Stromata Blog

Honor Roll of the Day

Who is Michael Tracey? He describes himself as “Roving journalist, friend to all dogs”. That tells us that he isn’t a fan of the governor of South Dakota but not much else. Whatever can be said about him, he deserves credit for compiling an extensive, albeit incomplete, honor roll of “right-wing media outlets that are systematically, fanatically ‘pro-Israel’”:

-Fox News
-Daily Wire
-Newsmax
-The Post Millennial
-PragerU
-Breitbart
-Washington Free Beacon
-Rebel News
-Epoch Times
-Babylon Bee
-New York Post
-National Review
-WorldNetDaily
-Washington Times
-Washington Examiner
-One America News
-Real America's Voice
-Christian Broadcasting Network
-The Blaze
-Daily Mail
-The Free Press
-The Federalist
-Gateway Pundit
-Salem Radio Network
-Right Side Broadcasting Network
-Western Journal
-Human Events
-RedState
-PJ Media
-Hot Air
-Twitchy
-Townhall
-Drudge Report
-Daily Caller

Kudos to all! Stromata and The Hesperian are, alas, too obscure to have received this recognition. I will try harder in the future.

The Enemy Within Twitter

In the post mortems on Ron DeSantis’s less that wholly satisfactory campaign debut, I’ve seen plenty of derision – Donald Trump is firmly aligned with the Left here – and some pro-DeSantis apologetics, mostly along the lines of, “Everybody will forget this in a week or two.” What I haven’t seen is so much as a breath of suspicion that the Twitter Spaces meltdown might not have been simply the result of the deployment of not-adequately-tested technology. Yet the grounds for suspicion sit in plain sight.

When Elon Musk acquired Twitter, many, many employees did not welcome their new overlord, to put it mildly. They were overwhelmingly Musk-hostile for a variety of reasons, some stemming from his imperious management style, others from dislike of his perceived political opinions, which jibe poorly with the tech world’s longstanding woke orthodoxy and increasingly woke orthopraxis. Many malcontents were fired in the wake of the takeover, but Musk couldn’t, even if he seriously tried, get rid of them all and conjure a loyal work force into being.

The DeSantis campaign rollout was intended to publicize not just the candidate but also Twitter Spaces, which is supposed to be Twitter’s Next Big Thing. For employees who loathe both Ron DeSantis and Elon Musk, what could be more tempting than a bit of sabotage to make sure that both looked inept?

Elon Musk doesn’t – he can’t – oversee all the steps needed to host a Twitter Spaces event that will be accessed by hundreds of thousands of people, no more than he can personally supervise SpaceX countdowns. A very few people in the right places at the right time could have created last night’s “technical difficulties”, with virtually no risk of leaving behind evidence of their actions. Did something like that happen? We will never know, unless the perpetrators come forward to boast about their exploit, but, such are the times in which we live, that the idea is far from unthinkable.

The Ironimeter Explodes

Too much irony for one day – or one year.

First, the editor of The New Republic, formerly a nonfiction magazine, complains about leaks to the press and is seconded by a multitude of left-wing bloggers, e. g., The Horse’s Mouth. Naturally, the leak didn’t undermine national security; it consisted of documents about TNR’s former “Baghdad Diarist”, Pvt. Scott Thomas Beauchamp, documents that were in the process of being released in response to FOIA requests. (Needless to say, they shouldn’t have been passed on to Matt Drudge outside of official channels, and I hope the malefactor gets a stiff dose of military discipline.)

What this incident establishes is that the sinistrosphere agrees that some secrets are worth protecting. It just disagrees with the rest of us about what they are. Government strategies to catch terrorists: nah. Transcripts showing that liberal journalists have engaged in a dishonest cover-up: yeah.

And then the New York Times insinuates that John Podhoretz got his new job as editor of Commentary through nepotism. Let’s do a quick comparison:

• Norman Podhoretz retired as Commentary’s editor 12 years ago. He doesn’t own or control the magazine, which is published by an not-for-profit foundation. John, his son, is inter alia a newspaper columnist, the author of several books, a former speech writer for President Reagan and a former managing editor of the Weekly Standard, about whose performance David Frum writes, “John was one of the most effective editors I have ever known, brilliantly capable in every aspect of the job, from conceptualizing new directions for the magazine to fixing commas.”

• The current publisher of the New York Times is the son and grandson of former publishers. His family owns a majority of the paper’s voting stock. Four years after graduating from college, he was hired by the Times and has worked there ever since. He has been the publisher for the past 15 years, chairman of the New York Times Company for ten. Based on performance, he would have been fired years ago if the public stockholders’ economic interests played any role in corporate decisions. He has never written anything of substance, though he did manage last year to deliver one of history’s weirdest commencement addresses.

Talk about the pot calling the polished porcelain black!

BTW, Michael Yon reports that Private Beauchamp was offered a chance to transfer out of Iraq and declined it, choosing to stay with his unit and fight for his country. So far as I’m concerned, that act washes away any and all prior misdeeds. Deus tecum, Scott.

Watch-ing No More

After five years of assiduously collecting news and opinion about the War on Terror, Mårten Barck has announced that Watch: Covering the War on Terror has come to an end.

I’ve decided to stop updating Watch. Five years seems more than enough, really, and I haven’t had any enthusiasm for it lately. It was just difficult to find a natural end for it, as history has a tendency to continue on a day to day basis. The frontpage will end on September 11, 2006, but you'll still find updates to December 2006 in the archive, which starts on September 11, 2001.

Mårten’s diligence and good news judgement made Watch an invaluable, though too infrequently heralded, resource. I’m sorry to see it come to an end but am glad that the archive remains as a research aid.

The Mystery of Jamil Hussein

There must be a rational explanation that fits all the facts. Either that, or we’re living in a movie with glaring continuity problems.

For those who came in late, Jamil Hussein is(?) a police captain in Baghdad who has been a named source for 61 Associated Press stories, many of them recounting Shi’ite militia atrocities against the city’s Sunni population. His 61st story was particularly horrifying: six Sunnis doused in kerosene and burned to death. After that report appeared, several strange things happened:

1. Iraq’s Interior Ministry, which controls the police force, denied that “Captain Jamil Hussein” existed. The U.S. Armed Forces issued the same denial.

2. The AP responded that he was, too, real but produced not a scintilla of corroborative evidence: not Captain Hussein himself nor statements from people who knew him nor anything else. It also ran no more stories quoting him.

3. Other news organizations, none of which ever seems to have heard of Captain Hussein, could find no witnesses to the alleged Sunni conflagration. The people who saw it were apparently AP exclusivists, just like the captain.

4. Attempts by third parties to locate Captain Hussein or anyone who knew of him were fruitless.

By this time, it was hard to avoid suspecting that the AP had either lied outrageously or, more likely, been duped. That it stonewalled all inquiries, adopting a progressively nastier tone toward skeptics, didn’t ease suspicions.

Then, after six weeks, Jamil Hussein suddenly turned up, as confirmed by the Interior Minister himself. The minister vaguely attributed the prior misinformation to poor record checking. He also issued a warrant for the captain’s arrest, then announced farcically that there would be no prosecution unless the AP identified him in a lineup as its source. He added helpfully that it would not be punished for noncooperation.

All this is less coherent than the plot of Il Trovatore. Where has Captain Hussein been for the past six weeks? Why is he seemingly unknown anywhere outside the AP newsroom? How has he been able to home in again and again on incidents all around Baghdad, many far away from his beat? Why did the AP ignore prima facie reasonable questions about his reality?

Bloggers who have gnawed on this episode will doubtless draw many jeers from the usual bevy of leftoids. It’s hard to see, though, how they can be faulted, unless it is a fault not to trust the Associated Press blindly. With so many peculiar circumstances, one would have to be devoid of rational curiosity not to suspect that something was wrong. Moreover, rather than just rant, folks like Armed Liberal, Eason Jordan (no conservative he) and others with local contacts tried to find the missing policeman; that is, they did the AP’s work for it. I don’t see how anybody writing in good faith can fault them, even if they turn out to have been wrong.

Will we ever learn what really happened here? If the Associated Press is interested in honest reporting, it will track down the true explanations of the anomalies. If it prefers to sneer at bloggers, that will tell us something as well.

Addendum: Michelle Malkin, who followed this saga so intensely that she has gone to Iraq to follow up, has a roundup of reactions from fellow Jamil doubters.

A New Frontier in Spam

The SF site BowieTreks has discovered a new and apparently burgeoning form of spam.

I just checked the most recent list of Recently Updated Blogs on Typepad, and found eight of the ten entries to be what I think of as bogus blogs, such as [link to bogus blog omitted]. These blogs consist of a list of links which lead to a list of ads for the topic in the blog title. All eight of these blogs were created today, none have any About information, so there is no way to tell who is creating them. They all look exactly alike, as if they were created by a software program from a form. These bogus blogs are proliferating like rabbits and clogging the Updated blogs list. They use bandwidth and other resources that could be used for legitimate blogs, and use our time when we click on them, thinking they might be a legitimate, interesting blog. Does this bother anyone else???

*sigh* Typepad has begun automating defenses against comment spam; about two-thirds of the on-line casino promotions that try to sneak into my comments sections now don’t make it through the gateway, saving me the trouble of deleting them manually. It was inevitable, I suppose, that the spammers would just invent a new tactic. */sigh*

Briefly Noted: Charlock, Simonsen, Social Security

■ The way that blogs come and go, I feared the worst when The Charlock’s Shade, a delightful blend of book notes and curmudgeonly observations on the state of culture, came to an abrupt halt last December 6th, while “Enoch Soames” was “out as well as about in Chicago, Illinois, U.S.A.” An ominous place to disappear! Happily, Enoch has reappeared just as abruptly. I take his harrowing account of his hiatus cum grano salis.

■ Redmond Simonsen, whose maps, counters and cover art for SPI have influenced wargame graphics ever since, died of heart failure on March 8, 2005, at the sadly young age of 62. He hadn’t worked in the wargaming industry for 20 years, but we old-timers remember him well. Operational Studies Group has posted reminiscences (page 1, page 2) from inter aliis Greg Costykian, David Isby, Jim Dunnigan, Jack Greene, Rodger MacGowan, Brad Hessel, John Prados, Eric Lee Smith and Kevin Zucker.

Update (4/24/05): The Charles S. Roberts Awards site has posted a detailed appreciation, Alan Emrich & Rodger B. MacGowan, “Our View is Better Because We Stood on the Shoulders of a Giant: Redmond A. Simonsen”.

■ Brendan Miniter’s description of the Democrats’ inchoate Social Security pseudo-reforms, which I noted when it appeared in the subscription-only OpinionJournal Political Diary, is now publicly available, with additional commentary, under the fitting heading, “Worse Than No Reform”. At least a few clever Dems have come up with ways to “save” Social Security that ignore its demographic imbalances while “improving” it in ways that would expand both the scope of the welfare state and the power of the federal government to influence the private economy. Not surprisingly, their ideas are Bill Clinton retreads.

Fake-But-Accurate in Norway

Bjørn Stærk presents a pair of anecdotes that illustrate the virulence and pro-terrorist bias of certain segments of the European Left.

The first is “fake but accurate” raised to a more brazen level than even Mary Mapes dared. Several months ago a left-wing blogger posted what looked like a reprint of a real news story quoting an American “senior administration official’s” supposed statement that the U.S. government funds the European Security Advocacy Group, which runs anti-terrorism newspaper and television ads in Europe. Leftists had been claiming as much from the beginning. Bjørn immediately suspected that this convenient confirmation was untrue and confronted the blogger, who admitted that he had made the item up. He refused, however, to withdraw or disavow it, declaring, “If people are mislead [sic] by this it’s fine with me. Maybe they will ask their government who pays for these aids [sic]. That should be helpful to find out who has the moral responsibility for the disinformation terror campaign.”

There the matter rested for a while, but –

. . . the story’s been sitting there ever since, waiting for someone to fall for it. That happened early this month, when it began showing up in Norwegian left-wing circles. . . .

On March 2, the story was reprinted by Hans Olav Fekjær on a Norwegian anti-NATO mailing list. From there, it made it to indymedia.no, and was then repeated by the Norwegian blogger Norvegia, who went on to spread it in the comment section on Dagbladet’s blog. [N.B.: Dagbladet is a leading Norwegian newspaper.]

I quickly replied on Indymedia and Dagbladet, pointing out that this was a deliberate fake story. I also sent a mail about it to Norvegia (who curiously doesn’t allow open comments in his blog). That was a week ago. Norvegia never replied to my mail, and never corrected his story, where he still claims that ESAG is financed by the US government. He did, however, reply to me on indymedia:

“Bjørn Stærk is of course entirely right; it is probably no more than 99.9% likely that the DoD (the Pentagon) is behind the financing of ESAG.”

So again: fake but accurate. Like Bernhard at Moon of Alabama, Norvegia believes that his own unproven suspicions justify making up an entire news story.

What is significant here is not merely that leftists feel no compunction about inventing and spreading “news” but that their target is an innocuous advertising campaign whose messages are “What Europe needs is a counter-terrorist response that’s thoughtful, balanced but appropriate,” and “Europe - all of Europe - must cooperate in deliberate, thoughtful but forceful measures against terrorism”, with the tag line, “There’s no future in terrorism”. It says a lot that, in some circles on the Left, such sentiments are not merely controversial but so outrageous that fighting them with lies is acceptable conduct.

The second incident involves not mere bloggers but a mainstream newspaper. Before the invasion of Iraq, Norway lent several laser-guidance systems to American forces in Kuwait. Last October, Norwegian media reported this assistance, and opposition politicians raised an outcry. An article in Dagsavisen reinforced the critics with quotes from “leading experts on terrorism” purportedly indicating that “The threat of terrorism against Norwegian targets has increased because of the weapons lending to the American forces”.

Bjørn talked to the persons quoted in the article and discovered that the reporters had (a) engaged in blatant shopping for statements that supported their preconceived opinion and (b) when that wasn’t sufficient, distorted what they were told. For example,

The most disturbing quote in the article is attributed to Jan Oskar Engene at the University of Bergen, another researcher with genuine expertise on terrorism:

“It could be enough to strike against something with a symbolic or real connection with Norway. An attack against the Norwegian Church Abroad would for instance be a heavy blow against the crusaders.”

In the context of the article, Engene seems to be talking about what form a revenge attack for the weapons lending may take, but he tells me that he does not at all agree with the thesis of the article, and that he said this only in reply to a direct question which he saw as unrelated to the weapons lending. He remembers his own surprise at reading the article, and discovering what he had supposedly agreed with.

In all, of the five sources Dagsavisen quotes in the article, only one – Marcus Buck – actually says what the headline affirms, that the “weapons lending” has placed Norway in greater danger of a terrorist attack. He's the only source explicitly referred to as a “terrorism expert”, and also the only source not in any way qualified for that label.

So what about the “leading terrorism experts” who have “concluded” that the terror danger against Norway has increased? They don’t exist. Jon Martin Larsen and Nilas Johnsen made them up. Norway’s actual leading experts on terrorism don’t believe this lending matters much at all. But casual readers have no way of knowing that. The article is deliberately designed to fool them. I have only one name for this: corrupt journalism.

Quite unexpectedly, Dagbladet ran an article about these criticisms. In it, the reporters were given a chance to defend their work; their effort was remarkably feeble, essentially a repetition of the out-of-context quotations that their sources had repudiated.

As with the blogging fabrication, we see unapologetic willingness to resort to falsehoods to attack even modest anti-terrorist actions, in this case one ally’s routine, small-scale aid to another. One can’t, of course, generalize from two incidents to Europe, or the European Left, as a whole, but it is important to be aware that people like these, who can legitimately be labeled fifth columnists, exist and influence opinion in the rest of the world.

Policing the Lavender Plantation

Maybe there is a story worth noticing in the James Guckert/Jeff Gannon affair, just not the one that the Left is working so hard to flog.

The “Gannongate” meme consists, in essence, of two elements: that the aspiring reporter was a “Republican shill” and that he once worked for a homosexual “escort” service. The combination is decried as scandalous, which is odd when one recalls that the politically correct leftist opinion is that there is nothing wrong with any sort of sexual relations among consenting adults. If Mr. Guckert were a liberal journalist, I’m sure that any negative comments about his past would draw immediate accusations of bigotry from Atrios, Daily Kos and the rest of the left-wing blogosphere (and likewise from large segments of the center and right).

But the cynosure of this kerfuffle happens to be a professed conservative who, until harassed out of a job, worked for a Web site set up to disseminate news favorable to Republicans. He seems to have been an energetic reporter and capable writer, if not an adept at devising questions for White House press conferences. (Right-wing mirror images of Helen Thomas’ crazy tirades don’t do much to advance the conservative cause. A real Karl Rove plant would have asked neutrally phrased questions that offered openings for pro-GOP points that would otherwise get lost in the news shuffle.) His abilities might in time have earned him a significant spot in the small corps of right-of-center journalists, but he was as yet not celebrity, and his employer, Talon News, has a minuscule audience.

So why should the Kossacks decide to ride this obscure figure out of town, and why should the elite media now treat him as a poster boy for Rovian dirty tricks? If they regard his day pass to Administration press briefings as a threat, their paranoia surpasses what even I can believe. Rather, we appear to have an instance of policing a leftist plantation. Just as uppity blacks who espouse non-liberal views are reviled, so, too, are homosexuals expected to toe the ideological line. Strays like Guckert/Gannon are punished by all available means, including exposés of their private lives that would be intolerable if conducted by Instapundit or Little Green Footballs.

The two sides of the spectrum both offer what might be termed “bargains” to homosexuals. The Left promises to promote official government recognition of same-sex relationships, provided that the beneficiaries adhere to the leftist agenda. For those who don’t, there is the threat of persecution quite as vigorous as was customary in the early part of the last century (i. e., shunning and shaming rather than imprisonment).

The Right makes a much more limited promise: to pay as little attention to out-of-sight sexual conduct as feasible and to rein in allies who show a propensity for queer-baiting. Nothing is asked in return but a gentlemanly degree of discretion.

Both of these offers are, to be frank, politically motivated. Very few heterosexuals feel sincere neutrality, much less approval, when they contemplate homosexual practices. Those who believe in the reality of liberal sympathy might ponder Bill Clinton’s remarkable whitewashing of “gays” from his account of his own Presidency, a feat that has, so far as I can tell, drawn absolutely no adverse attention from the Left.

I’m in no position to instruct homosexuals about their own political interests. I can, however, draw an analogy that may be instructive: Soviet-era Romania, uniquely among communist regimes, gave official support to Christianity. Orthodox priests, churches, schools and publications were financed by the government. In return, Christians had to give undeviating allegiance the Ceausescu tyranny’s political line. Those who didn’t were hounded, imprisoned or murdered.

Was that a good bargain for Christians? Were they better off with communist solicitude or the indifference of the secular West? American homosexuals face similar questions and, in answering them, may wish to think about how their “friends” have treated a man who tried to leave the lavender plantation.

Further reading: Power Line, “The Insanity of the American Left”; “Have They No Shame? No, Actually They Don’t”

Guess Who Cares About “Jeff Gannon” (And Why)

Like many others, I’ve been trying to figure out why the “Jeff Gannon” story is a “scandal”, or even a kerfuffle. Daily Kos and his ilk think that it tells us dark truths about the Bush White House. Is their point that the staff should delve into the private life of everyone who wants to ask questions at Presidential news conferences? All the raving about “Gannon’s” (alleged) homosexuality leads one to think so. Indeed, the loony left site Democrats.com shrieks that it “may be the biggest sex/spy scandal in American history”, which is mighty impressive.

There are, however, people with rational motives for hyping this tale. An item in this morning’s Washington Times Inside Politics [ephemeral link] explains why the Editor & Publisher Web site has plugged it half a dozen times (while completely ignoring Eason Jordan).

Reporters on warpath

Leaders of the White House Correspondents’ Association plan to meet with President Bush’s press secretary today to discuss tightening the White House press-credentialing process. . . .

The meeting follows the recent uproar over James Guckert, a former White House reporter for the Republican-linked Talon News, who had used the name Jeff Gannon and drawn fire for criticizing Democrats as part of a question to Mr. Bush.

Among the potential changes to the credentialing system: tighter restrictions on who can receive daily press passes, such as those Mr. Guckert obtained, and a more active role by the WHCA in approving requests for credentials, which are now handed out solely by the White House Press Office, reporter Joe Strupp writes.

“I can see arguments for a more aggressive credentialing process and for the correspondents playing more of a role,” said Mark Smith, WHCA vice president and a reporter for Associated Press Radio. “And I can see arguments against it.”

Ron Hutcheson, WHCA president and a Knight Ridder reporter, said five members of the WHCA board will meet with Scott McClellan today. He also said the entire nine-member board will consider the credentialing issue during its regular meeting on Feb. 28.

Mr. Hutcheson added that perhaps the White House should require that anyone seeking a day pass first obtain a Capitol Hill press pass, which is distributed by the Standing Committee of Correspondents, a group of congressional reporters.

To translate into English, a clique of journalists was grabbing for greater power over access to the White House, using an alleged “uproar”, audible only in the left-wing fever swamps, as its entrée. Predictably, that was not the kind of public pressure likely to move the Bush Administration. The meeting took place. Mr. McClellan listened patiently. And E&P sadly reports that he budged not an inch. On the other side,

WHCA President Ron Hutcheson said he believed the current system was fine and hesitated to have the correspondents’ association play a bigger role in distributing press passes. “I’m not sure we need to do anything,” Hutcheson told E&P. “I’m not comfortable in passing judgment on who is a journalist and who isn’t. My overriding view is that if I am going to make a mistake, it is going to be on letting people in rather than keeping people out.”

Sounds to me like a man who spent a few minutes in Mr. McClellan’s woodshed being lectured about how the First Amendment isn’t a guild monopoly.

Jordan: Eason Past the Obvious

Is the Eason Jordan story about the lynching of a mild-mannered, perhaps slightly inarticulate news executive by a howling mob of bloggers? That has certainly become the favored version among large segments of the media, including the editorial board of the Wall Street Journal, which insists that accusing American soldiers of systematic murder of journalists “hardly looks like a hanging offense” and laments that CNN “apparently allowed itself to be stampeded by this Internet and talk-show crew” into “throwing Mr. Jordan overboard . . . despite faithful service through his entire adult career”.

Those words ring oddly, because Bret Stephens, a member of the editorial board, ended his account of Mr. Jordan’s Davos panel with this query:

Mr. Jordan deserves some credit for retracting the substance of his remark, and some forgiveness for trying to weasel his way out of a bad situation of his own making. Whether CNN wants its news division led by a man who can't be trusted to sit on a panel and field softball questions is another matter.

This answer, his colleagues seem to believe, is, Yeah, that’s just the kind of leader CNN news needs. Okay, I can see why CNN’s competitors might think that, but really. . . .

The most obvious fact about the whole Jordan affair, which the elite media’s anti-blogger spin should not be allowed to obscure, is that Eason Jordan was fired because his “defamatory innuendo”, as Mr. Stephens called it – and, more important, the mindset that it revealed – broke the bounds of decent liberal opinion. Barney Frank – not my idea of a neoconservative – challenged him directly while the panel was in progress, forcing his attempt “to weasel his way out”. Senator Chris Dodd (D-Conn.), who was in the audience, said later that he was “outraged”. Even moderator David Gergen, the Dr. Perne of contemporary American politics, was, according to an eyewitness, “clearly disturbed and shocked”.

The notion that CNN could be intimidated by the howls of a thousand pajamahadeen, is more than faintly ludicrous. The “lynch mob” metaphor fits badly when the mob is wielding only words. What’s more, it was chanting, not Immolate Jordan! but Release the tape!. All of the most vehement anti-Jordanites clamored to learn what the man actually said before deciding whether he deserved to hang. (A lynch mob that wants to hear from witnesses?) It was the “victim” who proclaimed that the evidence would exculpate him and didn’t lift a finger to make it available.

At most, bloggers made enough of a stir to persuade the top echelon at CNN to look closely at what their employee was saying in their organization’s name. They didn’t like what they found and gave him the boot. It tells us a lot about the low repute of the mainstream media that so many observers, including others in the MSM, can’t believe that a TV network would refuse to let its newsroom be overseen by an anti-American conspiracy theorist. To my mind, CNN’s firing Eason Jordan was no more startling than a university’s dismissing a chemistry professor who taught phlogiston theory. Or am I holding the media to an impossibly high standard?

Addendum: Eugene Volokh has a very sensible view of the “lynch mob” comparison:

[B]loggers, or critics generally, have power only to the extent that they are persuasive. . . . So Jordan’s critics (bloggers or not) aren’t a lynch mob: If they’re a mob, they’re at most a “persuasion mob.” What’s more, since they’re generally a very small group, they’re really a “persuasion bunch.” . . .

We should love persuasion bunches, who operate through peaceful persuasion, while hating lynch mobs, who operate through violence and coercion. What’s more, journalists – to the extent that they love the First Amendment’s premise that broad public debate helps discover the truth, and improve society – ought to love persuasion bunches, too. When the only power you wield is the power to speak, and persuade others through the force of your arguments (and not through the force of your guns, clubs, or fists), that’s just fine. Come to think of it, isn’t that the power that opinion journalists themselves wield?

There Goes Mr. Jordan

The blogosphere seems united in seeing Eason Jordan’s unexpected (and, I take it for granted, involuntary) resignation from CNN as evidence of Blogger Power, though there is disagreement on whether it represents a long-needed counter to mainstream media bias or a “tire-necklac[ing] by a bloodthirsty group of utopian, bible-thumping knuckledraggers that believe themselves to be bloggers but are really just a streetgang”.

It’s obvious that, had bloggers not complained loudly about Mr. Jordan’s slanders against American soldiers, nothing would have happened to him. It doesn’t follow, however, that CNN was “forced” to act against a top executive. There was no danger that its image would be tarnished, except among people who already regarded it as a conduit for enemy propaganda, so long as 90 percent of the public never heard the story. And, as of yesterday morning, there was little sign that the non-blog-reading public was ever going to hear it. As Tim Blair observes, not a word appeared in the New York Times until its Web site reported last night that “Eason Jordan, a senior executive at CNN who was responsible for coordinating the cable network’s Iraq coverage, resigned abruptly last night, citing a journalistic tempest”. Come, now. A “journalistic tempest” without the NYT is a tsunami without water. As Power Line aptly puts it,

If, like most people, you relied on the conventional media for your news, you would not only be late to the party, you would have no idea what is going on – your first knowledge of anything out of the ordinary would be Jordan’s resignation. Assuming even that will be reported. It would be an interesting assignment: trying to write a story on Jordan’s resignation for a paper that has not heretofore covered the controversy. If Jordan had just announced he wanted to spend more time with his family, he would have made their task easier.

Mr. Jordan’s superiors at CNN probably learned about his Davos remarks from blogs, but it’s pretty clear that the decision to get rid of him was based less on not-yet-imminent public pressure than their own reaction to claims that U.S. soldiers deliberately kill reporters. That is Angry Left paranoia as its most rancid. Liberal though the CNN hierarchy may be, it evidently did not care to have its news operations overseen by an anti-American lunatic. There is, let’s remember, a spectrum of left-of-center opinion. One can oppose the liberation of Iraq without being a Michael Moore, just as one can support it without being an Ann Coulter (who ought to lose her last shreds of respectability for endorsing the murder of journalists).

Buried in news accounts of the Jordan resignation was an indication that he was under a cloud at CNN before Davos:

After several management restructurings at CNN, Jordan actually had no current operational responsibility over network programming. But he was CNN’s chief fix-it man overseas, arranging coverage in dangerous or hard-to-reach parts of the world.

That’s not the way that I’d seen his duties described previously, but it’s the kind of stealth demotion that out-of-favor executives frequently receive. Mr. Jordan had certainly shown plenty of earlier clues to his prejudices: By his own admission, he covered up the horrors of the Ba’athist regime in Iraq, and he had previously spread claims that Coalition troops tortured newsmen. His loose lips at the World Economic Forum apparently were simply the last, hanging offense.

I find it encouraging that CNN acted before it faced a “journalistic tempest”, for that suggests it isn’t dominated by anti-American bigotry. I also doubt that a tempest would have been helpful to our cause overall. Did we really want to give al-Jazeera the opportunity to recycle Mr. Jordan’s accusations with its own gloss? With no controversy and no videotape, we can hope that the “Americans kill reporters” meme will sink obscurely into the fever swamps. We can also give CNN coverage, for the moment, the benefit of a scintilla of doubt.

Corruption in the Blogosphere!

With all of the chatter about bloggers taking payola from politicians, something that C. S. Lewis wrote in the course of an argument with Marxist academic J. B. S. Haldane is worth attending to:

My fears of such a tyranny [socialist central planning] will seem to the Professor either insincere or pusillanimous. For him the danger is all in the opposite direction, in the chaotic selfishness of individualism. I must try to explain why I fear more the disciplined cruelty of some ideological oligarchy. The Professor has his own explanation of this; he thinks that I am unconsciously motivated by the fact that I “stand to lose by social change”. And indeed it would be hard for me to welcome a change which might well consign me to a concentration camp. I might add that it would likewise be easy for the Professor to welcome a change which might place him in the highest rank of an omnicompetent oligarchy. That is why the motive game is so uninteresting. Each side can go on playing ad nauseam, but when all the mud has been flung every man’s views still remain to be considered on their merits.

The leftists who were paid by Howard Dean’s campaign in the expectation of favorable coverage and the conservatives whom John Thune’s Senatorial campaign subsidized are in the business of presenting arguments for particular ideological viewpoints. They had plenty of motives for supporting their preferred candidates, and the mere fact of their choices was uninteresting. Does anybody but (perhaps) his mother care whom Markos “Screw ’em” Zuniga favors for any office, except to the extent that he can present reasons (or what pass for reasons in the strange Daily Kos universe) why others ought to agree with him?

There is, of course, a distinction between purveyors of opinion, who stand and fall by the logic and evidence that they adduce, and reporters of news, whose role is to provide information. Readers are rarely in a position to check whether the newspaper account of an event accurately reflects the facts. They either trust or don’t trust the reporter, and judgments about his credibility depend a great deal on perceptions of his motives.

That is why political bias (or, as CBS prefers the characterize it, gross incompetence) at a television network is an important issue and the Dean campaign’s generosity to a couple of anti-American zealots isn’t.

Does it suddenly occur to you that my real motive for holding news media and bloggers to different standards may be that I hope, like Professor Bainbridge and Iowahawk, to start collecting bundles of cash from the White House? Or am I, as Loony Left site Democrats.com “discovered” long ago, already a front for greedy corporate interests? Ah, but that would be telling. Who am I to unearth the dark secrets of the blogosphere?

Blogs and Blagues

In today’s Wall Street Journal, Joseph Epstein [link probably for subscribers only] observes that blague is homonymous with blog (to Anglo-Saxon ears anyway). This fact suggests a new distinction: between worthy blogs, such as the ones on the roll in this one’s sidebar, and blagues of the Daily Kos, democrats.com, Donkey Rising ilk. I of course do not mean “blague” in any derogatory sense. At least, I don’t see how any of the sites so labeled can reasonably complain. The word is, after all, French.

Incidentally, I am currently at SMOFCon, the annual convention for people who run science fiction conventions, particularly Worldcons. One of this year’s attendees is New Jersey fan Gary Blog, who is heartily embarrassed at seeing his name used so freely in the media. He hasn’t yet hit on the idea of demanding royalties.

I’ll pass along any interesting news or gossip that I pick up this weekend but am too sleepy to do a lot of schmoozing tonight. I did learn from Kent Bloom that he expects the prospective Denver in 2008 Worldcon bid to launch its official campaign over Fourth of July weekend at the 2005 Westercon in Calgary. As a long-time critic of over-lengthy bidding, Kent evidently intends to conform his practice to his precepts.

Also, Kevin Standlee emphatically denies any intention to organize a San José in 2012 bid. Emphatically.

These Are a Few of My Favorite Blogs

Right Wing News periodically ranks its proprietor’s favorite blogs. Accompanying the latest list is a request for similar ones from other bloggers. Always happy to oblige, I offer my own, highly eccentric and subjective honor roll of favorites (rank order approximate and variable from day to day):

1. Best of the Web Today – James Taranto’s daily roundup of important, interesting and downright odd stories from around the Internet
2. Kerry Spot – Bright, brightly written guide to what’s happening in the election
3. Watch: Covering the War on Terror – Links to news and opinion about the war
4. Instapundit – If he didn’t exist, the Left would try to keep him from being invented.
5. The Corner on NRO – National Review’s group blog
6. Overlawyered – Chronicling the high cost of American litigation; a fine source of information about the latest absurd lawsuits
7. Tim Blair – Australia’s blogospheric heavyweight
8. Little Green Footballs – Number one target of the Angry Left, so how can you not like him?
9. David Frum’s Diary – Best of the younger generation of neoconservative commentators
10. Hoystory – This guy ought to have his own syndicated column.
11. Iraq the Model – The antidote to the American media’s doom and gloom
12. Nixatron Blog-Times – Omnium gatherum of political news and opinion
13. Armavirumque – Group blog of The New Criterion, a great cultural magazine
14. Cronaca – Art, archeology, history, a dash of politics
15. Bjørn Stærk Blog – Imagine what it must be like to be a young, right-of-center pundit in Norway!
16. Arthur Chrenkoff – An Australian who is best known for publicizing the abundant good news from Iraq and Afghanistan.
17. Right Wing News – What the name implies, with a good sense of humor
18. Universe Today – News about astronomy, cosmology and the space program
19. Venezuela News and Views – You really should be paying attention to what’s going on in the world’s next communist dictatorship.
20. The Volokh Conspiracy – Group blog featuring libertarian and conservative law professors
21. Blogs4God – A meta-blog of religiously oriented blogs
22. Power Line – The blogosphere’s newest superstar
23. JustOneMinute – Practically an investigative reporter
24. The Conservative Brotherhood – Meta-blog of right-of-center African-American blogs
25. Transterrestrial Musings – Commentary on the space program, politics and related topics
26. Geek Press – News from the odd corners of science
27. Sound Politics – Covering Washington State; the model of what a regional political blog ought to be
28. The Edge of England’s Sword – Dubious statistics exposed, global warming debunked, the demise of Toryism lamented
29. Rasmusen’s Weblog – Economics, religion and politics; the first is heavily mathematical and can be intimidating, but you don’t have to understand all of it.
30. ConSim World – News about wargaming

Looking over the list, I already disagree with some of the rankings and regret numerous omissions. Don’t The Charlock’s Shade and Midwest Conservative Journal (the source for information about the breakup of the Anglican Communion) and Belmont Club and Jihad Watch and Davids Medienkritik and The Shape of Days and The Forest for the Trees and Europundits and a bunch of others deserve to be in the top tier? Yep. But I can either apportion places with absolute justice or finish this post. I choose the latter.

The Canadian Paradise

One hardly ever meets a liberal who doesn’t believe that the United States would be an infinitely better place were it only more like Canada. Here we labor in the tightening grip of fascism. North of the border, meanwhile, all is peace, serenity, New Age fuzzy warmness . . .

Bloggers in Canada are deleting posts after Warren Kinsella, an aide to former Prime Minister Jean Chretien, threatened them with legal action. [Cicada]

Upon threat of legal action from the wise, courageous, and apparently unchallengeable Warren Kinsella, I have pulled my previous post.

I'm not a lawyer, like Warren Kinsella, LL.B. I don't know if what I wrote meets the legal definition of defamation, and I can't afford to find out, so I've deleted the post. [Babbling Brooks]

BlogsCanada asks, “Who is Warren Kinsella and why is he threatening bloggers?” The quick answer is that he is a bigshot Toronto lawyer and former aide to the former Prime Minister. He likes to wear “George Bush is an Internationalist Terrorist” t-shirts. He doesn’t like to be criticized himself, and so he has launched legal threats against bloggers with unkind words to say about the Chrétien administration and particularly about the Adscam scandal.

Here in the proto-fascist U.S., nobody would pay attention. In Canada, everybody does, and the offending posts vanish from the Internet. Ah, freedom!

Catullus, it seems, could write more harshly about a Roman dictator than a modern Canadian dare about a democratically elected leader’s minion.

Nil nimium studeo, Caesar, tibi velle placere,
nec scire utrum sis albus an ater homo.

Tu quoque, Kinsella.

What Will Brinkley Write?

JustOneMinute makes the “bold prediction” that Douglas Brinkley’s rumored New Yorker piece on Lieutenant Kerry’s incursions into Cambodia will appear on the Greek Calends. My prediction (made earlier) is to the contrary. I think that Professor Brinkley will write the article, but –

• It will not be published until after the election. The announcement beforehand, without details of its content, is intended merely to reassure Kerry voters that their man is not a liar.

• It will document two or more occasions on which Lt. Kerry’s swift boat entered Cambodian waters, though it will concede that the “Christmas in Cambodia” story is bunk.

• It will assert that these events were omitted from Tour of Duty because John Kerry avoided giving the author the information that he needed to discuss them. We may well be told that Professor Brinkley learned about them only after the book was completed.

• It will reveal details about the incursions that are, in some respect that I can’t venture to predict, discreditable to John Kerry.

The preceding hypothesis is, I think, the most economical explanation of all of the known facts. The next best alternative, by Ockhamite criteria, is that Professor Brinkley, in an interview with the Daily Telegraph, deliberately made a false claim that “Kerry went into Cambodian waters three or four times in January and February 1969 on clandestine missions.” That would be suicidal conduct for a professional historian. No doubt Brinkley wants Kerry to win, but I strongly doubt that he will sacrifice his reputation for the cause. For that reason, I believe that the Cambodian incursions were real events.

If real events, why are they omitted from a laudatory account of John Kerry’s months in Vietnam? Not, it goes without saying, because they were “secret” and “illegal”. Those are secrets that the United States government lost interest in keeping decades ago. The only plausible reason is that Senator Kerry does not want them examined, and it is hard to imagine a motive for concealment that does not reflect badly on his conduct or character.

Since my forecast is based on the logic of the situation rather than inside dope, it may, of course, be wrong, but I’m willing to challenge JustOneMinute to a small wager on the question.

Watch Back on Duty

The editor of Watch: Covering the War on Terror went on vacation, as all bloggers should. Unfortunately, a computer glitch made the site inaccessible while he was gone, but he is now back, refreshed and up and running. There’s no better roundup of news and opinion about the ongoing conflict.

Reading Recommendations

Much as I’m tempted to do a line-by-line retrospective on the Democratic convention, this weekend has to be devoted to updating potted bios of several hundred science fiction professionals (explanation here in case you’re curious), so let me offer a pair of reading recommendations instead.

First is Watch – Covering the War on Terror, which is, IMHO, the best roundup of war-related news stories and opinion pieces on the Web.

Second is the best unappreciated blogger I know of, Matthew Hoy. He works for the San Diego Union-Tribune but as a layout designer rather than a writer. Why the paper didn’t long ago give him a column is a mystery to me. He must be one terrific design artist! Particularly worthy of note among his recent posts is a critique of convention bloggers, with suggestions for doing better at the Republican infomercial.

More when I grow weary of writing sentences like, “Carl Lambclear’s latest novel is Star Raiders of the Dust (2003), the sixth volume in the Five Universes series”.

BTW, the Pro Photo Gallery bios on my Web site are the 2003 edition. Additions and corrections are welcome. Leave comments, or e-mail them to me. (But don’t recommend additional pros for inclusion. I have no control over that.)

Only Our Tribune

Wonder why one is ill-advised the take the Chicago Tribune’s word for anything beyond weather reports and baseball scores? Here’s a paragraph from a story that ran today about political weblogs:

While scores of political blogs don’t go beyond gossip and bickering, many are quite influential, analysts say. Some feature political commentaries, such as the liberal instapundit.com or the conservative electionprojection.com. [emphasis added]

Professor Reynolds quotes that with no comment beyond his patented “Indeed”.

On the other hand, Election Projection 2004 is conservative, though it doesn’t really “feature political commentaries”. Its main focus is, as its name hints, the Bush-Kerry horse race.

At least the reporter seems to have spelled all of the bloggers’ names correctly.