Peenie Wallie

Another anti-llectual, liberal, talking head has fallen victim to the blog swarm. It couldn't have happened to a better person.

In some ways, the capitulation of Eason Jordan sets a new high water mark for the blogosphere. On January 27th, Eason Jordan made his outrageous assertions that the U.S. military was deliberately targeting non-combatants in the Iraq war. Although the major media outlets stuck their collective heads in the sand for as long as possible, a blog swarm ensued and Eason was forced to resign just two weeks later.

When blogs called publicly for the release of the tapes, main stream media yawned. Even now, as I write this story, searching for Eason Jordan's name on CNN's website brings up nothing. They still haven't covered the story they tried so hard to ignore.

The real story here is much bigger than Eason Jordan. No one that watches CNN should be surprised that their lieutenant is slandering U.S. troops in Iraq. You couldn't watch CNN and think that a soul in Iraq wants us there or that anything good has come from the overthrow of Sadam Hussein. It's obvious that CNN is, and has been, against the war in Iraq. Against Bush. But, this is intuitively obvious to the casual observer.

The story here isn't that Eason Jordan was caught accusing maliciously slandering the U.S.military and was forced to resign. The real story here is much larger. The real story is the rise of the blogosphere.

What is the blogosphere and what does it do?

A "blog" is an abbreviation for a "web log". Basically, an online journal, somewhat akin to a diary that is open to the public. People use "blogs" for any conceivable purpose, from sharing photographs and family news to sharing stories, news, or linking to interesting web sites. Frequently, others are allowed to post their comments to the web site also.

The resulting medium, is, essentially, a web of integrated documents. Each linked and cross linked to each other, with comments posted, annotated, and updated. Because it is hosted on the internet, it can be updated simultaneously from anywhere in the world, any time, day or night. The "blogosphere" is the sum of all of the blogs on the internet.

At first, the implications of this weren't intuitively obvious. Just like, when everyone started buying personal computers back in the early 1990's, it wasn't obvious that they should all be networked together. The internet didn't really reach critical mass until 1997. Once the internet became commonplace, people started sending emails and creating web pages and "web logs" or "blogs".

Each blog is, for the sake of argument, independently operated. One blog or two or five could disappear, and the blogosphere would remain in tact. The traffic would be routed to other blogs, the same way that the internet routes around hubs that drop out of the network.

Some comments have been made that it isn't always obvious who owns and operates the blogs. My thought is that this is immaterial. The MSM has been feeding us biased, liberal drivel for decades under the false premise of "objectivity", so how could this be any worse? If you don't like the ideas of the blog, you're free to move on to another blog. If you do like it, read it. It really doesn't matter who owns it or operates it. If the facts don't check out, it won't survive.

But, only fairly recently has the nature of the blogs really come to be understood and utilized appropriately. The blogs allow people to share information instaneously across time and space. So, they link and cross link to each other's documents, building a news story in the process, in a "grass roots" manner.

Because the overall picture is shaped by many different authors, each person brings their own expertise to the story. The facts are assimilated into an unassailable rock-solid news story that anyone can follow.

The beauty of the blog is that it is self-correcting. The more people that read it, the stronger it becomes. If anyone one earth sees the story and can refute any one portion of it, they do so. Any person can sit down at a computer, day or night, and click through all of the facts, from personal, eye witness accounts, to photographs, to news stories, etc.They post comments, link to other evidence that contradicts the premise, etc.

Most of these blogs are run by people in their spare time. They don't get paid for what they do. They do it because, like most of us, they're tired of having some talking head reading lies and half-truths from a teleprompter. Collectively, they are destroying the MSM. The reasons for this, once you understand the nature of the blogs, are obvious.

The blogs have an infinite number of resources across the globe working day and night to break a story. To shove the lies back down the throats of the talking heads we all love to hate. There is no possible way that the MSM will ever be able to respond effectively to the blogs. You can't possibly have one reporter, or two, or five, or even a thosand, go out and do a better story on the Eason Jordan story than what the blogs did. The blogs assimilated the information from every person on earth, distributed it across a few thousand websites, that each had thousands of viewers a day.

The Eason Jordan story began with the seed of a single person(Rony Abovitz) posting his eye witness account on a web site, expressing his displeasure with Eason's disparaging comments toward the U.S. military. In the old world order, that would have been the end of it. No news site wanted to touch the story with a 10 foot pole.

But that seed was observed by the blogs, evaluated, and analyzed. The story began to grow as others corroborated his observations. Eventually, the blogs laid out every eye witness account from Davos, every person's response to the eye witness accounts, and called for the release of the tapes, a boycott of CNN, and Eason's resignation.

So, we begin to see the blogs as this network of inter-linked web sites, updated constantly, by an infinite number of resources laboring around the clock, in perpetuity. The blogs have gained the most media attention when they do something spectacular like forcing Dan Rather's resignation. But I think the blogs are more interesting when they're out of the spotlight. When they don't have something juicy to chew on like the Easongate fiasco.

Sharks have to keep swimming or they die. They have to have oxygen flowing through their gills all the time, so they have to swim all of the time. (Some actually sleep in caves with their mouths open to catch an underwater current, but I digress.) Blogs are like sharks. They're predators, and as such, are always on the hunt for a story. They see every single story in the world. Every potential story is kicked back and forth between one or two or three people and, if it is important enough, it gets kicked to more and more sites. Each blog decides, independently, if the story has legs or not. If it's worth covering. If the facts are true. If the topic is newsworthy. So, it isn't that the blogs got lucky and stumbled onto the fact that Dan Rather had rushed forged documents onto the air to try to stop Bush from getting re-elected. It wasn't serendipity that caused the blogs to stumble across the story of CNN's potentate slandering the U.S. troops.

Once a story is elevated, it turns into a frenzy that is difficult to imagine. Each story that rises to the top of the blogosphere draws a level of scrutiny and analysis that the main stream media cannot conceive of. Essentially, every fact is checked by everyone of earth. This is true because, even people that don't read the blogs are deliberately introduced to them. If you see a story on a blog, and know of someone that's an expert on some particular aspect of the story, you run the idea by them. Email them a link, and bring their expertise to bear on the story.

In a matter of days, the blogosphere can construct a story that the main stream media couldn't put together in a lifetime. And, the beauty of it is, the MSM doesn't get it. The blog authors are viewed as a bunch of amateurs, hacking away in their living rooms. Perhaps Jonathan Klein said it best when he claimed that "Bloggers have no checks and balances . . . [it's] a guy sitting in his living room in his pajamas."

Death to the Talking Heads: The Implosion of the Main Stream Media

Today, Eason Jordan of CNN was forced to resign. Barely a month ago, CBS fired or asked to resgin Mary Mapes, Betsy West, Josh Howard, Mary Murphy, Mary Mapes, and Dan Rather, after the blogs pointed out that they were using forged documents.

People are tired of being fed liberal inuendo and half-truths by the talking heads under the false guise of objectivity. Main Stream Media, as we know it, is dead. They just don't know it yet.

The bloggers are evaluating every story in the world, and, once a story catches on in the blogs, moving with inconceivable speed in all directions. In short, the MSM is facing the most perfect journalistic system ever conceived in the history of the world, and they think that they're up against a bunch of pajama clad hacks. (I don't even wear pajamas. ;)

So, turn off your television. Cancel your subscription to that dead-tree newspaper. And welcome to the world of real, honest journalism. Here's some of my favorite blogs to get you started: