When's media special re: caving to FreeRepublic fake emails&firing Arnett

[papau]

When's media special on the media caving to FreeRepublic fake emails-firing Peter Arnett, etc?

They could just run the excellent documentary/media criticism DVD, Weapons of Mass Deception, by longtime media critic Danny Schecter.

Schecter says an official at National Geographic told him that they were Freeped into firing Arnett. "What was called the 'FOX Effect' drove all the TV coverage to the right. No network wanted to be accused of being unpatriotic...Veteran correspondent Peter Arnett was targeted by FOX news for his decision to say on Iraqi TV, what he was already saying on MSNBC.....Schecter: ...you didn't go on Iraqi TV to say, "I support Saddam Hussein" did you? Uh, you didn't endorse one side or the other...

Arnett: I didn't endorse one side or the other, it was part of the hysteria that was part of this war, there's a degree of hysteria about every war that America participates in... and this was part of the hyterical reaction and I was basically swept up in that incredible explosion of anger, I think there were 157 cartoons of me in the newspapers the next day. Some of them with me in bed with Saddam Hussein, management called up and said, "Look the pressure is too great, we've had thousands of emails and calls, and it's time, we have to drop you."

Schecter DVD "..What I've learned that has gone unreported until now is that those emails were not from the public at large, but part of an orchestrated campaign by Free republic, a right wing online network. "We were Freeped." an official at National Geographic told me. Explaining that 20,000 emails calling Arnett a traitor, bombarded their executives, who then panicked, and discharged him. The Freepers boasted of their success.

Here is a coxandforkum


and two from cagle at Slate/MSN



So the question is once again about media ethics/control by the right wing - Do these right wing attacks just give them the excuse for doing what they want to do anyway?

Why do the current media write ups of the interenet continue to mention Free Republic as if it was credible. If there is media ethics, would not at some point there be a discounting of anything on or from Free Republic? Instead we get Democratic Underground - if mentioned at all - called a far left site rather than a site for reasoned discussion that rejects assertion and demands sources.