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The Mainstream Media Is Still Your Master And Commander.

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item posted 19:37:32: 03-09-05 by kyle.

On the eve of the eve of Dan Rather's last nightly newscast -- the dragging of the .jpg of his bloated corpse through the blogosphere is scheduled for two pings after the hour -- a reminder that, before we declare the Mainstream Media once and for all Irrelevant, we might like to get ourselves off the Teet first. Ladies and gentlemen, bars and grills, Russell Crowe:

So Tuesday the story breaks that in 2001 Russell Crowe may or may not have been the target of an al Qaeda hit -- the FBI certainly seems to have thought so, anyway -- as part of a nefarious Osama plot to "destabilize the culture." ( !!!!Baldwin Buddy-Check, STAT!!!! ) Crowe tells the story himself in the March issue of GQ. And, of course, bad-a-bing it's all over the wires and all over the blogs. I mean, it's Russell-Frickin'-Crowe. Versus Osama-Frickin'-Bin-Laden. What's possibly not to love? I'll lay you a Franklin that says Matt and Trey are already on it.

Defamer's got the story (linking to news.com.au). Wonkette's got it (linking to MSNBC). In fact, a quick Technorati scan at 6:07 pm Texas time reveals:

And this, some 30 minutes later, concludes my search of the first 10 pages of Technorati "Russell Crowe + Al Qaeda" sites with at least 100 external links.

*Ahem.* Crowe tells the story himself in the March issue of GQ.

Yet even though every MSM article mentions the magazine by name -- they have to, it's the source -- of all blogs surveyed only Daniel W. Drezner (not listed above, 1367 links, 1,221 sources) actually links to GQ. And even he only points to an article-free splash page for GQ Australia. A little more Googling discovers the actual home on the web for GQ these days is men.style.com.

So what's the deal here? Thousands of us think the idea that al Qaeda wants to whack the Gladiator is a kick-ass story? And we're all talking about it and joking about it, and linking around it, but none of us really give a shit? Just to ask a hypothetical, did Russell Crowe in fact tell the story that the FBI thought he was the center of a terrorism plot? Does it even matter? Or, is it automatically news just because it sounds like news? (Sounds awfully MSM to me.)

[[[Ed. digress: As a matter of fact, Crowe did tell the story. It's a pretty good story, too -- and far better told by him than any in any MSM rehash. Yeah, he's Russell Crowe, and a lot of the time he comes off like a kind of a dick. But it's a really funny story. I mean, how would you react if 40 Men In Black showed up on your doorstep one morning and said, Osama Wants You. And then, say, a couple months later, it turns out they might have got their facts wrong, or heard something wrong, and they just sorta say, "Uh, we gotta go. Watch for ticking noises." If you ask me, Russell was pretty cool about it.]]]

More to the point, how did we decide Russell Crowe Osama Target is news? When was the GQ interview originally posted to men.style.com? Who can find out? Did anybody blog it before AP and Reuters? All right, so the two populations of bloggers and GQ'ers are probably a pretty Parton-esque Venn diagram.... But did anyone read the piece? Why didn't you say anything before Reuters beat you? Did the "news" require the hokey context that Reuters packaged it in before it became worth your while? We proudly boast, the mighty blogosphere drives the news cycle, smiting pretenders like Gannon and toppling pillars of the Old Way like Rather. So: Who's driving us?

The Dan got caught up in a big story and it got away from him. He got his ass busted for it, rightly so, and we're the ones that did it. Tonight he says goodbye to the nation. But somewhere in the historical record, shouldn't it be noted? The Dan at least went through the motions of checking his facts.

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