http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/Howard Kurtz, Michael Barone & Argument by Anecdote
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Most notably of all, there is the complete disingenuousness of Kurtz's claim that he never for a minute meant to suggest that the HuffPost comments were "representative of anything other than the politics of hatred as practiced by a tiny minority." Why, then, would he devote a front-page article to those comments -- echoing the very prominent coverage given to them by his colleagues, Sean Hannity and Rush Limbaugh -- unless the intent were to indict "the Left" or" liberals" or Democrats generally with the familiar stereotype, rooted in the trite and fabled images of the 1960s hippie-protestors, of being so driven by deranged and America-hating anger that they actually cheer on the attempts by The Terrorists to kill the Vice President?
But at least Kurtz wrote about the LGF commenters and, in doing so, was forced to acknowledge what the HuffPost "story" that he pumped meant, and more importantly, what it did not mean. And that is a good development, even if it is the case -- as it certainly was -- that the swarms of emails he received from readers here and elsewhere forced the issue into his column.
This whole episode raises two broader issues that I think are worth highlighting:
(1) Writing about extremist right-wing blogs can be tedious at times, but the point in writing about them is never the blogs themselves (let alone their commenters), but rather, how the national media depicts political movements and the assumptions embedded in how they referee our country's political discourse. That is always the point. It isn't news that LGF and other large right-wing blogs are the venues for sociopathic and violence-inciting rhetoric on a daily basis. Standing alone, there is limited value in writing or thinking about that topic.
The point here -- as always -- is to try to force the media to write about the stories it covers in a more critical and factual manner, to compel them to abandon the cheap and lazy cliches that otherwise frame everything they write. That is one of the most critical functions of blogs, and it is one of the goals that is realistically attainable by bloggers and their readers working together.
That, for instance, is the function that Talking Points Memo has performed with the U.S. attorneys story. They didn't do so much original reporting or uncovering of new facts. The real work they did was in critically examining the available facts, making the connections that were being missed, and then insisting that the media treat the story as it deserved to be treated by highlighting and documenting what it revealed. With some exceptions (such as FDL's original reporting on the Libby trial), that is really one of the core functions bloggers perform -- to battle against the cliched narratives and reflexive mindset the media has relied upon for two decades now in determining which stories they select to cover and what they say about those stories.
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