Joe Klein is a hack

Certainly, Joe Klein, Time's political columnist and glorified talking head is a hack, but his hackitude points to a larger issue about the power of blogs, the internet and distributed networks. Glen Greenwald takes apart Klein's embarrassingly lazy and dangerous work on the latest FISA legislation here.

The part that really grabbed my attention is where Klein, after being called on his factually incorrect and intellectually slovenly work, admits:

I have neither the time nor legal background to figure out who's right

But of course, many others, including Greenwald do have that background and the time to figure out the factual substance of the bill and do have the wherewithal to offer a reasoned opinion on the merits of said bill. The question, then, becomes why Time offers a platform to a man who admittedly cannot and will not do the work to understand the issue about which he writes. The dangerous part is that Time represents a far larger megaphone than the internet (right now) and that many many voters receive their information from that source. So when Klein smears House Democrats for supporting a bill that

"would require the surveillance of every foreign-terrorist target's calls to be approved by the FISA court" and thus "give terrorists the same legal protections as Americans"

many many voters take that as a fact, rather than an easily disproved falsehood.

UPDATE: The Chicago Tribune reprinted a large part of Klein's original article, even though he has distanced himself from the clear falsehoods in the article. Behold the power of the traditional media.