The right-wing blogosphere has gone berserk over the Associated Press advance story on U.S. President George W. Bush's speech tonight at Fort Bragg. That's because the report by Jennifer Loven hit the Web a couple of hours before the speech began.
Frothing all over keyboards can be found here, here, here, here and here. Oh and Canadian content drool here. And let's not forget Little Green Fascists.
Stand back ... here's a sample of their spittle, which focuses on Loven and not at all on parsing the speech.
Wow! Here I am, thinking that I need to actually watch the speech in order to live-blog it later on. This crack efficiency must be due to the layers of editorial control that the Exempt Media keeps claiming as their advantage over bloggers as journalists.
It's obvious that AP had an advance copy of Bush's text -- standard practice -- and Loven filed early so that some of the MSM could meet print deadlines and/or plan their coverage. That's why the White House releases advance copies. Duh! (From what I can see, Loven's first version dropped into the Star's foreign wire basket at 15:57 this afternoon.) But the right-whingers choose to ignore that and shoot the messenger instead.
Me, I am waiting for the the ConCons to find good things to say about Bush's (snicker) ''strategy going forward." It's going to be tough, especially as Americans wake up to the disaster that the attack on Iraq is.
So no wonder the right is trashing the mainstream media. It wouldn't do to point out how Emperor George has no clothes.
That said, it's instructive how the blogosphere is serving to expose MSM operations. Which is not a bad thing. Most people probably have no clue how much ''news'' is planned in advance.
Next election for example? When you read the report on your riding in the next day's paper, note that the ''news'' is only in the top few paragraphs. The rest -- what is known as ''zed-copy" -- was filed much earlier in the day by the reporters before they were dispatched to the various candidate headquarters. That ''zed-copy" contains all the background on who was in the running and the issues in the riding. It's basically filler so that the reporters can file quickly and the copy editors can move a lot of content at the last possible minute.
Yes, this will be on the exam.
UPPITY DATE: Oh wait. The reviews on Bush are starting to come in.
This from the big men on the blogging campus at Power Line:
Clear, confident, substantive. There was nothing in it that we and our readers didn't already know, but the message is one that many rarely hear. And the networks all carried it after all. That's good; President Bush nearly always does well when people see him, instead of seeing Democrats talking about him, as they will on the evening news.
The only thing I thought was odd was the unnatural quiet in the hall. It was like the audience at a Presidential debate, which has been cautioned not to express approval or disapproval. Only at the end, apparently, were the soldiers permitted to applaud.
The touch of emotion at the end was genuine and powerful. His appeal to Americans' pride and determination resonated, no doubt, with many who haven't spent much time understanding the strategic underpinnings of the conflict.
And those strategic underpinning would be ...?
Note that the review is all about style and not about substance. It's "Stay the course" time again.
UPPERMOST DATE: "His Best Speech Ever?"
Oh, gee. I kinda liked that Axis of Evil one better myself.
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