretation of his point:

“People have taken my coinage 'Mainstream Blogosphere' seriously. But I'll be the first to concede that it's a dumb, adolescent term. I simply wanted to highlight the stupidity of the ubiquitous 'Mainstream Media.' There are, of course, lots of liberal bloggers that I respect (e.g. Marshall, Yglesias, Drum) for their reporting, analytical capabilities, and writing. And they shouldn't be lumped with the likes of the ranters and cheap shot artists who I have critiqued. Similarly, CNN, NPR, and The Washington Post are very different beasts, who don't deserve to be polemically lumped together so often. That's just sloppy.

And that set off a semantic argument from Atrios at his blog.

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