When a CNN correspondent writes you email
Over the weekend, Salon.com blogger Glenn Greenwald wrote about an interview conducted with presidential hopeful John McCain by CNN’s John King. After block quoting the interview at length, Greenwald chided King for his softball, complimentary questions he had used with McCain.
“If McCain’s actual Press Secretary (rather than one of his many de facto ones in the press corps) had conducted this ‘interview,’” Greenwald wrote, “how would it have been any different? Maybe they would have at least tried to pretend the questions were a little more probing, less adulating, just for the sake of appearances if not basic dignity.”
On Tuesday, an email arrived in Greenwald’s inbox written by King himself.
“I don’t read biased uninformed drivel so I’m a little late to the game,” King begins. “But a friend who understands how my business works and knows a little something about my 20 plus years in it sent me the link to your ramblings.”
The email then goes on to attack Greenwald’s journalist integrity, claiming that Greenwald “clearly [knows] very little about journalism.”
“That way,” the email concludes, “even on days that I don’t consider my best, or anywhere close, I can look myself in the mirror and know I tried to be fair and didn’t call into question someone’s credibility just for sport, or because I like seeing my name on a website or my face on TV.”
After verifying that the email did in fact come from King, Greenwald posted it in its entirety on his blog.
“Most of this speaks for itself, but it’s worth noting how often journalists’ responses to criticisms contain so many of the same elements which King’s email contains,” Greenwald responded. “They always want you to know that they never read what you write and that you’re an Unserious, biased, partisan amateur (without any recognition of the glaring contradiction between those two claims).”
This exchange is indicative of the tensions between bloggers and old media journalists. I’ve seen many instances when journalists have written bloggers to inform them How The Game Is Really Played.
This is not to say those journalists are Get-Off-My-Lawn remnants from a pre-internet area — often they can make valid points. I remember one instance when I criticized a blogger for confusing various legal terms when he wrote about a specific legal case, and his basic response was that he didn’t adhere to rules “tethered to the conventions of the dying newspaper medium.”
I still think that bloggers can learn a lot of from old journalism, but at the same time King’s overall tone and dismissive quality really reads like a grown man throwing a tantrum. It was quite obvious that he didn’t even bother to proofread the email before sending it off in an angry fury — something that makes me wonder if he gave the email much thought.
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2. How to measure a blogger’s influence
3. Howard Kurtz’s slanted media coverage
