OK, I'll admit it, I'm still sore at Michelle Malkin for not including a single word about Cuba in a column she wrote last week about how press freedoms are repressed in certain countries of the world.
But the more I read her blog, the more I am convinced that she is not only out of touch with events in Cuba, she is out of touch with reality — especially the reality of journalism.
Just look at her latest rant, in which she suggests — complete with a poll question for her like-minded readers — that the Associated Press, the New York Times and other mainstream media outlets are sympathizers, if not worse, with al-Qaida and other terrorists.
Not to skew the poll results, but the Associated (with terrorists) Press has a lot of explaining to do.
Sure, the mainstream media has not gotten the Iraq story all right. And perhaps, the situation is not as dire as the public has come to believe. The fog of war can be hell to slice through.
But there has been no greater error on Iraq than the Bush administration's presumption that the war would be a cakewalk and that the Iraqis would greet us with candy and flowers. We'll be paying for that miscalculation for years. Ironically, many in the MSM helped the administration sell that story before the war.
What is repugnant about Malkin's attacks on the MSM is her underlying sentiment that the reporters and editors on the Iraq story are anything less than patriotic Americans just trying to do their jobs — which means finding out the facts, understanding what is happening the best they can and then writing their stories, with the good, the bad and the ugly.
More dangerously, she also demonstrates a total lack of respect and reverence for the underlying constitutional freedoms that give the MSM, and her, the right to write what they write.
Malkin, it seems, would on her best days, muzzle the MSM because they tell stories she doesn't like or cast the U.S. in a bad light. And on her worst, she would give reporters and editors a one-way ticket to Guantanamo Bay for a first-hand experience with water-boarding.
Of course, this is the MSM from which Malkin, whose column is inexplicably published by newspapers across the country, makes what I presume is a good living. (Full disclosure: The newspaper I previously edited was a Malkin subscriber, and it was my decision.)
As my old boss Denny Herzog noted last month, that makes Malkin a hypocrite:
I don’t understand how someone can work all day long trying to undermine the very hand that feeds her. But Michelle Malkin, the Queen of Shrill, does just that. She spends a good deal of her time on her blog doing what the right-wing shouters all spend a good deal of their time doing: Trying to blame the mainstream media for all the ills of the world. And then in her case, she hawks her column to … the mainstream media, including The (Grand Junction, Colo.) Daily Sentinel.
Malkin has found a schtick, and she has used it make a good living. I don't begrudge her that, although I don't think there is enough money to wipe away from her the stench of hypocrisy.
Just don't call her a journalist.
She is not worthy.
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