I'll Have Whatever She's Smoking, Please.

Tina Brown opines in the WaPo:

Now the conventional wisdom is that the media will be kept honest and decent by an army of incorruptible amateur gumshoes. In fact, cyberspace is populated by a coalition of political obsessives and pundits on speed who get it wrong as much as they get it right. It's just that they type so much they are bound to nail a story from time to time.

Wait a minute, did she just call the Blogoshpere a bunch of monkeys? Ms. Brown might want to avoid typewriter metaphors whilst discussing the CBS document fraud. Unfortunately she has more to say about that which she knows nothing.

The rapturing about the bloggers is the journalistic equivalent of the stock market's Internet bubble. You can see the news chiefs feeling as spooked as the old-style CEOs in the '90s who had built their companies over 20 years and then saw kids in backward baseball caps on the cover of Fortune. It finally drove them nuts. It was why we saw Time Warner's buttoned-down corporate dealmaker Gerald Levin tearing off his tie and swooning into the embrace of AOL's Steve Case.

The equivalent today is when news outfits that built their reputations on check-and-double-check pick up almost any kind of assertion and call it a "source." Or feel so chased by the new-media mujaheddin they start trusting tips garnered from God-knows-where by a partisan wack job in Texas.

No, no, no. It's P-A-J-A-M-A-H-A-D-E-E-N, it's such hard work correcting these old media types.

Ms. Brown continues into the Kerry tank:

Documents or no documents, everyone knows Bush's dad got him out of Vietnam. Everyone knows he thought he had better, funner things to do than go to a bunch of boring National Guard drills. (Only a killjoy like John Kerry would spend his carefree youth racking up high-minded demonstrations of courage and conscience, right?) Like O.J. Simpson's infamous "struggle" to squeeze his big hand into the glove, the letter was just a lousy piece of evidence that should never have been produced in court. Now because CBS, like Marcia Clark, screwed up the prosecution, Bush is going to walk.

This last graf makes so little sense that I will just let you baste in the pointless comparison of a blood-soak glove from a grisely double murder scene and a bogus memo alledging cronyism in Texas politics, as Tina has a boffo closer:

As for Dan and CBS, it wasn't really politics that drove them over the edge, was it? It was romance. That's the sad part. How good did it feel when they broke the Abu Ghraib story just a beat before Seymour Hersh at the New Yorker? How satisfying is it when a real news sensation takes hold instead of some tabloid trash moment (like Janet Jackson's flashing breast)? A veteran newsman is in the twilight of a long and distinguished career. He just wanted to taste that sweet medicine one more time.

Sweet medicine? An odd metaphor...so ole Dan is a junkie longing for his last peer approval fix, eh? Jeebus with friends like Tina Brown, Dan Rather doesn't need the blogosphere to harsh his mellow.

Jeff Jarvis isn't buying into it and neither is the public or the street.

Posted by feste at September 23, 2004 02:17 PM | TrackBack