"Blog-Gate" (the sequel)

Remember Corey Pein's disingenous little bit of revisionism in The Columbia Journalism Review that blamed the Memogate bloggers for acting on "flawed information"?

Well, guess who's pointing his finger at the blogosphere now in the Eason Jordan affair?

Rony Abovitz—the same blogger who first broke the story.

Hugh Hewitt–who's been at the center of both blog swarms—has the scoop:

Rony Abovitz now asks:  "Before Eason is stoned, are we sure that we are all without sin? Right wing bloggers: are you holding our leaders to the same standard of accountability that we are now holding Eason Jordan (see George W. Bush, reasons for invading Iraq)?"

I appreciate RA's candor and willingness to answer all posed questions—we wouldn't know of this story except for Rony's original post—but George Bush's Iraq policy has nothing to do with the issue today.  No one is about to "stone" Eason Jordan—he is catching hell for slandering the good men and women in uniform. That's all.  You can't blast heroes as killers and walk off the field to cocktail parties in Davos and pretend nothing happened. This isn't an ideological debate about whether it was wise to invade Iraq and whether 25 million Iraqis are better off today than they were two years ago, though they most certainly are. It is about whether a senior American news executive can slander the people who are fighting—and dying or being wounded—and do so without consequence. Don't try and raise the issue to one of "blogosphere ethics." It isn't that at all. It is about what Eason Jordan said and the refusal—thus far—of MSM to call him on it.  It is solely about MSM ethics, or lack thereof.

Hugh's dead right on this, of course. But he—and all of us—had better expect more of the same, especially if this who-am0ng-ye-shall-cast-the-first-stone nonsense is coming from bloggers themselves.

A comment added anonymously to my Eason Jordan post below may offer a clue about what's to come:

Is there a transcript of the discussion? Was this aired on C-span?

If you can verify the facts, it could be a big story. Until then, front paging this would be Ratheresque, don't you think?

The idea that we don't really have the facts, because we lack a transcript (though we'll have one in a few days), strikes me as more than a little naive. Not every conversation comes with a downloadable transcript attached. But a reasonable person can still, with some effort, reconstruct what was said.

Certainly the lack of a transcript of Larry Summers' remarks in a similar conference setting didn't keep The Boston Globe from turning them into a front-page story. Why should Eason Jordan be held to a different standard for comments at least as, if not more, controversial?

Henry Grunwald wrote: "Journalism can never be silent: that is its greatest virtue and its greatest fault. It must speak, and speak immediately, while the echoes of wonder, the claims of triumph and the signs of horror are still in the air."

And blogging—even more than journalism—can't wait.

UPDATE: Michelle Malkin helpfully points out the Howard Kurtz, media critic for The Washington Post, will be  doing an online Q&A tomorrow at noon EST. You can submit questions for him here. Mickey Kaus, meanwhile, offers some amusing comments here.