Hey, what about us?
The D&C blames the blogs for pistol-gate, but gives us no credit:
They picked off a few lines about the meeting from a blog written by a citizen adviser to the Editorial Board. The packin’ reference made it onto the New York Daily News Web site, and later the liberal site Huffington Post had this headline “GOP Congressman Thought About Packing Firearm to Fend Off War Protesters.” The same distortion appeared on Americablog.com and the Democratic National Committee’s site. The Web was off to the races.
We were the first blog to “distort” the context of the story. Why aren’t we mentioned? Is it because we’re too small to matter or because we were pretty fair in our discussion of the story? I’d like think it’s the latter, but I doubt it.
But, seriously, let’s examine this:
Kuhl’s reference to packin’ was not related to arming himself against demonstrators. He said “packin”’ — and, again, it was more friendly banter than grim assertion — in the midst of a brief conversation about growing tensions over the war and heightened security at the Capitol. That was the context, not the demonstrations at his district offices.
Aren’t the protests at his office a manifestation of the “growing tensions over the war”? I understand where the D&C is coming from here — they feel bad that Kuhl is getting hammered over a throw-away line they feel they shouldn’t have reprinted — but this isn’t very convincing.
Related posts:
Get used to it, dude. We might get interviews on Channel 13, but you can almost forget about the D&C. Say what you will about the man, but you can ask Brother Wease and he’ll tell you everything you need to know about one media source’s respect for another. We’re just greasy kids stuff to the journalistic community. If they have to criticize anyone, they’ll let it be the HuffPo and the Kos because at least those are large organizations.
The good work we in the blogging community do for our Rochester community will largely go ignored, I suspect. Even though you know they’ve been reading us: how else would they know about the HuffPo if I hadn’t said something? Like they read it!
Sure, there are those who treat us with kindness. Jerry springs to mind instantly. But by-and-large, the D&C and other publications view us with a mix of fear, contempt and when they can muster it, disregard. It’s like you dropped a boom-box onto the set of Little House on the Prairie.
A boom-box playing gangsta rap…
yeah, bizzle. They can’t figure out what’s crack-a-latin’ with the blog-azizzles.
the d and c sucks and they are threatened by everyone. remember how they started insider to compete with freetime? there was a fair fight. that’s like clear channel going after wber. well, i guess that might happen also, but you get the point. anyway, defending kuhl on this is crazy. with his history, he should not be using ‘throw away’ comments about guns. you don’t see john lightfoot joking about drinking and driving.
I don’t give a shit if the D&C ever acknowledges the existence of my blog, Rochester blogs, or blogs in general. T.Rex didn’t acknowledge the presence of mammals, except perhaps to gobble one up, yet somehow dinosaurs are still extinct. Print news has a finite lifespan no matter how many blogs there are. The Internet is to print news as the meteor was to the dinosaurs: deadly.
My concern is how they tried to squirm out of responsibility for what they printed. If Kuhl can lean on them to change a story, where’s their integrity?
The D&C has a history of errors.I sent them a lte last year that they printed BUT described Eric Massa as “Republican Candidate”. Then they recently printed a lte from a guy that blamed Massa for the news release of Perm boy Kuhl’s divorce records.
This is a huge problem, and it is much wider than than just the D&C. Virtually every time the traditional media does something that isn’t kosher, the blogosphere calls them on it, and the traditional media’s reaction is to blame the blogs and all of their supposed vile-ness. They have taken a lesson from George W Bush — nothing is every their fault, its always someone else’s fault.
Glenn Greenwald once wrote a post about how PROUD (yes PROUD) that many in the traditional media are that they have never been influenced by criticism from the blogs (sorry, I don’t have the link right now), even if that criticism is justified … but of course the traditional media is heavily influenced by politicians, usually of the Rethuglican stripe.
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