Post a Comment On: Internal Monologue

The New Republic Online (no stranger to blogger ass-kickings) has the story (HT: Sullivan):
Moments later, a writer identifying himself as "TomT" pointed out an error in Carney's "nut graf" that would have earned a failing grade for a first-year journalism major: "Clinton's approval rating in January [of 1995] was 47 percent. It was not mired in the 30s." At 9:12, the blogger Atrios, also known as Duncan Black, alerted his readers to the gaffe, and they descended on the Time blog like locusts--and, to mix the Biblical metaphor, served Jay Carney's head up on a charger. They tabulated several more boneheaded errors: Carney wrote that 1995 was Clinton's first State of the Union "with Newt Gingrich and Bob Dole seated behind him as Speaker and Senate Majority Leader"; but, of course, it is the vice president, not the Senate majority leader, who sits behind the president. He also wrote of Clinton's "recovery... during Monica, in 1999"--but, as a commenter reminded him, "Clinton never had to 'recover' from Monica, unless polls in the high 50s and 60s are something you have to recover from."To be fair, this was actually an example of veteran bloggers kicking MSM-figure-recently-turned-blogger ass. It can be quite shocking for many traditional media writers when they turn to blogging and find the reactions coming in so quickly and brutally.

This whole episode leads to the question:
[W]hy was it, again, that we were supposed to defer to the authority of newsweeklies (and the mainstream press) in the first place? [Time D.C. bureau chief] Carney was rude and wrong. The barbaric yawpers of the netroots were rude and right.The MSM isn't going away, nor should it. But the days when they could spout B.S. and not be called on it are over.