Sunday, September 06, 2009

Re: The New York Times   [Mark Hemingway]

A couple of takeaways from Van Jones resignation:

1) Remember Chas Freeman? This is actually the second time an Obama appointee has been sunk due to a protracted controversy over past statements and the NYT didn't write a single word about the controversy until after the fact. (Of course, Freeman had merely been nominated when he took himself out of the running for Director of National Intelligence — he wasn't actually in the administration, unlike Van Jones.)

2) While Glenn Beck and others in the conservative commentariat had been shining a light on Jones's radical past for a while, the revelations that finally sunk Jones were broken by Gateway Pundit and other bloggers. Not that long ago, the idea that a guy Googling in the basement would be capable of bringing down a White House staffer would have been a story in and of itself. I suppose some might think this sort of thing is old hat five years after Rathergate, but I also suspect that this aspect of the story will be largely ignored because it makes the MSM look very, very bad. Van Jones is an admitted former Communist in an administration that thinks "vetting" has something to do with universal health care for pets, and no one in the traditional media thought, "Hey, I wonder what we can learn if we just look this guy up on the Internet?"

09/06 02:48 PMShare