Now THIS is what I call real journalism. Garance Franke-Ruta at American Prospect Online has an in-depth look at three events in February - GannonGuckertGate, EasonJordanGate and JosephSteffenGate - all of which claimed scalps for the self-proclaimed "new media" of online bloggers:
"Scratch the surface and the same names turn up in each scandal, revealing the events of mid-February to have been part of an ongoing and coordinated proxy war by Republican political operatives on the so-called liberal media, conducted through the vast, unmonitored loophole of the Internet...Franke-Ruta then takes an in-depth look at exactly what went on with these three scandals, and who promoted them. Check the original story for lots of URL links. Here's the low-down on the Eason Jordan "scandal":
Using the cover of anonymity (many bloggers use pseudonyms), the cacophony of the relatively new medium, and the easily inflamed passions of the Web, these partisan political operatives are becoming experts at stirring up hornets’ nests of angry e-mails to editors, mounting campaigns to force advertisers to pull out of news shows, and, most disturbingly, spreading outright false information. The irony is that, at the same time this is happening, many in the mainstream media have decided it’s finally time to take bloggers seriously...
Easongate.com, the blog that served as the clearinghouse for the attack on CNN, was helped along by Virginia-based Republican operative Mike Krempasky. From May 1999 through August 2003, Krempasky worked for ["dirty-tricks master" Morton] Blackwell as the graduate development director of the Leadership Institute, an Arlington, Virginia–based school for conservative leaders founded by Blackwell in 1979. The institute is the organization that had provided “Gannon” with his sole media credential before he became a White House correspondent. It also now operates “Internet Activist Schools” designed to teach conservatives how to engage in “guerilla Internet activism.”After all his hard work, poor Jeff Jarvis will be very upset that his Buzz Machine blog does not even rate a mention.
Indeed, Krempasky could be found teaching this Internet activism course one recent February weekend to about 30 young conservatives at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in Washington. “He advocated that people write from their experience -- and not necessarily as conservatives,” a Democratic consultant who attended the seminar incognito told me. For example, Krempasky told “a conservative firefighter” that he should write about firefighting because that would be of interest to readers. Using that angle, he could build an audience. And if push ever came to shove, he could respond to an online dogfight from the unassailable position of being a firefighter -- and not as just another conservative ideologue. Krempasky then offered to help all the attendees set up their own blogs. “We’re definitely in serious trouble,” said the Democratic attendee.
The tactics Krempasky promotes are directly descended from those advocated by the late Reed Irvine of AIM, whose major funder was, for the past two decades, Richard Mellon Scaife. “Many bloggers and blog readers might not even know who Reed Irvine was, nor understand the debt we owe him as conservatives,” Krempasky wrote upon Irvine’s passing last year. “But that debt is tremendous.” In the late ’80s, Irvine had started the campaign to “Can Dan” Rather, coining the phrase “Rather Biased,” which became a rallying cry for anti-rather bloggers. Last fall, Krempasky was operating the main anti-Rather site, Rathergate.com, and organized a vast letter-writing and e-mailing campaign “to contact CBS and express themselves,” as he put it in an interview with Bobby Eberle of GOPUSA, an activist Web site founded by Texas Republicans and merged with one now owned by Bruce Eberle (no relation), the proprietor of a conservative direct-mail firm. “Conservatives have operated through alternative media for 40 years, direct mail being the first one,” Krempasky told me, sitting in the food court of the Ronald Reagan International Building as the CPAC wound down. “As far as the Internet goes, conservatives have largely been ahead of the left.”
Also part of the Easongate.com team was La Shawn Barber, who writes a biweekly column for -- again, the name pops up -- GOPUSA and has written for AIM about “the Bush-bashing media.” Working alongside Krempasky and Barber was another site, RedState.org, “a Republican community weblog” registered with the Federal Election Commission as a 527. Krempasky helped found that site along with Senate staffer Ben Domenech, the chief speechwriter for Bush ally and Texas Senator John Cornyn; and former U.S. Army officer Josh Trevino, a conservative blogger who used to write under the name “Tacitus.” The goal of RedState.org? “[T]o unite … voices from government, politics, activism, civil society, and journalism” in service of the “construction of a Republican majority.”
Power Line, another conservative blog deeply involved in the Rather controversy, helped push the Jordan story as well. Described by Time magazine as “three amateur journalists working in a homegrown online medium [who] challenged a network news legend and won,” Power Line was voted Time’s “2004 Blog of the Year.” In reality, its three writers are all fellows at the conservative Claremont Institute who attended Dartmouth College in the early 1970s and now work as attorneys; two of them have been writing articles as a team for conservative publications such as the National Review and The American Enterprise for more than 10 years.
Certainly there were some citizen-bloggers involved in the anti-Jordan effort. Easongate founder Bill Roggio, 35, is a computer-software analyst in Medford, New Jersey. His blog, The Fourth Rail, demanded that CNN release the video- or audiotape of Jordan’s comments in Davos. Roggio started Easongate.com on Saturday, February 5, with a couple of right-wing and military blogosphere buddies, Michigan-based Brian Scott (of The Blue State Conservatives) and Josh Manchester (of TheAdventuresofChester.com). Like Roggio, Manchester served in the military, leaving active duty as a U.S. Marine only recently. Scott, a Republican and member of Right to Life of Michigan, started his blog to further his dreams of becoming a conservative talk-radio personality.
As Easongate got cooking, the trio quickly reached out to “BlackFive,” a former paratrooper and prominent military blogger in Chicago who declined, in an e-mail interview, to reveal his surname (his first name is Matt). Blackfive brought in Cheryl, a 48-year-old advertising sales representative from southern California who asked me not to use her last name; she gave the group pro bono marketing services and helped to set up a database of CNN advertisers to be contacted. The team even tried to get an active-duty military officer to join their clique. The officer declined.
Jordan had made his comments more than a week before Easongate went live and, by all accounts, quickly backtracked at the panel when pressed. But the next day, January 28, Rony Abovitz, a blogger brought on by the World Economic Forum and, according to a later report in the Guardian, “one of those conservative online activists who believe the internet is an opportunity to balance what they see as media pro-liberal bias,” posted an item on the forum’s blog demanding that the two members of Congress who had been in Davos press Jordan on his remarks. The demand percolated throughout the conservative U.S. blogosphere as concern grew, and conservative talk-radio host, Weekly Standard writer, and blogger Hugh Hewitt added fuel to the fire by mentioning the controversy on cable television.
During the week that Roggio’s site was active, it launched a petition, turned readers into letter writers to CNN, worked the phones urging contacts in the military and government to call CNN, and generally acted as a clearinghouse for information on Jordan. Just as it was about to start a wholesale assault on CNN’s advertisers, Jordan caved. “I have never worked with a more cohesive, like-minded group of individuals in my entire life,” wrote Scott after Jordan resigned. “Without people like Cheryl, … Blackfive and his contacts, … La Shawn Barber and her writing prowess, and the advice of Mike Krempasky, we would not have succeeded.”
See the full article at American Prospect Online for the low-down on the GannonGuckert and Joseph Steffen scandals.
No comments:
Post a Comment