Charles Johnson In The WaPo
Charles Johnson, proprietor of Little Green Footballs, makes it into a story in the Washington Post this morning. They give him credit for exposing the Reuters photo fakery fiasco. (They don't mention My Pet Jawa's busting of the other photoshop, though).
The exposure of the doctored airstrike photo was a coup for Johnson and his four-year-old political blog, Little Green Footballs. Make that a second coup, of sorts.
In September 2004, not long after "60 Minutes II" seemed to offer damning revelations about President Bush's service in the Texas Air National Guard, Johnson was at the forefront of bloggers who raised questions about the CBS report. (Johnson used the Microsoft Word program to retype the memos used in the report and found that his computer could reproduce the same typefaces and line breaks that Dan Rather had said were produced by a manual typewriter in the mid-1970s.) The incident became a historic debacle for the network and contributed to Rather's retirement from the "CBS Evening News" anchor chair.
Little Green Football's "Reutersgate" and "Rathergate" scalps share a key characteristic: They stem from Johnson's skepticism of, if not outright hostility toward, the mainstream news media (or as some Little Green Football visitors like to refer to them when they post comments, "the lamestream media").
In Johnson's view, the news media haven't adequately sounded the alarm about threats to Western societies posed by radical Islamic groups — something he says he seeks to redress through his politically conservative blog.
"My main take is that political correctness has kept a lot of the hard truth from being spread by the mainstream media," says Johnson, 53, a professional musician in Los Angeles who spends most of his time maintaining his blog.
The article is really quite flattering to Johnson. The reporter does bring in a commenter from CAIR, one of Johnson's frequent targets. The charge is typical, that LGF is a "hate site", but the spokesman makes one absolute knee-slapper:
Not everyone, though, is a fan. Ibrahim Hooper, spokesman for the Council on American-Islamic Relations, a civil rights organization often vilified on Johnson's blog, calls Little Green Footballs "a vicious, anti-Muslim hate site . . . that has unfortunately become popular."
The irony, Hooper says, is that if the same kind of "hatred" that appears on LGF appeared on Muslim sites, it soon would be used by LGF's fans to justify their worldview.
Which, of course, any reader of LGF knows is deflection of the first order. LGF regularly documents vileness and hate coming from Islamists from all over the world. They don't need to justify their world view.
The extremists take care of that themselves. CAIR just tries to sweep all that from public view.
Blogosphere, Media | Gaius August 9, 2006
