Did I stutter?

| Gabriel |

Vain creature that I am, I was googling my Dixie Chicks stuff and it was a somewhat frustrating experience. Here are two of the references to it I found, out there on the wilds of the internet:

• Gabriel Rossman uses the Dixie Chicks incident of when they openly spoke out against Bush to show how synergy is creating corporate censorhip.
• A study titled “Who Killed the Travelin’ Soldier: Elites, Masses, and Blacklisting of Critical Speakers” done by Gabriel Rossman Dept of Sociology Princeton University supports the fact that neither “Free Republic or other right wing groups” organized boycotts were responsible for the dcx demise. It was the dcx themselves.

Aaaargggghhh!

If you haven’t read or don’t remember the article, the gist of it is that the Dixie Chicks blacklist was probably instigated by right-wing social movements and was definitely not instigated by big companies like Clear Channel. That is to say that both of these references to the paper get it completely back asswards, apparently so as to make it conform to their ideological priors. I can understand people thinking (incorrectly in my opinion) that it was big media’s fault or that right-wing social movements had nothing to do with it, but I really don’t see how you can use findings to the opposite effect as evidence for these positions. Nonetheless I’m sure it happens constantly (sometimes even in journals rather than, as in this case, random websites).