Fred Barnes has an excellent item over at the Campaign Standard on the herd mentality that has taken over the mainstream press as they rush to cover the story they’ve ignored for months–things are getting better in Iraq:
I think it was that great Democratic wit Gene McCarthy who described journalists and reporters as blackbirds on a telephone wire. When one flies to the telephone wire across the street, they all do. There’s also a non-bird name for this phenomenon. It’s called herd journalism. And just this week we’ve seen it pop up in stories about the pacification of Baghdad, crushing of Al Qaeda in Iraq, and almost complete end of the Sunni-Shia civil war. Taken together, these stories amount to a consensus that the surge of additional American troops and the counterinsurgency strategy adopted by General David Petraeus has worked – and worked brilliantly.
Go read the whole thing. Also at the Campaign Standard, Continetti notes the absurdity of Kos’s Newsweek bio: “Moulitsas, a Newsweek contributor, is the publisher of dailykos.com, a progressive Web site that generally supports Democratic candidates.” Continetti:
“Generally supports” Democrats? Now there’s an understatement. I suppose it’s technically accurate, as Kos does go after the occasional Democrat who believes the other side may have an idea worth contemplating on the merits. But maybe it would be more accurate for Newsweek to say that the Daily Kos is a website that “supports whoever really, really hates George W. Bush.”
