Rabid watchdog

Mon, 03 Jun 2002 21:06:00 +0000

CNN's Aaron Brown discovered he was the target of an organized campaign against him one morning in early May, when his Blackberry started vibrating with the fury of hundreds of e-mails. "It was like magic fingers at a cheap motel," he says.

He had run afoul of the online media critics at Media Whores Online, an anonymously run Web site whose writers and readers share a conviction that the mainstream media (aka "media whores") is dominated by a right-wing agenda, slavishly praising President Bush and viciously attacking all things related to Bill Clinton, Al Gore or Democrats in general. So MWO devotees, in turn, attack back.

The site's gimmick is to activate its readers, directing them to the latest offending "whore" to spam with e-mail arrows. And in its nearly three-year history, MWO's profile has steadily risen, meriting increasingly frequent television and newspaper citations. All by ruffling the feathers of those easily wounded egos in journalism.

Archive of grief

Tue, 23 Apr 2002 22:44:00 +0000

Many of the thousands of letters stockpiled in a small, sterile Washington office seek an answer to a fairly simple question: Will the federal government's Victim Compensation Fund cover them? Others come from angry citizens with their own bitter agendas, whether they think the fund is not paying enough ("Sometimes I think that if my daughter-in-law and granddaughters were to take advantage of what is being offered that it would be like compromising with the devil," wrote a woman whose son had worked for Cantor Fitzgerald in the World Trade Center) or that it shouldn't pay a dime ("The reality is that any one of these people could have been killed crossing the street that same day," wrote one).

The letters poured into the Department of Justice after the agency made a public announcement asking for responses to or suggestions about its plans to distribute the massive multibillion-dollar fund established last year by Congress to benefit the victims of the terrorist acts of Sept. 11 and their families. And among the pages is a seemingly endless amount of finger-pointing and recrimination. Some, following a campaign by Amnesty International, wrote to complain that domestic partners will not be covered by the fund, while one woman, identifying herself as the sister-in-law of a World Trade Center victim, was "outraged" at such a prospect and asked the fund to "show some respect for the American institution for legal marriage and for decent people with morals and strength of character."

Salon.com > Jennifer Liberto

Rabid watchdog

Archive of grief