UPDATE-10/30/07-Please see Doc Weasel's comment below and the new information he's found about Bobby Calvan.
Who Is Bobby Calvan and Why Is He In Deep Shit?
I’d never heard of Bobby Calvan until a ruckus started on Hotair.com and continued on throughout the Blogosphere and it’s a tantalizing story.
For Bobby Calvan works for McClatchy newspapers, formerly Knight-Ridder. He is currently on assignment in Iraq but in his spare time, Calvan decided to create a Blog.
Calvan, as most of us Bloggers do, used his Blog to post personal vignettes and stories of his daily life in Iraq that he can’t submit for publication to his major publisher.
I’m sure that Calvan had no idea his post about his experience trying to get past an American soldier at the Green Zone checkpoint would cause such a fuss.
I’d read about the Calvan flap after Calvan had already pulled down his Blog due the outrage he caused. The stories I’d read about the anger his Blog post caused intrigued me.
Enter DocWeasel. From his Blog header, Doc Weasel looks like some kind of comic book aficionado but this Blogger was hot on the heels of Bobby Calvan.
As these things go, in due course some enterprising citizen journalist will manage to fine a cache of that which they would rather hide and HERE is Doc Weasel’s re-creation of Bobby Calvan’s infamous Blog post.
What’s even better than Calvan’s arrogant, simpering Blog post are the hundreds of comments that followed this little piece of shameless drivel. Below is one example of the many comments.
October 24th, 2007 at 8:44 pm
This is incredible. Every other week some member of the press is reporting on how unsafe the Green Zone is. Despite all the current security issues you find the sheer audacity to criticize those who entrusted with providing the security that does exist.
The men at those checkpoints serve long, difficult hours, doing a mostly thankless job. You seem so incredibly proud of yourself for being ignorant of the current restrictions and requirements, and beyond that you seem to desire approval for bullying those that protect you.
You sir are an embaressment. If Knight Ridder had any sense, they’d kick you to the curb.
Click into Weasel’s re-creation of Calvan’s Blog post. Read the nasty crap he wrote about an American soldier who Calvan wouldn’t be worthy of wiping his behind.
Oh, and in the interest of fair and balanced, a Defense of Bobby Calvan. As if there’s anything worth defending about this sanctimonious creep.
1 comment:
Thanks for the link.
I've exchanged a good number of emails back and forth with Mr. Calvan and he does seem like a decent person, he just screwed up and then blogged about it.
He's reposted his blog, he copy/pasted his own post from the the version I saved and reposted it (he had deleted his entire blog, so he had to go to my page to recreate his own post) and he's re-opened comments, plus he made a new post admitting he now realized his behavior was asinine and apologizing, so he deserves credit for that.
However, LGF has posted questions about the veracity of his reporting in Iraq and Dan Riehl has some evidence that seems to indicate Mr. Calvan padded his resume at the SacBee, so he's not immune to all criticism from here on out just because he apologized for the post in question.
I have some follow-up posts about this stuff on my blog, plus an unsolicited email defending Calvan from a fellow reporter from the SacBee and some of Calvan's emails.
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