TNR, The Boston Globe, dKOS and Eric Alterman- What the .....??!!

[chill_wind]

Huffpo has this editorial today by Eric Alterman concerning some extreme craziness erupting between The New Republic ("Old Media") and The Daily Kos site ("New Media")

Unfortunately, Alterman is so bogged down in analyzing the definition of "death threats" while alluding to the fact that an email under discussion in his piece was a forgery- without explaining further-- that his whole story seems so garbled and I'm at a loss to what his ultimate point really is.

I *think* he is attempting to shore up a defense of the liberal blogosphere, but I can only hope he will indeed get around one day to what he calls a more "central fact of the drama."

From: Of Death Threats and 'Death Threats'

(...)

For reasons I cannot fully explain, I became briefly obsessed on Friday afternoon with the Boston Globe's report of "death threats" against The New Republic's Jason Zengerle by members of the Kos community who did not like his reporting on Jerome Armstrong and Moulitsas Zúniga. The article, which was written by Globe intern, Michael M. Grynbaum, here, struck me as playing to all the clichés the mainstream media offers about the liberal blogosphere, but nowhere more than in the reporting of alleged "death threats" against Zengerle, which when I read it, I knew simply could not be true. (Why the article made no mention of what struck me as a central fact of the drama--Zengerle's employment of an accusatory e-mail that turned out to be a forgery--also piqued my curiosity/annoyance, but remains another story.)

Anyway, on Friday afternoon, I made a few calls and reached both Globe Washington bureau chief Peter Canellos and Jason Zengerle. (I could not reach the article's author, Grynbaum, who was not in the office, and does not have voicemail on the system.)

(...)

whole article:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/eric-alterman/of-death-threats-and-dea_b_24742.html
(bold-face mine)

And here is the Boston Globe story under discussion:

Bloggers battle old-school media for political clout
Online journals gaining greater influence, scrutiny

By Michael M. Grynbaum, Globe Correspondent | July 6, 2006

WASHINGTON -- When a writer for The New Republic, the 92-year-old doyen of elite Washington opinion journals, accused the nation's most prominent political blogger of using his online clout to hush up a potential scandal involving a former business partner, he knew there might be some backlash from the so-called ``new media."

But he didn't expect death threats."

the rest: http://www.boston.com/news/nation/washington/articles/2006/07/06/bloggers_battle_old_school_media_for_political_clout/

I ask myself if it's in fact a case that the email was a forgery? why the careless employment of that by TNR and the Globe is not the real story?

Will the liberal blogosphere (seemingly much disdained by the "old media" exerts) be seeing a retraction, a correction, a disclosure, an explanation from any of these involved "old/new media" parties?

Anybody?

[AX10]

1. kick

[Demit]

2. the "death threat" email is a different one from the forged email.

The forged one (regarding Kos' supposed strongarming of his fellow liberal bloggers) was supposedly forwarded to Zengerle by three people he left unnamed, which turned out to be one person, and the email was bogus to begin with--supposedly it was written by Steve Gilliard, except it wasn't. It's such a goofy convoluted story (you might be able to get a sense of it by accessing Gilliard's archives, he wrote about it at length) that for Alterman to try to present it would have taken away from his main point--the hysterical characterization of an obscene email as a death threat.

The full court press is on to delegitimize the liberal blogosphere. The Globe seems happy to comply.

[chill_wind]

4. Thanks for some added perspective.

And for confirming how convuluted (good word) this all seems. (thought it was just me, as I'm not a regular at KOS)

I'll read your link, and have found a couple more at CJR (Columbia Journalism Review) purporting to have some more background:

http://agonist.org/sean_paul_kelley/20060621/blast_from_the_past
http://stevegilliard.blogspot.com/2006/06/ethics-lecture-from-new-republic-is.html
http://www.firedoglake.com/2006/06/21/thanks/

re:
"The full court press is on to delegitimize the liberal blogosphere. The Globe seems happy to comply."

It certainly seems so. And while it's not new, it certainly seems to be intensifying. It goes without saying that we all have a very vital stake in fighting that effort...

[leveymg]

3. Has everyone forgotten the TNR scandal in '98 with Stephen Glass?

Glass was a 26-year-old junior editor at The New Republic who made up then very cutting-edge stories about computers hackers and other edgy characters. It came at a time that TNR was already in decline and had fired David Kelly, its editor. An on-line publication of Forbes discovered the scam. It was the middle of the end.

The beginning of the end for TNR was when it went to the Right, a direction taken by its guru, Marty Peretz, and its owners. The movie about the self-evisceration of TNR, "Shattered Glass" is on IFC right now.

I guess TNR, which during the Clinton years was advertises as "The in-flight magazine of AirForce-1" is trying to get its revenge against the on-line media that has replaced it.

[grasswire]

5. sounds like perhaps Rove is meddling?

A few well-placed bogus documents again?