The Clinton Playbook?

As Michelle Malkin notes in a gangbuster column today, the media is reacting to last week's blogswarm...

...by changing the subject, and by insulting the messenger.

I think there's more to it.

She sums up the responses:

• As I noted earlier, the Wall Street Journal's Bret Stephens rattled off exactly half the story. Stephens sniffed:

  it does not speak well of CNN that it apparently allowed itself to be stampeded by this Internet and talk-show crew...[the media have] other obligations, too, chief among them to show the good judgment and sense of proportion that distinguishes professional journalism from the enthusiasms and vendettas of amateurs...No doubt this point of view will get us described as part of the "mainstream media." But we'll take that as a compliment since we've long believed that these columns do in fact represent the American mainstream. We hope readers buy our newspaper because we make grown-up decisions about what is newsworthy, and what isn't.

  In other words, Stephens slimes the messenger - but he didn't give the audience the wherewithal to fairly judge the story by bothering to list all of Jordan's attacks on the military. So, Bret Stephens - what was that distinction between "amateurs" and "professional journalism?"
• The NYTimes, as Malkin notes, frames the story as a left vs. right issue, not telling the reader that Rony Abovitz, Rebbeca McKinnon, Senator Chris Dodd and Rep. Barney Frank, among others, are hardly right-wing tools.

The priests tire of our heresy. The swarm of mosquitos has drawn more blood than they figured it could, and they think it's time to start swatting.

Does any of this sound familiar?

Remember the Clinton playbook? When attacked, the Clinton Administration exercised the "Three Ds" - Deny, Delay, Destroy.

The mainstream media pieces on the subject - Stephens, Howard Kurtz, etc - have denied in effect that Eason Jordan did anything seriously wrong (by denying the public access to the evidence - his long history of such inflammatory outrages). The World Economic Forum denies us the chance to see for ourselves by sitting on the video.

CNN delays the investigation by shoving Jordan out of the way, sweeping the issue under the carpet. Davos' denial of the video delays the resolution of the story, and provides plausible deniability - eyewitnesses aside - to the notion that Jordan really, really meant anything untoward.

Then there's the third D, "Destroy". The media are laying the groundwork - the namecalling has begun:

• Stephens: bloggers are "amateurs"
• NYTimes: we're "Trophy hunters"
• A commenter listing himself under the name William Boykin, the Special Forces general who controversially invoked God in the counterterrorism discussion and who links to Antiwar.com in his comment on Jeff Jarvis' blog: " "Eason Jordan has just been tire-necklaced by a bloodthirsty group of utopian, bible-thumping knuckledraggers that believe themselves to be bloggers but are really just a streetgang. "
• Malkin's NYPost piece points us to Bertrand Pecquierie, director of the World Editors Forum, who calls us "sons of Senator McCarthy" - you know you've struck a nerve when the left brings out the "Mc" word.
• Also via Malkin, Steve Lovelady of the CJR: ""The salivating morons who make up the lynch mob prevail".

Malkin, in her NYPost article, refers to several of the above as deranged heavybreathers, who ironically believe the likes of Ed Morrissey, Bill Roggio and Hugh Hewitt are a "lynch mob". I think Malkin sells the media short. I think it's the opening salvo of something much bigger.

Expect the media to start digging into bloggers conservative bloggers' finances, associations and backgrounds, looking for the next Armstrong Williams or Jeff Guckert, trying to pick at the credibility the Blogswarm has accrued.

It's in the playbook.

Posted by Mitch at February 14, 2005 07:54 AM | TrackBack