Blogs The Famous Media Reads: John Harwood
February 28, 2006 at 1:43 pm
Now, the next installment in Extreme Mortman’s regular feature: a peek inside the blog-reading habits of our nation’s top reporters and media celebrities. John Harwood is national political editor for the Wall Street Journal. He writes the paper’s regular political column Washington Wire. And he’s a smart, big-time TV commentator, offering political analysis on television programs including Meet the Press and Washington Week with Gwen Ifil and National Journal.
And now, John Harwood — here’s what he tells Extreme Mortman he reads:
My favorite and most frequent destination is realclearpolitics.com, which has a great collection of current polling data and links to smart commentators. I like Marshall Wittmann’s blog, bullmoose.blogger.blogspot.com. I tend to visit blogs not at a set time but rather because I’ve heard of something especially there or I want to sample activist reaction to a specific political development. Those include redstate, instapundit, huffingtonpost and dailykos.
http://www.pressthenews.com said,
June 14, 2006 @ 6:35 pm
harwood may be a “big time” journalist..
if this means “reiterating Bush administration talking points,” then he is. because today, on msnbc’s countdown, that is exactly what he did.
aside from uttering several specific campaign slogans verbatim “stay the course” ( in lieu of “stay until we know the gov’t and its won securty forces can adequately quell the insurgency) etc, he also engaged in what would appear to be either craftily calculated logic on behalf of the adminstration or just flat out faultly reasoning. one of the two.
bush has “doubled down” on Iraq. (doubled down? he is trying to make it work. he believes we should stay. he hasnt doubled anything). “he is staking his presidency on it.”
WRONG.. this is spin to create an :”out:” for the administration. if Harwood realizes this, he is not a jouralist, but an admin’ spokesman. more likely, he doesn’t real.ize, this, which simply makes him, at least in this instance, a poor journalist, renowned or not.
the fact is, if we achieve democracy in Iraq. –which would be a good thing,” at a cost of thousands of american soldiers lives, at a cost of toppling a dangerous regime that was not any more affiliated with international terrorism than dozens of similar countries, at a cost of hundreds upon hundreds of billion of dollars that could have arguably been better spent in the war on terror, if we accomplish demcoracy in Iraq, this is hardly the crowning achievement that it has been made ot to be, costs and controversy aside. it is a good ting. that is all it is. it is one small piece to the international puzzle. and the international puzzle, in turn is only one piece of the bush presdiency.
harwod is spinning this, whether inadvertently or purposefully, (though most likely the former) as if the larger reality of the rest of the internatonal puzzle, and the rest of what America, american government process and policies here at home about, don’t exist. (on top of that, President Bush has done nothing but lose politically via Iraq for a few years now, so the cost of leaving politically is probably larger than staying. Iraq may succeed, whether we stay or leave. believes staying helps it,. A fair belief whether right or wrong. if it fails,he gets blamed anyway, if it succeeds, it will be spun as a sucess, particularly if Bush ignores critics and keeps our troops there, whether keeping troops there had anything to do with the insurgency finally ending, or not). This entire premise by Harwood is largely nothing but dutifully covered spin. its illogical, and there has been far too much illogical reasoning coming from so called “renowned”:”journalists. the past several years in America.