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Bloggers expose the conspiracy!
by blank at 05:32 PM on September 17, 2004
So, I read this article on the Washington Times web site and think “what a bunch assholes! Tearing up a 3 year-old girl’s sign like that.” What a crappy thing to do. I didn’t really get anything else out of it.
Then the story popped up on a blog I read. Onedwarf.com sees it as a typical situation around Democrats. They’re just violent people causing trouble and poor Phil Parlock and family are just the latest victims of violent union workers. Hell, even the union issued an apology for the incident. This seems like a logical conclusion since the author of the blog and his pregnant wife have been pushed around by union workers too.
Then there is the other side of the coin at Rising-Hegemon. Phil Parlock is a “serial Republican victim,” says the blog. This has happened two times before and so this story can’t be a coincidence. They even go as far as to say that this ripped sign incident was staged and use some family photo off the web to “prove” that the guy with the union shirt on was actually Phil’s son.
Then the comments string goes on and on into the hundreds with nasty words about how awful Phil is and that Social Services should take his children away. Yep, there’s no way left wingers are hateful, violent people. Phil must have set staged the incident.
It’s a blog, I know, fine. One dork on the web can have his opinion Just like one dwarf can.
Finally, I come across this article on the subject posted on a site called Truthout. It was linked by Google News, so I thought I’d get something with a little journalistic integrity. Ha! It basically regurgitated what Rising-Hegemon said and put a media scam angle on it.
The proof the article has is that Phil was involved in three such incidents, one for each of the last three presidential campaigns, and then reported the incidents to the same news media.
Let me get this straight, of all the political events Phil has attended in the last TWELVE years, the fact that something has happened to him three times and he reported the incidents to his local news media means he’s up to something. Sure …
It even goes as far as to suggest that Phil had something to do with a shooting at a local GOP headquarters because he was there:
“A gathering of Republicans at the local GOP headquarters got a nasty scare when someone fired a bullet at the building. About two dozen people were there to watch the Republican Convention in New York when a single shot hit the window.
Dee Delancy of WCHS news in Charleston reported on the incident, and interviewed several people who were there. One of them was Phil Parlock, who said, 'I think this is definitely, definitely an act that was by an extremist kind of thing.'
Parlock was there.”
There you go. He must be up to something.
The article the ends with an Author’s Note:
“The manner in which this story came to light is a lesson in modern journalism. The mainstream fellows simply reported the Parlock perspective, but it was an intrepid band of online newshounds - bloggers Rising Hegemon and Atrios, who picked up on the work of one Rezmutt, member of the forums at DemocraticUnderground.com - who pieced together the strange coincidences surrounding these Parlock incidents. Once upon a time, stories like this would get missed. The internet has created a whole new phenomenon. If the mainstream media wants to avoid being embarrassed, they might want to think about paying attention to this brave new world of investigative journalism.”
Blogs are the “brave new world of investigative journalism”? Has Mr. Pitt ever heard of credibility? Blogs have zero. They may contain different viewpoints or opinions on various topics, but being legitimate sources of investigative journalism … come on! You need more than an internet connection and Google to investigate. It sounds like too many bloggers have been watching too many episodes of the X Files.
comments (4)
I keep hearing about how this is the most important election in a generation and blah, blah, blah. Maybe that's why all these bloggers and others are so fired up about it. But to me, I can't see much changing in my everyday life one way or the other. So I kind of ignore all that stuff mostly. Unless it's amusing like the shenanigans in your post. Loved it.
by anna at September 17, 2004 6:55 PM
Real or staged... people are missing the point that he took his kids into a potentally dangerous situation. Someone with his past history would know what would happen. Quite a few people are being attacked on both sides, and so far the Right Wing has ignored all of them until it was one of their own, and that's hypocrisy.
The Washington Times also presented an entirely different account of the story from the original from the Herald-Dispatch (Where is his 21 year old son? This one involved a mob attacking them?).
I'd be the first to kick the shit out of anyone attacking a toddler... but there's something not right about this story. Not that I would EVER accuse Sun Myung Moon of passing off right wing propaganda or anything. Noooo.... :0)
by -=e=- at September 19, 2004 5:30 PM
Actually, the line between blogs and investigative journalism continues to be blurry. Note that Kevin Drum started as a journalist with a blog "on the side, and then was hired as a journalist/blogger by The Washington Monthly. People like Kos and Atrios are actually blogging/reporting *for a living* - "professional bloggers", if you will. The Conservative blogs were the ones who exposed the forged CBS letters: causing the network and Dan Rather to specifically credit to "online media" and "political websites" with breaking the story.
Of course, anyone can have a blog, like you say. No one will claim *all* weblogs are journalism. But a lot of the better-known ones are getting to be something close, so it's rather obdurate to automatically and immediately dismiss a source out-of-hand just because it happens to be a weblog.
Personally, I think this assclown *did* stage the whole thing - but I will grant you I haven't seen enough "journalistic quality" evidence to accept that as fact yet. But investigations have to start somewhere. I'm sure when the networks first heard about the question regarding the typography of the CBS memos, they might have dismissed it as "crackpot conspiracy theories." But here we are two weeks later - one of the major stories of the year, commented on by The President of the United States - and prompting an apology from a network news anchor.
by Charles at September 24, 2004 8:46 PM
Myself I am just baffled about the significance of the Swift Boat thing, Dan Rather's bogus memo, National Gaurd Service etc etc. Dude, there's a battle outisde raging! Why then do blogs and/or journalists or whatever continue to dwell on ancient history?
To me a better question is this: When a known terrorist personally beheads an innocent on the Web and dumps his still warm body in a nearby alley in a US-controlled city, why can't we find him? That is what is wrong: We have loads of technology but we don't know how to use it. Why doesn't every civilian in Iraq have an implanted tracking devise?
Sorry, I'll pipe down now.
by anna at September 25, 2004 8:45 AM