The chips are still falling in the Eason Jordon affair.
Michelle Malkin today carries
this response from French journalist (I
know, I
know) Bertrand Pecquerie, Director of the World Editors Forum, the organization for editors within the World Association of Newspapers (WAN):
"Sad conclusion in the Eason Jordan affair (see below the New York Times article), sad day for the freedom of expression in America and sad day again for the future of blogging: the defense of the US army honor seemed more important to some bloggers than the defense of reporters' work (and sometimes life)! Nevertheless, there is one advantage in this story: masks are fallen! Within the honest community of bloggers, some of them claimed to be the 'sons of the First Amendment', they just were the sons of Senator McCarthy."
Maybe Pecquerie has a point. Maybe the masks
have fallen. But if so, they're not the ones he has in mind. The bloggosphere may be
less accountable than mainstream media; it is also several orders of magnitude more independent (alas, no one's paying us to do this...). The Dan Rather's, Eason Jordon's, and Bertrand Pecquerie's out there are at the iceberg tip of a large, well-paying, consensus-forming buddy network (from which
even Berkeley is not spared). If the masks have fallen, they are the masks of sociability and extra-professional relationship which have long kept these guys arrogant and gotten their back whenever one of them slips up.
No wonder they're unhappy with developments in blog land: few things die harder than a sense of entitlement. Some people never get over it.
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