MICHELE AT A SMALL VICTORY blogs an open letter to Rachel Elbaum of MSNBC, whose puff-piece on antiwar websites got a brief mention here the other day. Excerpt:
In this article, you link to three anti-war sites and not one site with an opposing point of view. You interview two people who run anti-war sites but not one person who has a site that takes a pro-defense stance.
If this debate is playing out online, as your title suggests, you do not show it at all. The only reference you give to “pro-invasion” sites is to say, “There is a pro-invasion presence on the Net, but it is much smaller and exists mainly on message boards and in chat rooms..”
Had you attempted to do any research on this, rather than submit an obviously biased article, you could have come up with many “pro-invasion” sites. In fact, a quick search on Google would have landed you at sites like Andrew Sullivan or Bill Quick’s Daily Pundit.
Yeah, and then there’s yours truly. I get about as much traffic in a day as the ANSWER site she plugged gets in a week. Then there’s the matter that ANSWER itself is — according to non-warmonger David Corn of The Nation — a front group for the North Korea and Milosevic-supporting Worker’s World Party:
The party advocates socialist revolution and abolishing private property. It is a fan of Fidel Castro’s regime in Cuba, and it hails North Korean dictator Kim Jong-Il for preserving his country’s “socialist system,” which, according to the party’s newspaper, has kept North Korea “from falling under the sway of the transnational banks and corporations that dictate to most of the world.” The WWP has campaigned against the war-crimes trial of former Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic. A recent Workers World editorial declared, “Iraq has done absolutely nothing wrong.”
Officially, the organizer of the Washington demonstration was International ANSWER (Act Now to Stop War & End Racism). But ANSWER is run by WWP activists, to such an extent that it seems fair to dub it a WWP front. Several key ANSWER officials — including spokesperson Brian Becker — are WWP members. Many local offices for ANSWER’s protest were housed in WWP offices. Earlier this year, when ANSWER conducted a press briefing, at least five of the 13 speakers were WWP activists. They were each identified, though, in other ways, including as members of the International Action Center.
It seems a bit, er, unprofessional to blandly mention ANSWER as “an international coalition of organizations devoted to ending war and racism” without providing this sort of context. Does Elbaum know this stuff? (To coin a phrase, don’t these people use Google?) Or does she just consider it non-newsworthy?
And Kim Du Toit’s National Ammo Day site is getting over a million hits a week. Wonder when MSNBC will do a story on that?
UPDATE: Justin Raimondo emails:
How well-informed could this reporter be if she neglected to mention antiwar.com — which gets around 25,000 unique visitors a day? Instead she mentions some hippie out in Vermont that nobody ever heard of. Go figure. It’s not a sinister conspiracy: just plain old stupidity.
Hmm. You know, I think he’s right. And it’s not like you have to be a rocket scientist to think of that URL.