Jay Rosen’s Questions

He has a couple about the Eason Jordan “kerfuffle:”

Overlooking the larger scene, Michael Barone of US News writes: “The focus of hatred in the right blogosphere is not Kerry or the Democrats but what these bloggers call Mainstream Media, or MSM. They argue, correctly in my view, that the New York Times, CBS News, and others distorted the news in an attempt to defeat Bush in 2004.”

Barone, a friend to the right blogosphere, is correct– and he’s being candid. The focus of hatred in the right blogosphere is the Mainstream Media. (For the Left it’s Bush, he says.) I want to know what the right blogosphere says back. Not to me, although that’s fine too, but to Michael Barone. Is he right?

I don’t know how to answer that question (though I agree with his diagnosis of the MSM from the perspective of the “right blogosphere”), because it’s a complex one (in the literal sense of the phrase). I don’t consider myself part of the “right blogosphere.” I doubt if Glenn Reynolds does either. Until we get past this simplistic need to label, I’m not sure that we’ll make much progress in having a dialogue (which leads to his next question):

In an effort to go dialogic, I asked Will Collier of Vodka Pundit (who got into it with Steve Lovelady of CJR Daily) a question that I hope is both pointed and open ended: Is the point to have a dialogue with the MSM or help cause its destruction? (Or is there a third and fourth alternative we should be discussing?) This is something the blogging world should take a moment for and reflect upon.

There’s at least a third (and probably a fourth and fifth, and…). The points are to get the MSM to 1) recognize that it has a problem with political bias; 2) to recognize that this bias tilts politically to whatever is meant by the “left” to those who accuse some of the blogosphere of being on the “right;” and 3) to come up with some means of addressing this issue, and some means of bringing accountability to those who spin the news in a certain direction while expressing outrage that their coverage is characterized as anything other than “objective.”

Howzat for an alternative, Mr. Rosen?