THE LAUNCH

A little live-blogging from Rockefeller Center….   The OSM bash been running for an hour and a half now, 65 floors up in the Rainbow Room cabaret haunt. (Nice chandelier...) I’m tucked away at a table right at the back. (I needed to find a quiet corner to file my Times column - finally sent it off just now.) At the moment John Podhoretz, David Corn, Belmont Club and Larry Kudlow are on-stage, talking politics and news-gathering. BC had a good line about blogging being "the revenge of the guy with the day-job". Corn, rightly, says we shouldn’t get carried away too soon; bloggers are still reacting to news stories, by and large, not creating them. "There’s still a lot to be learned about the process of gathering information from the old dinosaurs…" Podhoretz, a traditional media man to his fingertips, had some provocative thoughts about the authority invested in columnists: sometimes the people who get the star by-lines only got the job in the first place because they’d been passed over for some senior editorial post. Buggin’s turn, in other words.

JP also talked about his early days in journalism on the Washington Times. In those days Supreme Court decisions were distributed to papers via AP, meaning the agency's journalists could put their own spin on the raw data before it reached the public. Now Eugene Volokh and Co have a chance to have their say too.

Not much to report about the opening session, a fashionista debate about boiled down to which sites have the best dress sense. Very girlie, although we did get to hear the disembodied voice of Manolo, delivered down the line from an undisclosed location.

LATER: A rhetorical question or two from Podhoretz: what would have happened if the Tet offensive had happened today? What if there had been bloggers in Vietnam? At which David Corn immediately hit back by asking what would have happened if there’d been bloggers in El Salvador in 1981. Chairman Kudlow cannily intervened before matters went nuclear.

Judith Miller gave a keynote speech at lunch. Politely received. In the Q&A that followed, Jay Rosen registered his disapproval. I'm sure he'll post on it.

We now await the evening's cocktail gathering.

UPDATE: Atlas Shrugs, who turned out to be the life and soul of the party, has posted lots of pix - and a riposte to the ever-sour James Wolcott.

Comments

[Tom Grey - Liberty Dad]

Jay's busy writing a book; I hope he does post on it, though.

I like David Corn's fast rebuttal; and it does implie something true. But looking at SE Asia Killing Fields after the US left (got booted? by the media?), compared to Central America -- I think the peasants in Cen Am got a better deal, though many are likely upset it wasn't even better.

What did you think of Judith?
(I'm here because neo-neocon noted you...)