Well, that was hideous. With the exception of Dan Kennedy, the sage media analysts of Greater Boston – – Callie Crosley, Joe Sciacca, and John Carroll — completely botched their analyses of the feud between Markos Moulitsas (of Daily Kos) and The New Republic’s blog The Plank, and compounded their ignorance with prejudiced arrogance.
There are two issues here. One is that Jerome Armstrong — Moulitsas’s co-author, founder of MyDD, and now consultant to possible Pres. candidate Mark Warner — has a dicey business history, to say the least. That is indeed distasteful.
However, TNR’s other allegation — that Armstrong somehow paid off Moulitsas to talk up Warner — has absolutely no basis in fact. Tonight Crosley and Sciacca cited TNR’s journalistic “credibility”, with Crosley even suggesting that TNR had a “checkbook entry”. There is no such checkbook entry. Crosley just made that up.
Sciacca sneered that blogs have no credibility, when in fact — as Kennedy pointed out — it was the “credible” TNR that posted a fake email to bolster its case.
This was rotten work by these three tonight. Credibility has to be earned, and regarding the “payola” issue, neither the New Republic nor the NYT’s “Opinionator” column have a leg to stand on.
I think Callie Crossley was making a hypothetical point. I thought the beat the press discussion was fine.