Media Hangover

Thumbs Down

Fred Barnes, executive editor of the Weekly Standard, is pretty conservative. And his forthcoming book, "Rebel-in-Chief: Inside the Bold and Controversial Presidency of George W. Bush," sounds like it would appeal to the right. But the Conservative Book Club has not only declined to offer the Barnes volume, it has also attacked the book.

"Rebel-in-Chief" is filled with "empty puffery," writes book club Editor-in-Chief Jeffrey Rubin. Barnes is too favorable toward "all those things that Bush does to drive traditional conservatives to despair" in a way that "call[s] into question his own understanding of conservatism. . . . Fred Barnes isn't doing the president -- or the country -- any favors by celebrating his worst political tendencies."

Barnes says he doesn't believe that an unsuccessful bid for his book by Regnery Publishing, owned by the book club's parent company, was a factor in the slam. "I guess they don't like Bush, or me, either," he says of the club. "But going out of the way to say 'don't read this book' is a bit unusual."

Explosive Story

In reporting last week that the FBI was making progress in identifying the origins of homemade bombs used against Americans in Iraq, CBS News agreed to withhold some details at the bureau's request.

Rome Hartman, executive producer of the "CBS Evening News," says CBS News President Sean McManus and correspondent Jim Stewart spoke with FBI officials who "made the case that putting in certain details might in their view jeopardize American lives. They felt very strongly about it."

During a "very spirited" internal debate, Hartman says, the FBI's case "felt to me, and to Sean and Jim in the end, to be a pretty persuasive argument. You ought to err on the side of discretion and caution." Stewart's report mentioned that CBS was withholding part of the story.

Blogging Manifestos

The lightning-quick online pundits known as bloggers are turning to a far older and slower technology: book publishing.

In his forthcoming "An Army of Davids," Instapundit's Glenn Reynolds casts bloggers as an increasingly influential check on the mainstream media: "Where before journalists and pundits could bloviate at leisure, offering illogical analysis or citing 'facts' that were in fact false, now the Sunday morning op-eds have already been dissected on Saturday night, within hours of their appearing on newspapers' Web sites." He also predicts a backlash from "Old Media guys" who resent the scrutiny.

Reynolds praises "flash media" -- bloggers who spontaneously organize around a sudden event -- and says that "even when Big Media snubs such coverage, bloggers let hundreds of thousands of people read about, see and sometimes even experience via video a story that they would otherwise miss."

Daily Kos founder Markos Moulitsas, who speaks regularly with Democratic leaders, will soon publish "Crashing the Gate," his indictment of "a progressive movement that is failing to keep up with the times," including "issue groups that don't realize it's no longer 1975 or even 1995" and "an incestuous relationship between the party committees and consultants that serve themselves more than our candidates."

Urging people to pre-order the book online, Moulitsas writes: "Help us debut on the best seller list. Wingers like [Ann] Coulter get an automatic berth on the best seller list thanks to TWO conservative book clubs (our first doesn't launch until March or so) and bulk purchases from organizations. We don't have those advantages. But we've got you guys."

Andrew Sullivan, one of the blogging pioneers, is finishing "The Conservative Soul: How We Lost It; How to Get It Back." He calls it "an attempt to grapple with the way in which American conservatism has shifted in recent years from an emphasis on small government, individual freedom and a 'leave-us-alone' coalition into a big-spending, big-government force for correcting human immorality and delivering us from foreign evil."