Finkel's hit piece in WaPo: Ya Know Brady, Hiatt & Howell are freakin'

The Washington Post published yet another article today -- this one entitled The Left, Online and Outraged, by David Finkel -- seeking to depict the liberal blogosphere as being nothing more than the venting ground for the crazed and hateful rantings of what it calls "the Angry Left." To accomplish this goal, the article features a single blogger, Maryscott O'Connor of My Left Wing, examines her posts, finds the most extreme and outrageous, throws in some deliberately selected inflammatory comments buried in various blogs, and then attributes all of that to the liberal blogosphere generally. Based upon these isolated comments, The Post tells its readers that the liberal blogosphere is a place reserved for the furious and the profane -- "Loud, crass and instantaneous."

The article's principal tactic -- really, its sole tactic -- is to search through hundreds of comments on O'Connor's site and sites like Eschaton, pick out the most extreme ones, and then feature them as representative of the blogosphere generally.

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Any time old, crusted, failing, dying institutions launch attacks on new and innovative competitors, it is an unmistakable sign that the attacking dinosaur feels threatened and feels its power slipping away. That dynamic, more than any ideological goal, is what is motivating the steadily increasing appearance of these types of hostile blogosphere caricatures masquerading as news articles. The reality is that the blogosphere need not be a hostile competitor of journalists, but can be a uniquely valuable research and analysis tool to supplement the governmental adversary role which journalists are supposed to perform.

But until they realize that, and as long as they continue to perceive that their stranglehold on conventional wisdom is being abolished as a result of the irreverent and increasingly substantive blogosphere, these types of "articles," devoted to the destruction of the blogosphere's credibility, are going to become more and more common - and more and more desperate. Today's exercise by Finkel in the lowly art of absurd caricature and sloppy generalization advances that process, ambitiously and enthusiastically.

Much more of Glenn Greenwald's Mistaking caricature and generalization for journalism at:

http://glenngreenwald.blogspot.com/2006/04/mistaking-caricature-and.html

Deborah Howell and Fred Hiatt: Fact Free and Loving It

by Jane Hamsher on 15 April 2005

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Yes, we know you have a lot invested in your warmongering. It has no doubt paid the giant cocktail weenie bill for years. But the fact is that there was no reason for the president to believe Iraq was seeking uranium at the time. Do we have to go through this again? I guess so. Joe Wilson’s oped appeared on July 6, 2003. Five days later, on July 11 2003, George Tenet had to admit Wilson was right and there was no credible reason to believe as of January, 2003 when the President gave the State of the Union address that the 16 words had any validity; indeed, that’s why Tenet said they never should have been included in the first place.

Only this last week we learned what they knew then, but what we didn’t know – the National Intelligence Council had delivered a definitive judgment in January of 2003 that the claims weren’t credible. It appeared in the Post on the same day Hiatt’s editorial did. Lil’ Debbie claims Hiatt had not read Gelman and Linzer’s piece at the time he wrote his editorial, not that it would have made any difference (her words not mine — facts obviously have no place within the bubble world of the Post’s editorial page). But by the time Howell was scribbling her excuses for Hiatt she most certainly had read it.

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Much more at the link:

http://www.firedoglake.com/2006/04/15/deborah-howell-and-fred-hiatt-fact-free-and-loving-it