Don’t miss Jack Kelly’s wake-up call to his colleagues in the MSM: “The mainstream: Out of it.” It begins with an inspirational anecodote:
When the Web logger Laer (“Cheat Seeking Missiles”) called to cancel his 25-year subscription to the Los Angeles Times last Monday, he was made an extraordinary offer. The circulation service rep, detecting that he was fed up with the paper’s liberal bias, offered to sell him the newspaper without the news sections. Laer was thunderstruck.
“How often must the beleaguered circulation department … be dealing with calls like mine, for them to come up with a special like this?” he wrote. (On Wednesday, an LA Times exec wrote back, denying that the Times sells partial copies of the paper, but thanking Laer “for bringing this to our attention.”)
Kelly bases his column on the contrast between a “controversy you’ve probably heard about [Gen. Mattis], and one that many people haven’t [Eason Jordan].” Kelly comments: “Journalists who got their panties twisted over Mattis apparently see nothing newsworthy about having the executive vice president and head of news for CNN accuse the U.S. military of deliberately killing journalists.”
Kelly notes the scandalously shoddy column by Howard Kurtz on Jordan’s remarks; Kelly himself was the first mainstream journalist to report Jordan’s comments, in his column last Sunday. Kelly concludes with a gibe at his colleagues’ casual derogation of the blogs:
The consensus seemed to be that we needn’t worry much about them, because we report the news and bloggers only offer their opinions. But the Eason Jordan story was brought to our attention by a Web logger, and it was other bloggers who uncovered earlier remarks by Jordan in the same vein. Seems like reporting to me.
The earth rumbles, and we think it’s our big feet, stomping the Lilliputians. But what if it’s an earthquake about to swallow us up?
All that’s lacking is the soundtrack with the Bob Dylan touch:
There’s a battle outside
And it’s ragin’.
It’ll soon shake your windows
And rattle your walls…
(Thanks to RealClearPolitics.)
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