Moron o' the week
This post has been updated
There's been a lot of competition, but this week's winner is Columbia Journalism Review's Paul McLeary who came up with this thoughtful, incisive bit of analysis on the dustup over The New Republic's "Baghdad Diarist."
How dare a college grad and engaged citizen volunteer to join the Army to fight for his country! (Which is something that most of the brave souls who inhabit the milblog community prefers to leave to others.) While there are some very legitimate questions about what Beauchamp wrote, nothing, it's worthy of note, has been proved false yet. But that hasn't stopped the sharp knives of a slew of bloggers from coming out.
That's akin to saying that all of the blawgers (law bloggers) aren't lawyers. Milbloggers are, by definition people who have served in the military and fought for our country.
McLeary also might want to reconsider his staunch support of TNR -- because they haven't proved that anything Beauchamp says happened actually happened.
UPDATE
I originally wrote this post two days ago, but it got stuck in "draft" mode and I didn't notice it until Tuesday morning. Since then, McLeary has been peppering apologies around the blogosphere to various Milbloggers.
I was careless in my choice of wording when I wrote the piece. What I meant was the whole community of blogs that have sprung up in the same universe as milblogs -- Hugh Hewitt, etc., who act tough about the war, but have never served, and have never left the comforts of their air-conditioned offices to see what might be going on in Iraq or Afghanistan.
I had to take a logic class in college -- apparently they don't offer them at Columbia.
McLeary and his ilk would do well to study up, starting with the first one on the list: ad hominem.
An Ad Hominem is a general category of fallacies in which a claim or argument is rejected on the basis of some irrelevant fact about the author of or the person presenting the claim or argument. Typically, this fallacy involves two steps. First, an attack against the character of person making the claim, her circumstances, or her actions is made (or the character, circumstances, or actions of the person reporting the claim). Second, this attack is taken to be evidence against the claim or argument the person in question is making (or presenting).
I'm thinking it's long past time to start decrying the state of journalism education in this country.
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You mean there is journalism education? Amazing
I use the term loosely. For the record, I'm coming to the conclusion that journalism would be better off as a craft if we got rid of the universities and went back to an apprenticeship system. I think those who go into the profession with an idealistic agenda would see the job as less glamorous if all that was required was a high school diploma.
I suspect it doesn't matter much. The public believes two to one that journalists are biased. There are other sources of news and analysis. The traditional media are dying - I suspect partially from self inflicted wounds.
So far the mainstream media's response has been a redoubling of their efforts to be as unfair and unbalanced as possible. It's not selling more papers or growing the TV audience.
The liberals carp about FOX, but exlude Brit Hume and they are not a very serious bunch. I imagine a network news show that played it straight - i.e. really fair and balanced and informative reporting of all the facts would quickly wipe the other two networks out. Unfortunately, they are all entertainment. Luckily, the audience that watches and believes them is dying.