(Note to literalists: the Watched column presently contains only a smattering of 'warblogs' because the facilitator of the template-change--Dr. Menlo--is not very familiar with them, and will be adding more as they are sent to him. Also, this blog may contain areas of allusion, satire, subtext, context and possibly even a dash of the surreal: wannabe lit-crits beware.)
Control
[Watch this space for: Pentagon and Petroleum, The Media is only as Liberal as the Corporations Who Own Them, Wash Down With, and Recalcify]
WARBLOGGER WATCH
Wednesday, September 18, 2002
For the first time in recent memory, a Control-F executed on Internet commentator Andrew Sullivan's "Unfit to Print" vanity website comes up empty for the keyword "Raines." Al hamdou lilah, though his inability to register more than four consecutive posts without a lame swipe at the Times shows he's been thus far unable to disabuse himself of the patently ridiculous notion that Howell Raines has successfully foisted his personal prejudices upon the paper's entire newsroom and editorial office. A question Sullivan has yet to consider:
The vanity of even the worst journalists under God's sun is immeasurable. Fits are thrown when an editor excises the most superfluous of adjectives, as if the writer's every word is a contribution to humanity equivalent in scale to the internal combustion engine or the twelve-pack. Yet Sullivan expects his great ape constituency to believe that Raines has been able to dictate the line on every Iraq-themed piece the paper has ran without bylines being pulled, without staffers launching extracurricular websites expressing grievance, without outraged letters being sent to Romenesko for publication, and without walkouts, serially or en masse. How is this so?
Sullivan, an adoring fan of Rumsfeld and his curious brand of logic, doesn't ask the question of himself. Nor does he ask how Raines was able to seize control of the mammoth Times, a supertanker, as Max Sawicky put it, whose staff is reckoned by Hoover's to number 12,050, and steer it down the narrow channels of his own personal prejudices without incident. posted by Anonymous6:52 PM
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The Watchers
WBW: Keeping track of the war exhortations of the warbloggers.
