David Neiwert has posted a quicky critique of the Liberto MWO article, voicing my own similar sentiments. I'll hopefully chime in later...

I have to chime in on Jennifer Liberto's not-very-good piece on Media Whores Online:



What I object to most of all is the utter lack of context to this piece. Liberto seems to be blithely unaware that the mass e-mail attack hardly originated with MWO. This strategem actually came into its own as a result of the ultra-conservative (and frankly neo-Patriot) Free Republic Web site. Ask anyone who dared write anything anti-conservative during the late 1990s what it was like to get "Freeped." The rabid MWO hordes clearly represent the flip side of this, but why shouldn't liberals be able to fire away with the same abandon and gusto as conservatives? And frankly, having sampled both sides, I think the MWO crowd on balance is more civilized, though probably only by degrees.

A noteworthy passage:

Of course, it's hard to take MWO seriously as a media watchdog, when it remains completely free of any accountability.

Actually, the main criteria for whether or not to take MWO seriously is whether or not they are right. And a lot of times, they catch these pundits and faux journalists with their pants down, and they do it very effectively.Liberto utterly fails to acknowledge this.



There's more.