Atrios writes an angry letter to CBS news about an incredibly stupid story they ran on blogging, which includes some notable and obvious mistatements about him:
Hypothetically, if The Washington Post discovered that The New York Times had a reporter being paid by the Bush campaign it would report it. If proven, the suspect reporter would be fired and likely never work in mainstream journalism again. Hence, the courts have been satisfied with the industry’s ability to regulate itself.
In the case of Duncan Black, this is what happened. The author of the popular liberal blog Atrios, Black wrote under a pseudonym. All the while, he was a senior fellow at a liberal media watchdog group, Media Matters for America.
“People are pretty smart in assuming that if a blog is making a case on one side that it’s partisan,” Jamieson said. “The problem is when a blog pretends to hold neutrality but is actually partisan.”
Those must be three of the stupidest paragraphs I've ever read. Atrios's letter points out that they contain factual inaccuracies: the blog is called Eschaton, not Atrios, and he's worked for MMFA since June of this year, even though he's been blogging since 2002. And, of course, there's also the fact that he doesn't work for any political candidate.
But the stupidest part must be Ms. Jamieson's quotation. This "Ms. Jamieson" is Kathleen Jamieson, "an expert on political communication and dean of the Annenberg School for Communications," and she said: "The problem is when a blog pretends to hold neutrality but is actually partisan." It's hard to say from the context whether she's talking about Atrios or not.
I'm not expert on what makes experts, but I'd like to gently suggest that if she was indeed talking about Atrios, her degree in expertness should be revoked; it seems like experts on topics should at least have one of the two brain cells required to rub two brain cells together. OF COURSE ATRIOS ISN'T NEUTRAL. I'm not sure if it's the section on his site called "Various Dem Party Sites," or the long blogroll of liberal blogs, or the subtitle which says "a proud member of the reality based community," but something there seems to give it away.
In any case, the juxtaposition of the bit about Atrios next to Ms. Jamieson's expert opinion shows one of two things: 1) she's an idiot and didn't do her research, or 2) the author of the story, Paul Kuhn, is an idiot and didn't do his research. Neither of which are very savory options -- either the Dean of the Annenberg School doesn't actually know anything about the topic on which she is an expert, or a reporter from a major news outlet isn't professional enough to even look at what he's writing about. Wow.
-- Michael
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