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.11However, it still does not take away from the fact that Maher, whoseshow s premise was political criticism, was suddenly caught in a politicalcontroversy after he said the military was acting cowardly.Even thoughPolitically Incorrect was not cancelled until May of the following year, theNew York Times claimed it was that remark that led to the demise of theshow.12 That fact is interesting to note, considering the history of the word coward as a trigger for honor rituals.Whether Fleischer s comments, as White House spokesman, weremeant as an attack on free speech is a moot question in this debate.Whatwas apparent at the time is that journalists critical of the administration,such as Maureen Dowd, felt that their free speech was being threatenedbecause of their political views. Even as the White House preaches tol-erance toward Muslims and Sikhs, it is practicing intolerance, signalingthat anyone who challenges leaders of an embattled America is cynical,political and this the subtext? unpatriotic, wrote Dowd in a Septem-ber 30, 2001, editorial, Liberties; We Love the Liberties They Hate inthe New York Times.13 An item for future study might be whether thiswartime honor ethic has been a driving force for increased partisanism inrecent press trends.Another possible item for future study is whether thisheightened wartime honor ethic could factor in Elisabeth Noelle-Nueumann s spiral of silence communication theory.In this research, it was suggested that when personal honor inter-twined with politics and journalism the result was antagonistic and oftenviolent in the nineteenth century.The rise of Internet web logs, or blog-ging, as a journalistic trend, shares many characteristics to that of jour-nalists in the early nineteenth-century party press era.14 In a September23, 2004, editorial in the Fort Wayne News Sentinel, Leo Morris wrote,What we re seeing today is the return of that penny press.Putting up ablog site is so cheap and easy that just about anyone can do it.And mil-lions of people are doing it lawyers and journalists and ordinary peopleof all kinds.Those who dismiss them as angry partisans in pajamas areforgetting or don t even know the origins of the press in this country. The press belongs to the masses now in a way it didn t even in thebeginning.15Although it was an apt assessment by Morris, it is probably more correctto say that we are seeing a return of the party press era values, which over-158 Pistols, Politics and the Presslapped with the penny press era in the nineteenth-century.For example,as in the age of the party press, blogging promotes the kind of journal-ism, as Hazel Dicken-Garcia described in her book Journalistic Standardsin Nineteenth-Century America, in which an editor s personality domi-nated and people read the newspaper for his views. 16 Inevitably, the linebetween reporting the facts and partisan opinion is often blurred in blog-ging, as it was during the party press era.Similar to the nineteenth-cen-tury party press era, elements of personal honor and politics are seeminglymixed together in blog journalism with often antagonistic results thatsometimes stop only short of outright violence.Some media critics contend that blog journalism poses little threatto mainstream journalism because it lacks a business model.In a January16, 2005, New York Times op-ed piece, The Depressed Press, WilliamSafire wrote:1.On the challenge from bloggers: The platform print, TV, Internet,telepathy, whatever will change, but the public hunger for reliable infor-mation will grow.Blogs will compete with op-ed columns for views youcan use, and the best will morph out of the pajama game to deliver seri-ous analysis and fresh information, someday prospering with ads andsubscriptions.The prospect of profit will bring bloggers in from the main-stream to the mainstream center of comment and local news coverage.17But what if bloggers are politically funded in ways analogous to antebel-lum patronage?Similar to the party press era at the height of honor politics in Amer-ica, the modern Republican Party appeared in 2004 to have resumed apattern of awarding patronage to those journalists who best advanced itsviews.On February 18, 2005, Salon.com reported that journalist Jeff Gan-non, aka James D.Guckert, and other seemingly independent bloggerswere paid as part of a Republican strategy to discredit then DemocraticSenate Minority Leader Tom Daschle during a hotly contested 2004 racefor the senate against Republican John Thune.Salon.com reporter JoeConason wrote:Gannon went much further, however, in accusing reporters at the state smost important newspaper, the Sioux Falls Argus-Leader, of shilling forDaschle and, worse still, of colluding with the senator in the intimidationof his political adversaries.Such wild attacks were then played back on theThune-financed Web logs, which attracted substantial attention in theSenate race and influenced coverage in the South Dakota media.As theNational Journal explained in a post-election analysis, the blog assault opened a new and potentially powerful front in the war over public opin-Eight Conclusions 159ion. The National Journal and local journalists agreed that the blog cam-paign against Daschle was crucial. A top Argus-Leader editor conceded, I don t think there s any way to say [the blogs] didn t affect the paper scoverage.18In addition, it was reported that seemingly independent blog journalistssuch as University of South Dakota law student Jason Van Beek and JonLauck, an associate professor of history at South Dakota State University,were paid thousands of dollars to advance Thune s candidacy.For his part,Gannon was a paid employee of Talon News, which was shown to beclosely connected with GOPUSA, a Republican consulting group.19 Gan-non was then further legitimized by being regularly awarded White Housepress credentials until his connections were exposed.20There is evidence that this pattern of political patronage is spillingover into the mainstream media.In a January 16, 2005, New York Timeseditorial, columnist Frank Rich wrote:By my count, Jeff Gannon is now at least the sixth journalist (four ofwhom have been unmasked so far this year) to have been a propagandiston the payroll of either the Bush administration or a barely arms-lengthally like Talon News while simultaneously appearing in print or broadcastforums that purport to be real news.Of these six, two have been syndi-cated newspaper columnists paid by the Department of Health andHuman Services to promote the administration s marriage initiatives.The other four have played real newsmen on TV.Before Mr.Guckert andArmstrong Williams, the talking head paid $240,000 by the Departmentof Education, there were Karen Ryan and Alberto Garcia.21Is this propaganda though? Or are we seeing a cultural shift in press val-ues instigated by blog journalism that more closely mirrors the origins ofAmerican journalism? In response to criticism of journalistic bias, Gan-non told Howard Kurtz of the Washington Post, Call me partisan, fine,but don t let my colleagues [Washington Press corps] off the hook.They repartisan, too, but they don t admit it. 22Some supporters of blog journalism have suggested that the Internethas provided almost a spiritual rebirth of individualism in the Americanpress
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