Mahablog; The Natives Remain Restless

Having decorated their huts with Mark Whitaker's shrunken head, and having confined Michael Isikoff in a little cage so that the tribal children can poke him with sticks, the rightie tribe has moved on--to the Newspaper Guild and Editor & Publisher.

The Rectitudinous Righties are not worked up over anything published as news by the evil "MSM," however. A week ago Linda Foley, national president of The Newspaper Guild, made some comments at a National Conference for Media Reform that put her on the tribal hit list. At the conference in St. Louis, Foley said of U.S. forces in Iraq:

Journalists are not just being targeted verbally or politically. They are also being targeted for real in places like Iraq. And what outrages me as a representative of journalists is that there's not more outrage about the number and the brutality, and the cavalier nature of the U.S. military toward the killing of journalists in Iraq. I think it's just a scandal.

It's not just U.S. journalists either, by the way. They target and kill journalists from other countries, particularly Arab countries, at news services like Al Jazeera, for example. They actually target them and blow up their studios, with impunity. This is all part of the culture that it is OK to blame the individual journalists, and it just takes the heat off of these media conglomerates that are part of the problem.

Like it or not, Ms. Foley is not pulling these charges out of her butt. Jeanne d'Arc has documented incidents that look suspiciously like journalist targeting.