Monday, June 20, 2005

Exactly.

This Mark Danner response to a Knight-Ridder letter really breaks it all down rather nicely. It is sickening, but not particularly surprising, that basically no editor at the major dailies has adopted this framework for investigating this story.

This point, for example, is extremely clear and does not seem to be that difficult to understand:


The Knight Ridder pieces bring up a larger issue. It is a source of some irony that one of the obstacles to gaining recognition for the Downing Street memo in the American press has been the largely unspoken notion among reporters and editors that the story the memo tells is "nothing new." I say irony because we see in this an odd and familiar narrative from our current world of "frozen scandal" -- so-called scandals, that is, in which we have revelation but not a true investigation or punishment: scandals we are forced to live with. A story is told the first time but hardly acknowledged (as with the Knight Ridder piece), largely because the broader story the government is telling drowns it out. When the story is later confirmed by official documents, in this case the Downing Street memorandum, the documents are largely dismissed because they contain "nothing new."


Once again I urge all bloggers in the BBA to familiarize themselves with the larger context of the Downing Street Disclosures and the resultant media coverage as described in this piece.

5 comments:

metafiz said...

is this apshort's blog? the a.p. short?

just know this:

"i SEE you!"

Anonymous said...

forgive the terse reply, my parents' computer is a POS.

good to hear from you metafiz - heard you had some knee problems. how you feeling?

metafiz said...
This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.
Unknown said...

Better - I had surgery, uh let's see, back on June 8. They had to take out the bursae (i think that's how it's spelled). It seems to be healing well. Though it's still a little swollen and weak. After being up and around for 4 or so hours, I'm pretty much done and have to go rest and ice it. The worst part is I was supposed to be in Mexico this week with church. Doing some construction work in a small village on the Yucatan Peninsula. Doctor would let me go (and, more importantly, neither would the wife). I had to be put on the DL for church softball too.

Unknown said...

Sorry I had to take your comment out, but the name of the little Ape is taboo on this site for privacy reasons.

Life with the monkeyworm is a lot of fun, though it has its ups and downs. We should be through town before too long, and we're thinking of moving back in the next six months or so.