Media Curmudgeon

« You Can Learn a Lot From Art | Main | The New York Times Buys About.com. Why? »

February 20, 2005

Bloggers Blogging About Blogging

Bloggers are blogging about bloggers who blog about blogging and the impacts of blogs. Enough already! As Jon Stewart said when he went on CNN “Crossfire,” “Stop it!”

Even bloggers I normally respect are going overboard on the Eason Jordan resignation from CNN. Jeff Jarvis on his BuzzMachine blog wrote too much about it. Jarvis does all he can to boost the importance of blogs and, thus, of Jarvis as a blogger. There is little doubt if you read him regularly that he thinks he’s very IMPORTANT, as evidenced by all his media appearances he blogs about so he’ll get more media appearances.

Let’s see, you blog about how blogs are making the mainstream media (MSM) irrelevant and in order to promote this point of view, you genuflect to the MSM to get interviewed by them. If they are irrelevant, why is being on them so important?

Jay Rosen who writes the Press Think blog, the most thoughtful of all the bloggers who write about the media, in my view, thought that Eason Jordan should not have resigned because a lot of conservative bloggers got on him for apparently saying in Davos that he though the military were targeting journalists. I rarely disagree with Rosen, but I do in this case, plus he wrote too much about it—no need to go on an on about Jordan resignation (or firing).

I love Jack Shafer’s column on the media in Slate, and I agree with his column titled “I Would Have Fired Eason Jordan.” Shafer writes that Jordan “uncorked” a provocative comment and then backed off when asked to back up his claim so he should have been fired for saying something so dumb.

The bloggers didn’t get Jordan, he got himself. CNN is under new management and Jordan was under scrutiny, I’m sure. He’d made similar comments about the military targeting reporters before apparently, and that’s dumb. Even it you believe that it might be true and want desperately to try to protect reporters from more harm, you don’t want to piss off the only protection they have, the military.

It reminds me of the great film “Twelve O’clock High” in which Gregory Peck plays an Air Force general, Frank Savage, who has to shape up a sloppy B-24 bomber unit stationed in England that is making dangerous daylight bombing raids on Nazi Germany in World War II. The casualty rate among the pilots is high and Peck finally breaks temporarily under the strain of having to send brave young airmen to their deaths. The same thing might have happened to Jordan, the head of news coverage at CNN. He had been at CNN for 23 years and probably identified with the reporters who were in harm’s way in Iraq, just as General Savage did in the movie, and Jordan may have cracked temporarily.

If that was the case, and Jordan actually believed the military was targeting reporters, then he should have been removed from being in charge of coverage. It was the right management decision regardless of what the bloggers were writing. Jordan probably wasn’t being disloyal to America or disparaging the military, he was identifying with reporters and in doing so said some stupid things. Enough said. Stop blogging into the ground. You’ll give blogging a bad name.

Posted by Charles Warner at February 20, 2005 02:05 AM

Trackback Pings

TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://www.mediacurmudgeon.com/movabletype/MT/mt-tb.cgi/172

Comments

Gary Goldhammer at February 21, 2005 06:43 PM writes:

Jesse Kornbluth at February 21, 2005 03:39 PM writes:

Post a comment