Name and The Killian Documents Controversy
Charles Johnson, the blogger behind Little Green Footballs, teamed up with Roger L. Simon to create PJ Media after his contribution to the Killian documents controversy investigation helped lead to the retraction of a 60 Minutes story critical of President George W. Bush's service in the Air National Guard from 1972 to 1973 and Dan Rather's resignation from CBS News. Johnson and Simon set out to replace the mainstream media with a network of citizen-journalists.
According to Simon, PJ Media was founded to take advantage of the "immediacy" unique to citizen journalism. He told the New York Sun, "Our affiliates will have a physical proximity, language and cultural knowledge" that traditional media lack. Responding to criticism of PJ Media and blogs in general, Glenn Reynolds, then an advisor to PJ Media, said, "...it is a tired cliche that because there won't be newspaper editors at PJM, somehow the product will be diminished. We do not need four of five layers of editors to screw this up like they have at the L.A. Times."
The name "Pajamas Media" is a reference to "Pajamahadeen," a portmanteau of pajamas and Mujahideen, meaning "bloggers who challenge and fact-check traditional media" (according to The American Dialect Society, which voted it the Most Creative Word of 2004.) The word suggests that bloggers have the goal of overthrowing the established media. The term was coined during the Killian documents controversy during the U.S. presidential election campaign of 2004, in which bloggers were derided by Jonathan Klein, a former CBS News executive vice-president for vigorously challenging the accuracy of a 60 Minutes story by CBS anchor Dan Rather. Klein said, "You couldn't have a starker contrast between the multiple layers of check and balances and a guy sitting in his living room in his pajamas writing." Bloggers who were pursuing the story such as Charles Johnson of Little Green Footballs, Power Line, and Jim Geraghty at National Review Online took this insult and turned it into a variety of humorous self-deprecating descriptions of their form of online activism. Andrew Sullivan noted in response to Klein's remarks, "Actually, I'm in sweatpants and a tanktop. But of course, it doesn't matter a jot what a fact-checker is wearing as long as his facts are correct. CBS's apparently aren't."
Famous quotes containing the words name and the, name and, documents and/or controversy:
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