Grade ‘Eff’ Media Fails Sheehan’s Test — BradBlog Tracks Activist’s Tiff With RawStory, Iconoclast

[Editor’s Note: The Lone Star Iconoclast is running this entry from The BRAD BLOG as a feature story in the interest of sharing with our readers a teachable moment. The moment illustrates the relationship among an anti-war activist, a blogger for an alternative Internet media outlet, and the blogger’s opinioned source. This piece’s author Brad Friedman finely captured the delicate tiff with an open mind and (perhaps more importantly) an open heart because in the end all the actors in this story are open to criticism from any side. If not, then why refer to this profession as the “free press?” Enjoy!]

LOS ANGELES, Calif. Cindy Sheehan, whose Army son was killed in the early days of the Iraq War, and who became well known during her controversial stand in protest outside of George W. Bush’s property in Crawford, Texas, in the summer of 2005, is taking her protests to Bush’s new tony suburban enclave in Dallas.

RAW STORY covered Sheehan’s plan to lead a “march on former President Bush’s new home in the well-to-do Dallas suburb of Preston Hollow” on Monday, June 8, in protest of what Dallas’ NBC affiliate quotes her as describing as “crimes against humanity.”

“We can’t allow George Bush’s crimes to be forgotten just because he is not in office anymore,” she told the NBC affiliate via e-mail, as reported in their story, which also quotes Bush’s new neighbors chiding protesters to “Go away… Go back! Leave us alone!”

In an apparent attempt to offer additional “balance” to his coverage of Sheehan’s new protests, RAW STORY’s Stephen C. Webster reports that Sheehan “was hit by the right for criticising [sic] the invasion of Iraq and, eventually, by the left for being a perpetual spotlight-seeker.”

Webster notes that he “would link to sources” backing up his claims of criticism from the left, “but that bit comes first-hand.” He recounts that he’d “spen[t] months covering Cindy’s activity for The Lone Star Iconoclast in Crawford,” and writes that he “understand[s] many of the various opinions expressed about this woman’s activism.” He then goes on to associate with his former Iconoclast colleague Nathan Diebenow who, he writes, “quite accurately summarized, her constant angling for the spotlight and failure to significantly modify her tactics,” which, Webster goes on to charge, “made Cindy into a ‘media bore’ (as opposed to the oft referenced ‘media whore’ insult so many on the right would hurl at her).”

To all of that, Sheehan replied in comments confirmed as her own to The BRAD BLOG today in a scathing rebuttal which begins: “Eff whoever wrote this article and Nathan Dibenow [sic] from the Lonestar Icnonoclast. [sic]”…

Sheehan, who, until recently had paid her own way to host a weekend progressive radio show on San Francisco’s Green960 (KKGN), called “Cindy Sheehan’s Soapbox” (which still continues via Internet podcast), goes on to blast the reporters from both outlets, responding sarcastically: “Yes, I am doing all this for attention, because obviously the wars are over and George Bush and Dick Cheney have been prosecuted and everything is happy crappy and I should just go home and suffer in silence.”

She continues by listing seven points, in all capital letters, underscoring her belief that protests against Bush and Cheney and President Obama need to continue; railing against the Iconoclast for capitalizing on her C