Remember Jonathan Klein? He is the former CBS news executive who, during the Rather memo controversy, complained during an appearance on Fox News that "these bloggers have no checks and balances... You couldn't have a starker contrast between the multiple layers of checks and balances and a guy sitting in his living room in his pajamas writing."

(That, of course, was the quote that inspired the word, "pajamahadeen.")

The same guy who got picked to run CNN?

The same guy who... is promoting CNN's increased coverage of blogs?

Jon Klein, a former CBS News producer who jumped to an Internet venture before being tapped to run CNN a few months ago, says that there's no sense in ignoring the "blogosphere," which is why he has created a daily, four-minute segment on Inside Politics.


"Inside the Blog," which kicked off Feb. 14, is the first daily segment on cable or network TV dedicated to people whose reporting and opinions appear on the Web.

"We want to demystify blogging," Klein says. "We want to peel back all those layers and also do a reading of the blogs that our audience doesn't have the time to do."...

Schechner and Tatton "don't treat bloggers as some kind of freak show at all. They take them very seriously," Klein says. "Bloggers are as multi-layered as any other source of debate or dialogue, and it's a mistake to write them off as one thing or another.

"They are fertile ground for doing what good journalists do: find out who they are and what they are saying, and how accurate are the things that they're saying and how useful are the things that they provide."

Let's hear it for a guy who came around to the idea of blogs and now takes them seriously.

Reading Klein's newfound blog-enthusiasm made me recall this post:

From his comments before and after his "apology" — a thin gruel of legalistic weasel words that stretches the definition of that word — Rather has made clear he believes that those clad in pajamas and typing on computers are in no position to judge him. Our role, in his vision, is to passively imbibe his disinformative propaganda the way geese receive cornmeal to make fois grae. He sits behind his anchor desk, confident that his status is impenetrable and that any attack made by the Pajamahadeen against his position would be a useless gesture, no matter what technical errors we may have proved. He steadfastly believes that CBS television stations remain the ultimate persuasive power in the news universe, and he intends to use it.


But Rather should not be too proud of this technological agitprop dispersal system he's constructed. The power to hype a fake memo is insignificant compared to the power of the blogosphere.