Context watch (special U.S. Senate edition, II). Reporting on A1 today about Tom Daschle's ultimatum on judicial nominations ("Democrats in the Senate Issue Threat to Block Court Nominees"), Sheryl Gay Stolberg doesn't seem to have room in memory for more than about two items of backstory.

Senate Democrats, turning up the heat in their long-simmering feud with President Bush over judicial nominations, vowed on Friday to block all new federal court appointments unless the White House promises to stop installing judges while Congress is in recess.

"We will be clear," the Democratic leader, Senator Tom Daschle of South Dakota, told his colleagues Friday morning in a pointed speech on the Senate floor. "We will continue to cooperate in the confirmation of federal judges, but only if the White House gives the assurance that it will no longer abuse the process."

In effect, the Democrats are retaliating against Mr. Bush for his recent decisions to bypass the confirmation process and place two nominees, Charles W. Pickering Sr. and William H. Pryor Jr., on the federal appellate bench while Congress was on vacation.

Well, yes, in effect that's true—if you're going for the narrowest possible effect.

Stolberg adopts a grave tone to write about the "increasingly hostile battle" over Bush judicial nominees, about an "impasse" that threatens to leave "dozens of federal judgeships ... vacant through this November's elections, and possibly longer." And her account of Republican complaints about Dem behavior in the struggle gives us the second and last bit of backstory that Stolberg allots:

Democrats have used filibusters to block six nominees, including Judge Pickering and Mr. Pryor, to the appeals court, the level just below the Supreme Court.

Republicans, who have been unable to muster the 60 votes they need to break the filibusters, complain that Democrats are also using other tactics to delay consideration of nominees. Last year, Republicans were so frustrated with what one aide called Democratic "foot-dragging" that they staged a 30-hour filibuster of their own: an all-night talk-a-thon on the Senate floor to denounce the Democrats for refusing to allow a straight yes-or-no vote on the nominations.

The Judiciary Committee chairman, Senator Orrin G. Hatch, Republican of Utah, reiterated that sentiment on Friday.

"The Democrats should stop playing delay games and give all of the nominees the simple up-or-down vote the Constitution requires," Mr. Hatch said. "It is the unprecedented filibusters by the Democrats that necessitated the recess appointments that the Democrats are now criticizing."

Far be it from me to suggest that old Orrin should come in for a good Nit Picklering—but, like they say on the law dramas, Stolberg opened the door.

Seriously: if you're going to quote Orrin Hatch on the subject of judiciary-nomination shenanigans, isn't at least a bit of context in order? Here are two things I know right off the top of my head, which I have to presume Stolberg also knows—what's more, and just for fun, I can support them with the very first two Google hits I get off the phrase "Orrin Hatch judicial nominee hypocrisy." First is the fact that Orrin Hatch was the author, back in the Clinton day, of the notorious revision of the old Senate "blue slip" rule on the blocking of judicial nominations, a revision that led to the Republicans having a field day keeping Bill Clinton's judicial nominees away from confirmation votes and off the bench. Then let's add a second fact, that it was members of Hatch's own staff who stole a whole raft of memos and strategy documents—related specifically to fighting Bush judicial nominations—from Democrats on his committee. (The linked post is old—from last November, well before the full scope and venality of the thieving had been elaborated—but like I said, just for fun ...)

I want to emphasize that this isn't a question of Nit Picklering. Both those little Hatch-related facts are crucial for understanding how we arrived at the current state of play on the Judiciary Committee, which the article seems so concerned about, and for understanding why Tom Daschle should be issuing ultimatums about judicial nominees. Why doesn't Ms. Stolberg think she owes it to her readers to provide them that necessary context?

posted by michael  5:32:17 PM  
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Context watch (special U.S. Senate edition). Reporting on A1 yesterday about Senate passage of the "Unborn Victims of Violence Act," Carl Hulse drops in a little nod to the electoral context:

Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, voted against the measure and was criticized by family members of crime victims on hand for the debate.

Both sides anticipate such social issues will loom large this fall in a polarized presidential election, with the opposing campaigns seeking to galvanize their core supporters by highlighting stark differences on social concerns.

"Senate Outlaws Injury to Fetus During a Crime"

Ah, but there's context and there's context.

How do you think those family members managed to be conveniently "on hand for the debate"? And not just on hand, but in a place where they could address criticism of John Kerry to members of the press? Mr. Hulse, a Certified Professional Journalist, doesn't seem to think that's an interesting question. Though I do get the impression that the second graf I quoted stands rather in place of an answer to that question, as it were preemptively: "social issues" like this will "loom large this fall"—looming apparently from out of nowhere, just like the victim families—and both sides are going to be trying to "highlight [their] stark differences," so why bother thinking about how this particular issue made its appearance? It's just Kerry's turn to get criticized this time, that's all.

Except, of course, that only one side controls the Senate, the venue for this little charade, and that one side has broadcast some pretty definite thoughts about pressing its advantage:

Republicans plan to use Congress to pull Sen. John F. Kerry and vulnerable Democrats into the cultural wars over gay rights, abortion and guns, envisioning a series of debates and votes that will highlight the candidates' positions on divisive issues, according to congressional aides and GOP officials. ...

Republicans openly welcome the discomfort that votes on issues such as gun control might cause Kerry, Edwards and other Democrats, now and later this year. "The Senate floor is full of bear traps," said Eric Ueland, deputy chief of staff to Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-Tenn.).

Jim VandeHei and Charles Babington, Washington Post 3/2/04 ("GOP Plans Votes to Put Democrats on the Spot")

What effort would it have cost Carl Hulse to have gestured toward the existence of an all-but-stated agenda operating here to use legislation as a platform for playing "gotcha!" with the Democratic nominee? Especially when it looks like that agenda is going to guide the course of Senate business throughout this session. Wouldn't he be serving his readers better by clarifying the political context, rather than veiling it behind that generic "both sides" crap?

posted by michael  4:42:41 PM  
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Jay Rosen is leading a discussion session at the upcoming BloggerCon, tentatively called "What Is Journalism? And What Can Weblogs Do About It?" In exemplary blogger fashion, he's posted a draft of a background essay at PressThink, along with a request that journabloggers help him formulate a list of twenty questions to prep the discussion and also to serve as items on the floor. Take a look, and if you do be sure to read the comments: the discussion there is shaping up to be pretty interesting.

I added a comment to Jay's post that I thought I'd share with the class here. It was prompted by a couple of other comment posts whose tendency was to treat "journalism" as a kind of static target, and to reify it in relation to blogging. "Genuine blogging 'journalism' happens when bloggers break their own news online," says Academy Girl, otherwise "blogging 'journalism' really amounts only to second-hand punditry, not journalism at all." On the other hand, Tony Matrullo says that "journalism is a largely conventionalized affair that has build-in resistance to experimenting with rhetoric, image, narrative, tone, etc.," and goes on to suggest that "blogs that aspire to be like journalism are less interesting than those that attempt to offer something less hackneyed."

From my perspective, "journalism" as such, as a categorical abstraction, simply doesn't exist. Journalism is a practice, or a set of practices, enabled by the creation of certain social technologies (hard technologies + social forms adapted to their use) for the distribution of information. As the social technologies that structure the practice of journalism change, so does journalism.

Which is what makes the emergence of public-affairs blogging so fascinating. My old teacher, Walter Ong (rhetoric and media theorist, important in his own right but probably remembered more as an associate of Marshall Macluhan—also a genuinely warm and inspiring man who I regret not having seen for some time before his passing last year) said something in a class ages ago that stuck with me: new media don't simply displace old media, Ong proposed, they reorganize them, they change the media ecology. (And, of course, organize themselves within that ecology.) The simple and provocative truth of the matter is that we don't know what "journalism" is in the blog era. We have a pretty good idea what mass-media journalism (print, broadcast) is, because it's been around for quite some time and is the product of a set of fairly stable social patterns. And we can make a good guess that the interoperation of old-media and new-media journalism will create new forms of journalistic practice, in the old as well as in the new location. [I think the real wild-card here is linking, as the defining technology of Web information distribution, and the ancillary technologies (Technorati, Blogdex, Memeorandum) that are being developed to, in effect, re-socialize linking (by creating means to measure the link network both qualitatively and quantitatively, and to feed that knowledge back into blogging).] As to what those might be, I can't claim to have any real clue. It's enough for me at the moment to just watch and learn, like everybody else who's doing this. The real measure of blogging as a journalistic practice, such as it is in this early moment, is that it's already set the concept of "journalism" in motion in a way that I imagine hasn't happened since at least the dawn of television news.

You know, there are times occasionally when I miss academic discussion. Makes me wish I were able to get up to BloggerCon.

posted by michael  2:28:55 PM  
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