The Times acknowledges the blogosphere
Here's something interesting I noticed all by myself :-) about Michael Smith's report on the second leaked British cabinet document in The Times of London; and since Juan Cole brings it up today (and since I first noticed the story on Cole's site), I'd better note it here and credit Cole accordingly. The interesting thing is Smith's crediting of the Internet in his story. He writes:
Cole notes (quite correctly, I think): "If this story had broken in the 1970s, it probably would just have been buried by the mainstream US press and remained an oddity of UK's Fleet Street. But here you have the Times of London actually acknowledging the wind under its sails from the blogging world!"
Cole goes on to note Rep. John Conyers' www.downingstreetmemo.com web site and petition demanding answers on this issue from Bush. So, argues Cole, "Smith not only acknowledges the pressure put on the US corporate media by the bloggers, but he also points to a virtual social movement around the DSM, with emails and petitions circulating in the hundreds of thousands and giving the Democrats in Congress their first high-profile investigatory opportunity of the Bush presidency." He continues:
As Cole also notes, in contrast to the almost complete US media silence on the original memo, at least some mainstream media are paying attention to the new cabinet paper -- including the Washington Post, which even put it on page A1 yesterday!
From my reading of this article, by Walter Pincus, it looks as if the Post is playing down the importance of the new document -- Pincus's piece focuses a lot of attention on the "lack of post-war planning" angle, and downplays the much more contentious issues of Bush's duplicity and the likely illegality of the invasion. Also, while it gives due recognition to Smith of the Times, it neglects to mention the role of the Internet. Instead it merely says that the DSM "has been the subject of debate since the London Sunday Times first published it May 1." (Debate? Where? Not in the pages of the Post. Is Pincus trying to sneak in an "Officer Barbrady" ruse?) Pincus then shows how gun-shy the Post still is on this issue, when he writes: "Opponents of the war say [the memo] proved the Bush administration was determined to invade months before the president said he made that decision". Is it not now possible to state clearly and unambiguously that, if you accept them as genuine, the memo and now the briefing paper, taken together, make it unambiguously clear that the Bush administration was determined to invade months before the president said he made that decision? Especially as Pincus then acknowledges that "neither Bush nor Blair has publicly challenged the authenticity of the July 23 memo"?
Anyway, Cole argues that the page 1 treatment by the WP "is clearly in part a result of the enormous pressure the bloggers and the public have put on the Post on this issue. Indeed, it is probably the case that having "ombudsmen" at the papers of record, who discuss and explain editorial decisions, is itself a response to the interactivity of contemporary culture, exemplified by the internet." The New York Times also has a story on the new document by David Sanger (in today's paper), but it is "deeply buried" in the paper (don't have a page number yet) and is, according to a contributer to Cole's site (Stanford linguist Jean-Philippe Marcotte), "strikingly defensive" in tone. Now why would the New York Times be defensive on this issue?
- There has been a growing storm of protest in America, created by last month’s publication of the minutes in The Sunday Times. A host of citizens, including many internet bloggers, have demanded to know why the Downing Street memo (often shortened to “the DSM” on websites) has been largely ignored by the US mainstream media." [Emphasis added by Cole.]
Cole notes (quite correctly, I think): "If this story had broken in the 1970s, it probably would just have been buried by the mainstream US press and remained an oddity of UK's Fleet Street. But here you have the Times of London actually acknowledging the wind under its sails from the blogging world!"
Cole goes on to note Rep. John Conyers' www.downingstreetmemo.com web site and petition demanding answers on this issue from Bush. So, argues Cole, "Smith not only acknowledges the pressure put on the US corporate media by the bloggers, but he also points to a virtual social movement around the DSM, with emails and petitions circulating in the hundreds of thousands and giving the Democrats in Congress their first high-profile investigatory opportunity of the Bush presidency." He continues:
- The seeping of blogistan[?] into the pages of the Times of London with regard to its own scoops seems to me a bellwether of the kinds of changes that are being produced in our information environment by the blogging phenomenon. The gatekeepers at the New York Times and the Washington Post can no longer decide whether a leak is a story or a non-story. The public decides what a story is.
As Cole also notes, in contrast to the almost complete US media silence on the original memo, at least some mainstream media are paying attention to the new cabinet paper -- including the Washington Post, which even put it on page A1 yesterday!
From my reading of this article, by Walter Pincus, it looks as if the Post is playing down the importance of the new document -- Pincus's piece focuses a lot of attention on the "lack of post-war planning" angle, and downplays the much more contentious issues of Bush's duplicity and the likely illegality of the invasion. Also, while it gives due recognition to Smith of the Times, it neglects to mention the role of the Internet. Instead it merely says that the DSM "has been the subject of debate since the London Sunday Times first published it May 1." (Debate? Where? Not in the pages of the Post. Is Pincus trying to sneak in an "Officer Barbrady" ruse?) Pincus then shows how gun-shy the Post still is on this issue, when he writes: "Opponents of the war say [the memo] proved the Bush administration was determined to invade months before the president said he made that decision". Is it not now possible to state clearly and unambiguously that, if you accept them as genuine, the memo and now the briefing paper, taken together, make it unambiguously clear that the Bush administration was determined to invade months before the president said he made that decision? Especially as Pincus then acknowledges that "neither Bush nor Blair has publicly challenged the authenticity of the July 23 memo"?
Anyway, Cole argues that the page 1 treatment by the WP "is clearly in part a result of the enormous pressure the bloggers and the public have put on the Post on this issue. Indeed, it is probably the case that having "ombudsmen" at the papers of record, who discuss and explain editorial decisions, is itself a response to the interactivity of contemporary culture, exemplified by the internet." The New York Times also has a story on the new document by David Sanger (in today's paper), but it is "deeply buried" in the paper (don't have a page number yet) and is, according to a contributer to Cole's site (Stanford linguist Jean-Philippe Marcotte), "strikingly defensive" in tone. Now why would the New York Times be defensive on this issue?
posted by hdougie at 4:19 PM
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