Yet Another MSM Hit Piece on Bloggers

I was disappointed that Marc Fisher?s "The New News" is dominated by criticisms of blogs balanced by faint praise. His writing off of the extensive documentation of liberal media bias as "readers who want to see their perspectives reflected in the news they receive" is typical of someone who once wrote the following: "I don't mind kids being taught the national anthem or patriotic songs. The pledge, however, has a creepy totalitarian feel to it, with or without the obviously unconstitutional, McCarthy-era addition of the God bit."

Yes, I used a blog to research that Marc Fisher quote. He is obviously antagonistic to blogs because they have been successful in breaking the near-monopoly on current events information by the political left. No, the blogosphere did not only reveal the "flaws in CBS News' reporting on President Bush's National Guard service." Without blogs, Dan Rather's last-minute use of crudely forged documents would have likely swung the election to John Kerry. Within a few hours, a blog had produced an animated GIF showing a pixel-for-pixel match of one of the CBS documents using Microsoft Word's default settings. I was one of many who highlighted the story that CBS?s own document experts expressed doubts about their authenticity prior to their release.

CBS's response to the scandal was primarily ad hominem. One executive defined a blogger as "a guy sitting in his living room in his pajamas writing what he thinks." Marc Fisher brings an embellished put-down. Bloggers are pajama-wearers who "are not being read." He seems oblivious to the Hayekinan spontaneous generation occuring in the blogosphere in which quality attracts attention. Last week my two month-old blog was cited by dozens of sites for debunking a widely reported mainstream news story that Margaret Thatcher had renounced her long-standing advocacy of deposing Saddam Hussein. One site alone sent 3,500 readers to my post after naming it their "BlogTruth" of the day.

I'm sure that thousands of fledgeling Princeton alumni bloggers resent the disparagement. Regrettably for Mr. Fisher, we are no longer consigned to the "Letters to the Editor." My blog contains links to four of the many similar "hit pieces" on blogs that have been published in the jealous mainstream news media. To see them, click here, here, here and here.