{"id":744,"date":"2010-01-25T12:18:54","date_gmt":"2010-01-25T20:18:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.artesianmedia.com\/blog\/2010\/01\/25\/the-new-york-times-take-on-charles-johnson-little-green-footballs\/"},"modified":"2010-01-25T12:18:54","modified_gmt":"2010-01-25T20:18:54","slug":"the-new-york-times-take-on-charles-johnson-little-green-footballs","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.artesianmedia.com\/blog\/the-new-york-times-take-on-charles-johnson-little-green-footballs\/","title":{"rendered":"The New York Times&#8217; Take on Charles Johnson &#038; Little Green Footballs"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>This story has been developing for some time, and has provided <a target=\"_blank\" href=\"http:\/\/www.huffingtonpost.com\/2009\/12\/01\/little-green-footballs-ch_n_375357.html\">the usual lefty suspects with quite a delicious schadenfreude chortle or two.<\/a> But now t<a target=\"_blank\" href=\"http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2010\/01\/24\/magazine\/24Footballs-t.html?pagewanted=4\">he New York Times has weighed in<\/a>, and the article makes it clear that<a target=\"_blank\" href=\"http:\/\/www.politicalbyline.com\/2009\/12\/01\/on-charles-johnson-retreat-from-the-right\/\"> something extraordinary is happening in the blogosphere.<\/a>&nbsp; If nothing else, the <a target=\"_blank\" href=\"http:\/\/www.politicalbyline.com\/2009\/12\/01\/on-charles-johnson-retreat-from-the-right\/\">sheer viciousness<\/a> &amp; <a target=\"_blank\" href=\"http:\/\/www.therudenews.com\/archives\/6779\">paranoia<\/a> that it&#8217;s engendered amongst the former supporters of the (formerly?) right-wing anti-jihadist blog <a target=\"_blank\" href=\"http:\/\/www.littlegreenfootballs.com\">Little Green Footballs<\/a>. <\/p>\n<p>To recap: Charles Johnson, the founder of the influential blog, announced last fall that he was &#8220;leaving&#8221; the right\/Republican movement.&nbsp; His reasons were that basically he could no longer swallow the lockstep doctrinaire cant that demanded <a target=\"_blank\" href=\"http:\/\/michellemalkin.com\/\">unswerving hatred of Obama<\/a>, support for Sarah Palin, denigration of minorities and anti-intellectualism.&nbsp; Man, just writing that sentence sounds so wrong &#8211; but perhaps it&#8217;s emblematic of how polarized our political dialogue has become, that anyone not defining themselves by what they are against more than they are &#8220;for&#8221; by necessity straddles the lines of division drawn by the most extreme in the political wings. <\/p>\n<p>Anyway &#8211; the point of this post is to call attention to a nice example of the somewhat rare MSM-created snark. Johnathan Dee, the NYT writer, mocks the inevitable screeching sure to result from the confluence of an article about Charles Johnson <a target=\"_blank\" href=\"http:\/\/www.loonwatch.com\/2009\/09\/the-blog-wars-charles-johnson-takes-on-robert-spencer-for-hanging-out-with-the-extremists\/\">(&#8220;race traitor! burn him!&#8221;)<\/a> done by the bete noire of the right, the New York Times: <\/p>\n<blockquote><p>But perhaps I am, as many suggested to me, just another liberal dupe. Perhaps I even fell for the pretense that Johnson lives in the modest home where I visited him, which bore none of the trappings his supposed sellout would suggest. The U.P.S. man who delivered packages to his door while I was there, and his truck, may have been hired for the day just to snow me; the decidedly un-Mata-Hari-like woman he introduced to me as his fianc\u00c3\u00a9e, who brought us water and fruit as we talked in his small home office, may have been a member of the Trilateral Commission. It would be just like a representative of the Mainstream Media to get caught believing his eyes like that.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Damn, that&#8217;s some fine stuff. <\/p>\n<p>The deeper message in the article though, is starting to touch on something interesting to New Media types like myself &#8211; that the &#8220;Link Economy&#8221; has grown to a size &amp; strength that it&#8217;s benefits and drawbacks are starting to become known &amp; predictable. Which is about the time that a workable business model starts to really emerge &#8211; when you can posit Action A will lead to Result B, then you have a predictable model. Which big advertisers can start using to attach those nice little wads of cash to.&nbsp; <\/p>\n<p>The larger effects of Johnson&#8217;s break with his former political cohorts (about which<a target=\"_blank\" href=\"http:\/\/www.politicalbyline.com\/2009\/12\/01\/on-charles-johnson-retreat-from-the-right\/\"> more than enoug<\/a>h has been written elsewhere, on both sides of the issue) may be that this is a starting point for independent journalists\/content producers to start defining a monetization model for the blogosphere and social media sites. <\/p>\n<div class=\"zemanta-pixie\"><img decoding=\"async\" class=\"zemanta-pixie-img lazyload\" alt=\"\" data-src=\"http:\/\/img.zemanta.com\/pixy.gif?x-id=38154550-2aad-8943-a10c-8163d05233e7\" src=\"data:image\/svg+xml;base64,PHN2ZyB3aWR0aD0iMSIgaGVpZ2h0PSIxIiB4bWxucz0iaHR0cDovL3d3dy53My5vcmcvMjAwMC9zdmciPjwvc3ZnPg==\" \/><\/div>\n<\/p>\n<p class=\"technorati-tags\"><a href=\"http:\/\/technorati.com\/tag\/Little%20Green%20Footballs\" rel=\"tag\">Little Green Footballs<\/a>, <a href=\"http:\/\/technorati.com\/tag\/New%20York%20Times\" rel=\"tag\">New York Times<\/a>, <a href=\"http:\/\/technorati.com\/tag\/Malkin\" rel=\"tag\">Malkin<\/a>, <a href=\"http:\/\/technorati.com\/tag\/Atlas%20Shrugs\" rel=\"tag\">Atlas Shrugs<\/a>, <a href=\"http:\/\/technorati.com\/tag\/traitor\" rel=\"tag\">traitor<\/a>, <a href=\"http:\/\/technorati.com\/tag\/screed\" rel=\"tag\">screed<\/a>, <a href=\"http:\/\/technorati.com\/tag\/rightwing\" rel=\"tag\">rightwing<\/a>, <a href=\"http:\/\/technorati.com\/tag\/blog\" rel=\"tag\">blog<\/a>, <a href=\"http:\/\/technorati.com\/tag\/blogger\" rel=\"tag\">blogger<\/a>, <a href=\"http:\/\/technorati.com\/tag\/blogging\" rel=\"tag\">blogging<\/a>, <a href=\"http:\/\/technorati.com\/tag\/sellout\" rel=\"tag\">sellout<\/a>, <a href=\"http:\/\/technorati.com\/tag\/paranoia\" rel=\"tag\">paranoia<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>This story has been developing for some time, and has provided the usual lefty suspects with quite a delicious schadenfreude chortle or two. But now the New York Times has weighed in, and the article makes it clear that something extraordinary is happening in the blogosphere.&nbsp; If nothing else, the sheer viciousness &amp; paranoia that [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","wds_primary_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[351,352,353,354],"class_list":["post-744","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","tag-new-media-strategery","tag-online-multimedia","tag-politix","tag-weblogs"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artesianmedia.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/744","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artesianmedia.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artesianmedia.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artesianmedia.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artesianmedia.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=744"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.artesianmedia.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/744\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artesianmedia.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=744"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artesianmedia.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=744"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artesianmedia.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=744"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}