The Blogosphere Blows the Whistle on Chas Freeman

My esteemed Keloland Colleague and NSU Colleague Emeritus, David Newquist, frequently compares bloggers with “real journalists.”  He does so without any risk of flattery to the former.  I generally agree with him on that point.  But I think that bloggers play a very important role in contemporary political journalism.  There was a time when the major newspapers and network news organizations could kill a story by ignoring it.  That time is over. 

Mickey Kaus thinks that we have passed a major threshold with the Chas Freeman affair (see my last post). 

During the Trent Lott scandal, if I remember right, there was speculation that the blogosphere would really have arrived when a high public official suddenly resigned over an Web-borne scandal without the scandal being mentioned in the respectable mainstream press--so if you had only read the New York Times or Washington Post you'd have no idea why this person quit or what the scandal was until he or she was gone. Poof! Killed by ninja blogs.** Well (without regard to the merits of the dispute), the Charles Freeman withdrawal is close to that case, no? WaPo apparently printed its first news story on the controversy the day it ended--i.e. when Freeman withdrew. Ditto the New York Times. ... What does this event signify? Not to be too portentous, but it signifies you can no longer be a well-informed citizen if you just read the Times and Post print editions. You have to go online. Sorry, Mom! ...

Kaus certainly has a point.  If you get all your news from real journalists, or from people who get their news from real journalists, you would have had no idea that Obama’s nominee for Chairman of the National Intelligence Council was controversial, let alone that he thought that the only thing wrong with the Chinese Government’s crushing of dissent at Tiananmen Square was that the Government waited so long. 

But I don’t believe that the magical threshold has been passed.  The Freeman appointment was, praise be to God, brought down by the Israel lobby, not by bloggers.  Still, Kaus is right about one thing.  The Washington Post and the New York Times did no stories on the Freeman nomination until the last moment.  Both of these stories include a paragraph on Freeman’s appalling comments about the Tiananmen Square atrocity, and both bury it deep in the article. 

If you want to know what is going on, the mainstream press is a good place to start.  But you need to know that our major organs of news aren’t honest.  To know the rest of the story, you have to go to bloggers such as, well, me. 

Comments

[gary]

US foreign policy is not so much dictated by Israel as coincides with it. Israel is the US's watchdog in the Middle East, keeping the uppity oil-rich Arabs in check, with the help of some local dictators.

http://gazasolidarity.blogspot.com/2009/03/freeman-affair-commentators-ask-how.html

[KB]

I am inclined to agree with your first statement, Gary. But how Israel keeps "uppity oil-rich Arabs in check," is beyond me. Unless by "in check" you mean that Israel keeps them from killing her.