Not much time for writing today, so instead I'll offer an endorsement: this post by Mark Schmitt, at The Decembrist, stands out as the single most lucid, and farsighted, brief discussion of the Rovian strategy behind Social Security privatization that I've seen. It's about creating Republicans, and not just—or even primarily—by thrilling them with "ownership" of their own litte half-acre:

Now, there is another way that Social Security privatization could create Republicans, and I think this is actually closer to what's on the mind of the less utopian strategists. (That is, those not named "Gingrich" or "Kemp.") It's the negative: they believe Social Security creates Democrats, by fostering a positive sense of government, which in Texas is called "dependence." They don't care about the private accounts so much as eroding as much as possible of the guaranteed benefit. ...

This is related to what I believe is the Republican strategy to break any positive connection between citizens and government. ... The positive theory that [private] accounts will make people excited, entrepreneurial, wealth-accumulating owners, and thus Republicans, expresses one idea about human nature. The negative, anti-government theory embodies another: that people, unless desperate, will not rise up to demand what they don't have and have never known. Here it's useful to remember that Karl Rove's historical parallel is the 36 years of Republican dominance from the McKinley election in 1996 to Hoover's defeat. That was a brutal period in American economic life. Government offered nothing in the way of benefits for workers, minimal widows' pensions, no aid for children, monetary policies that were cruel to farmers and regulatory laissez-faire that was cruel to workers. And yet, year in and year out, people took it, without question. It was the natural order of things. Only the greatest economic collapse in our history forced change. People generally don't demand what they don't have.

Lest any of us forget that we are, indeed, in a period of out-and-out social warfare, or what the stakes are.

Mark wields a good pen (or keyboard), and he's sharp as a tack, obviously, with a strong historical sense as a bonus. If you haven't before this (I only came to The Decembrist recently myself), by all means check him out.

posted by michael  8:07:49 PM  
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Jeff Jarvis joins the Chicago 8. I can stop any time I want to. Really. I don't have to keep after each fresh idiocy that emerges when Jeff Jarvis writes about politics and the Democratic party; I just do it for the sport. Really. I'm gonna quit tomorrow—it'll be easy.

This is Round 3 of the most recent skirmish in Jeff's self-appointed, self-infatuated crusade of the center against the marauding hordes of the Deaniac Left, and it's wonderful how much deeper a hole he digs for himself with each post. (But if you think there's a bottom, remember Satan's words in Paradise Lost: "But in the lowest deep a lower deep/Still threatening to devour me opens wide" ...) We pick him up here, hectoring Oliver Willis (who seems for the time to have replaced Eric Alterman in Jarvis's affections) for daring to have written lucidly about why it doesn't pay anymore for Democrats to play the hands-across-the-aisle game with the Rove/DeLay GOP. Reader, be warned: contained in the blockquote below is a nugget of purest inanity, so refined, so alchemically perfect in its quality of self-annihilation, that men have gone mad from staring too long into its depths. Approach with composed mind, if you dare:

If you keep thinking that the other party is the enemy, you lose sight of the real enemy, an enemy I have seen first-hand. We have met the enemy, Oliver, and it's not us.

You see, Oliver, when I grew up in politics, we did fight our own party to make it better. Hell, we rioted in the streets of Chicago against our own party. I didn't do that (couldn't skip high school, you know), but I did demonstrate at a precocious age against the party's president, Lyndon Johnson, and we knocked him out. The Democratic party has a proud history of struggle within to improve itself. If you give that up, then you act not like a politician but a propagandist, selling only the party line that comes from above. What did your precious Howard Dean do in the election but criticize the party and try to make it over and take it over (and, indeed, he took it over)? He can criticize the party and I can't? Where's the logic there, Oliver? Where's the fairness? Where's the democracy in the Democratic Party, then?

(The real enemy, to gloss for those unfamiliar with Jarvis's style of paranoid self-dramatization, are all them Muslims out there trying to steal our Precious Bodily Fluids—whose 9/11 assault not only destroyed lives, but seems to have permanently damaged the part of Jeff Jarvis's brain devoted to political thinking.)

Jarvis seems to cherish the idea that he's the Jon Stewart of this exchange, when God help him he's the Tucker Carlson. (You're hurting the Democratic Party. Just stop. Please.) All I can make out from this is that it's bad, very bad, the worst thing really, for Democrats to attack other Democrats, at least when it's Jeff Jarvis being attacked: unless it's Jeff Jarvis doing the attacking, in which case it's the acme of self-sacrifice and a sacred fulfillment of civic duty. In struggling against Jeff Jarvis and Dems like him, Oliver Willis (following the trail of his spirit-guide Howard Dean) is betraying the "proud history" of Democratic struggle, er, somehow, which history is even now being reprised by Jeff Jarvis, who rioted on the streets of Chicago against a sitting Democratic president, except that he didn't. And is rioting now, in his own mind, on his own blog, against the Democratic candidate who didn't actually run for President. Where's the logic, indeed.

But step back from this for a moment, and contemplate the fact that Jeff Jarvis, an apologist for global colonial warfare, is here claiming the mantle of the anticolonialist, antiwar radicals of 1968. If that don't curdle the Dairy Mate right in your coffee, I don't know what will.

But no, I'm not hooked, really. See? I just quit. I'm quitting right ...now. Right now.

posted by michael  9:28:51 PM  
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South Dakota stealthblogging. I usually don't excerpt/link to stuff when I don't think I can add something of my own to the discussion, but—given the interest I've been taking lately in the right-wing misuses of political blogging—this is just too good to pass by. Over at Personal Democracy Forum, Jan Frel writes an excellent, comprehensive account of how the Thune campaign employed stealthbloggers to game the South Dakota media and gain a crucial advantage over Tom Daschle in a tight race. Here are the opening grafs, which hit every note right:

At the end of January, newly-elected South Dakota Senator John Thune briefed his colleagues at a closed-door GOP retreat in West Virginia about the importance of blogging in contemporary politics. Thune earned his bragging rights by defeating former Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle this past November, in a race where conservative bloggers played a small but important role. But the story that Thune has to tell isn't anything like earlier political blog successes such as the Dean for America campaign blog or DailyKos.

The blogging efforts on behalf of Thune's Senate campaign didn't cause greater civic participation or bring in piles of small donations. Instead nine bloggers -- two of whom were paid $35,000 by Thune's campaign -- formed an alliance that constantly attacked the election coverage of South Dakota's principal newspaper, the Sioux Falls Argus Leader. More specifically, their postings were not primarily aimed at dissuading the general public from trusting the Argus' coverage. Rather, the work of these bloggers was focused on getting into the heads of the three journalists at the Argus who were primarily responsible for covering the Daschle/Thune race: chief political reporter David Kranz, state editor Patrick Lalley, and executive editor Randell Beck.

Led by law student Jason van Beek and University of South Dakota history professor Jon Lauck, the Thune bloggers tormented and rattled the Argus staff for the duration of the 2004 election, clearly influencing the Argus' coverage. They also appear to have been a highly efficient vehicle for injecting classic no-fingerprints-attached opposition research on Daschle -- most of it tidbits that perhaps might never have made it into the old print media -- directly into the political bloodstream of South Dakota. What they did may turn out to be a "dark side of politics" model for campaign-blogger relations in 2005-06 -- made all the more telling by the fact that the Thune bloggers relied heavily on now-discredited Jeff Gannon/James Guckert of Talon News for many of their stories.

The piece is called "Daschle, Thune and the Blog-Storming of South Dakota," and the only criticism I have is that in this case the use of "blogstorm" is a bit misplaced; it's clear (and Frel in fact writes it this way) that the Thune tactic wasn't to use blogs to whip up a media storm, rather it was to turn them into a new, more coordinated instrument in the right's old "work the refs" gambit.

posted by michael  10:06:40 AM  
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If the fool would persist in his folly, he would become Jeff Jarvis. Not that I want to keep flogging this horse, but really—it's amazing to me that someone so apparently ineducable can manage to put together a passable English sentence (passable being about the highest mark Jarvis's prose can aim at), let alone acquire a reputation as some sort of thinker.

Jarvis follows up yesterday's Lefty-playa-hatin' with more of the same today. It's a sight to behold, the wounded Jarvisian ego in full shoring-up mode. There's been "a lot of interesting followup discussion" to his post, Jeff tells us: and proceeds to gloss "interesting," Limbaugh-style, as "I heart being dittoed." What follows, after Jeff manages to preen himself in an aside for having found a soulmate in new pal Bill Keller (that's a nice little reacharound club those two have got going), is a stringing-together of quotes from the BuzzMachine attaboy chorus, and it's a sorry lot: the first (a "card-carrying liberal," no less) informs us that the war in Iraq "is over as a political issue," that "the left lost that one," and in terms both of rhetoric and of attachment to reality it's all downhill from there. Passing through borderline illiteracy along the way (the commenter who talks about the "death nell" of the Democratic party, and "recinds" his offer of Republican membership to Jeff, hoping that Jarvis will stay and cure the Democracy of its manifold ills), we end up here, which Jeff introduces with a flourish, telling us he's "saved the best for last":

There's a lyric by an old hardline band that says "There's only two sides and a line that divides, if you stand in the middle you're not on my side." And that's pretty much the way the fringe on both sides of this political rock fight sees things. If you don't agree with them 100% then you are the enemy. Agreeing with them 90% is the same as disagreeing with them 100%. It's completely retarded, especially since most people, the ones who probably have the numbers and pull to make a change fall somewhere in the middle. Yet all we ever heard from is the fringe. It's almost as if taking about the things you agree with isn't interesting and not worth the coverage - the only thing work talking about is who you don't agree with. As if your enemies define you more than your friends. I think that's completely stupid. [Everything in here, by the way, sic.]

This level of intellectual and rhetorical sophistication being endorsed, indeed celebrated, by Jarvis as a follow-on to his own post of a day earlier excoriating Oliver Willis for "calling anyone with whom he disagrees, 'stupid.'" Way to hold the line on intellectual consistency there, Jeff.

Go read the whole thing, and realize that these are the supporters that Jarvis is crowing about. Imagine what affronts to reason and English usage await in the ones he can't bring himself to quote. I want to warn him, but I don't think it'll do any good: Jeff, when the Friends of Hugh start praising you for your reasonableness and insight, it's a sure bet they're just looking forward to indulging a bit of what Grover Norquist likes to call "bipartisanship."

posted by michael  5:47:08 PM  
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Political immaturity. Jeff Jarvis notices that he's been called a right winger over at dKos (actually, a "right-wing media gadfly"—and the diary in question exists mostly to excerpt James Wolcott's dead funny, dead-on takeout of the smarm-fest currently being conducted in Jarvis's correspondence with Bill Keller, but Jarvis knows better than to try to do a number on Wolcott, who'd eat him for breakfast), and it prompts Jeffy to get all dudgeony about "the obnoxious self-inflicted orthodoxy of some on the left" which is hurting, um, no not Jeff's tender feelings, but the Democratic party. (A prize of some sort, by the way, to whomever can make sense to me of the phrase "self-inflicted orthodoxy.") Jeff has discerned in us "cultists" a desire to force the Democrats into permanent, ineffectual opposition, if not extinction (funny, I thought that was the platform of the Rove/DeLay GOP)—you know how we just hate it when liberals win elections.

So why do these guys want to drum me out of their corps (or what they think is their corps)? What are my crimes of political incorrectness?

: I didn't support Howard Dean.
[blather]
: I didn't support Howard Dean.
[blather]
: I didn't support Howard Dean.

And for these sins, Kos calls me right-wing, Alterman calls me all kinds of things, and Oliver Willis rises to the rhetorical heights of calling me, as he calls anyone with whom he disagrees, "stupid."

Is this the left, the caring, human, open, inclusive, warm, huggy, humanisitic left? Or is this just its wackier, ruder wing of the party? I vote for the latter.

But this is how liberals treat our own if we don't agree with ever syllable certain folks proclaim or if we don't seethe and spit at the other side.

Because I have an optimistic view of human nature in spite of myself, I left a comment at BuzzMachine in the hope of educating Jeff about just how, er, stupid this is. And because I'm lazy, and have a need for attention, I'm posting the comment here.

We are in a state of political emergency in this country. Our discourse is being brutalized, and the space for ordinary democratic politics being shrunk. This is not the product of symmetrical assaults by "extremists" of both sides, regardless of what moderates like to fantasize. Mainstream discourse is being handed over in great chunks, and increasingly, to the Hewitts and Hindrockets and Hannitys and O'Reillys—to the brutalists of the right, and only to them. (Find me any left-wing "brutalist" offered a platform remotely comparable in size. For that matter, find me any prominent left-wing commenter who approaches the routine rhetorical brutality of a Hindrocket.)

These are the people for whom "liberals" like Jeff Jarvis are happy to provide cover. Jeff, I don't give a good goddamn who you say you vote for, or plan to vote for. [Jeff proclaims elsewhere his "reluctant" vote for John Kerry and his hearty desire to vote for Hillary in 2008.] The actual effect of your work is to embolden the right-wing shouters and ranters. You consistently skew in their direction, too consistently for it not to be noticed. And they are a threat. As loyal servants of the proto-fascist tendency that now controls the Republican party, and the machinery of American government, the Hewitts and Hindrockets and their ilk are doing everything they can to undermine the legacy of tolerant, liberal democracy that Americans have enjoyed for so long. They are doing everything they can to make honest dissent impossible, and you're standing by and applauding as they do it.

Don't agree with me? Fine. But understand that there are quite a lot of us, ordinary, unflamethrowing left-liberals, who are terrified of where this country is being taken. We see an encroaching fascism, we see the destruction of American ideals that we love, and we don't have the luxury of making the nice distinctions of allegiance you'd like us to make, Jeff. Whatever you do in the privacy of the voting booth, you've set yourself up to enable the anti-democracy right. You willingly make yourself a useful idiot, and it pisses us off—not because we're "searching for heretics" [in the words of one of Jeff's glad-handing attaboy commenters earlier in the thread], but because it's do or die this time and we need everybody we can get, and you're on the wrong side. You don't have to agree with that. But that you can't even begin to get it—that you think it's somehow all about a Howard Dean litmus test—that's just proof, if any were needed, of your dire political immaturity.

posted by michael  9:46:44 PM  
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Link exchange and interestingness in the blog space. Synchronicity's funny, idn't it? No sooner do I write a post referencing the power-law distribution in blogging, than Brad DeLong and Henry Farrell (at Crooked Timber) take note of the problem of blog spam at Technorati, and write in worried tones about its implications for what Brad calls the "Web-structure information commons." (Henry juxtaposes with Brad's discussion a note about the problem of "flogrolling," based on a report that has blogger Jason Kottke selling links.)

Here's Henry:

The underlying value of the blogosphere is that it is a system that more or less efficiently conveys the decisions of readers that a web page is worth viewing. It does so through links. As Rebecca Blood observed a couple of years ago, the best way for a blog to get attention or readership is to get links from other blogs - especially well known ones. Links are the currency of the blogosphere - and they’re valuable because they have real informational content - they tell us about the blogs, or posts, that another blogger considers to be worth reading.

This has led to the creation of a sort of informal economy of link exchange, with norms regarding due credit, reciprocity and so on. It’s by no means perfect, but it does a pretty good job in ensuring that good posts and good blogs get attention. Not a perfect job - network effects, path dependence, link cartels and so on all have a distorting impact - but, as stated, a pretty good job. ...

The problem is that the political economy of link exchange on which this rests may have some inherent fragilities. Links are valuable currency because they refer to the ‘interestingness’  ... of a specific post or blog. Interestingness is a subjective concept, of course, but the more people (especially people who share your tastes), that find a post or blog interesting, the more likely it is that you yourself will find it interesting. If the relationship between links and underlying interestingness is broken, than many of the advantages of the blogosphere as a means of sifting through views and highlighting the interesting ones will evaporate.

I see some very interesting theoretical questions lurking here, and though I'm neither an economist nor a statistician nor a network theorist, I've been thinking about these questions for a while now, so here goes.

I think there's a problem with Henry's term "interestingness" that somewhat vitiates his discussion. The problem is measured by the difference between "interestingness" and "relevance"—which is also, I think, a parallel difference between what Technorati does and what Google does.

The conceptual leap made by Google was to recognize, in the structure of the Web link (a marriage of resource-pointing behavior with keywordish description), an opportunity to analyze, across the information space, the existing association of resources with intelligence about them. That's an analysis of relevance: simplistically, the more pages associate a given resource with a given bit of description, the likelier it is that the resource is relevant to the bit of description, and vice versa.

To treat links as bloggers and blog-mapping tools like Technorati do, as an attentional currency—ideally, a measure of interestingness—follows a different conceptual model from Google's, though, even if both can be made subject to similar attacks meant to distort the information space. "Reciprocity" is the chief difference: the link, in the Google model, isn't reciprocal; it ends at the pointed-to resource. Where links are treated as currency, though, exchange—rather than pointing-to—is the fundamental gesture. "Interestingness" may or may not be part of the real-world impetus to any given link-exchange, but it's not part of the structure of the exchange. At best it's a social form that exerts pressure on the character of the exchange, that biases people within a given sphere (say, the political blogosphere) toward valuing "interestingness" highly among the whole set of motivations that produce a link exchange.

The notion that "the relationship between links and interestingness" might be in danger of breaking isn't persuasive to me, in other words, because I think the relationship was always-already broken as soon as links became currency. (More accurately, I don't think the relationship can have been broken, because it was never present in the structure of link exchange.) And while the blogosphere does, at least so far in the game, reliably indicate the pressure toward "interestingness" as a social aspect of link exchange, link exchange makes a wildly unreliable measure of interestingness within the blog space. (Assuming for the moment that such a thing could really be measured: but one does have a sense of the difference between an ideal map of information worth in the blog space and how that map is constructed in reality.) In fact, the power-law effect in social networks pretty much guarantees that, as it expands, the link structure of the blogosphere will become less and less reliable as an index of good/interesting stuff: necessarily, more and more such stuff is going to languish in the tail of the distribution. Flogrollers, in that sense, are already (as it were) behind the curve: they can't distort the picture more than the network effect already has, and will continue to.

Addendum: After I made a version of this point in a comment at Crooked Timber, Henry noted that he and Dan Drezner have done research to indicate that, at least for political blogging, the network effect produces not a power-law distribution but a (less drastically skewed) lognormal one. I haven't had time yet to read their paper, but I certainly will.

posted by michael  1:42:00 PM  
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Blogging and its discontents. Atrios has posted a rather, shall we say, intemperate email he received from blogger Ron (not fucking Roy) Brynaert, complaining at a lack of recognition within the blogosphere generally (and specifically at Eschaton) for his work on the "Jeff Gannon"/Talon News story. (I haven't taken the time to review Ron (not fucking Roy)'s blog to know just what that work is, and to what extent merited recognition is eluding it.)

i might still like your writing...but i am fucking going to continue to attack you fuckers for the unethical way you choose to operate...

you won't fucking link to me...no matter what...will you? ...

A lot of people are reading me now, Duncan (for the first time I'm using your name). You have one last fucking chance to realize that you are making a mistake by being a fucking elitist douchebag...and start giving links to smaller blogs like me...and responding to your emails...or I am going to blog about this. ...

YOU ELITIST BLOGGERS ARE HURTING OUR CAUSE BY BEING PETTY CIRCLE JERKERS!!!!!!!

Ron Brynaert (ron not fucking roy)

I can't imagine expressing myself this way, but I'll admit to a certain amount of fellow-feeling for Ron (not fucking Roy), as proprietor of a small—hell, tiny—blog that Atrios has never noticed, even when it's alerted him in polite emails to interesting things said about matters that he typically concerns himself with. But that's beside the point of this post, which is one (or an installment of one) I've been meaning to make for a while now.

Blogging, at least in the public-affairs space (but no doubt in most others), is beset with ego traps. All authorship is beset with ego traps, of course, but blogging may very well have created some new ones, or given a new twist to the old ones. Roy appears to be suffering from what I think of as Power Law Madness: a condition caused by the mismatch between one's expectation of a flat landscape of information choice and the reality of the power-law distribution in blogging.

It's a fair question whether attention is more unequally distributed in the blog space than in the print world—I'm guessing it is, given how much freer choice is (in the economic sense) on the Web: network theory forces the counterintuitive conclusion that power-law curves are steeper the more options there are to choose from, and the fewer impediments there are to making choices. Add to this the fact that HTTP itself, along with the secondary tools that have grown up around blogging, makes it possible for a blog author to know in almost real time how big an audience he has and what they're looking at.

I don't know how many times it's happened that I've made what I think of as a particularly cogent post, then sat back and watched the traffic not move, and wondered why the hell nobody was reading/linking this—never mind what I actually know about how attention moves on the Web. One of the reasons I took a hiatus last year was because I began to see that I was getting a little nuts about traffic: too much time monitoring my tracking database, too much emotional attachment to the state of the moving average of my daily hits. (Embarrassing as all this is to mention—especially given that my high average of traffic, just before I left off, was barely 150 page hits a day.) I'm a Zen practitioner, and it took me a while but it dawned on me that while with one hand I was working very patiently to defeat my ego, with the other I was constantly stoking it. The first thing I did, when I realized I wanted to start posting regularly again, was to shut off my tracking script and make myself promise not to turn it on again—if I'd had real strength of mind I'd have opted out of the Salon tracking as well, but that's so crippled in functionality that it almost doesn't make a difference.

Anyway, Ron (not fucking Roy), good luck to you. You may get yourself to a new readership plateau, now that Duncan's linked to you. (No such thing as bad publicity, after all.) Just don't let it make you crazy: readership, except as it leads to conversation, is only an imaginary reward anyway. Oh, and learn to use capital letters when you email.

posted by michael  5:19:16 PM  
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Moment of honesty. An unexpected bit of skeptical reporting today from Elisabeth Bumiller, on the occasion of Bush's speech in Brussels:

White House officials had promoted the speech as a major embrace of European unity, and had released excerpts on Sunday night suggesting that the president would extensively support the idea of the 25-member European Union as a partner rather as a rival to the United States.

But he did not devote more than a few sentences to those ideas, and cast his support for a new European unity in the context of his goal of advancing liberty.

"Bush Says Russia Must Make Good on Democracy"

Ah, but that bow in the direction of reality comes after the jump, 14 paragraphs (about halfway) in to a piece that begins by situating the speech in the approved faith-based manner:

The president's words opened his first trip across the Atlantic since his re-election and were part of a speech aimed at building a new relationship with Europe after the dispute over the American-led invasion of Iraq. Mr. Bush's 31-minute speech  ... declared that in a "new era of trans-Atlantic unity," the United States and Europe must work together ...

BushWorld, where you only have to say it to make it so.

It's nice, I guess, that Bumiller feels she can allow herself a moment of honesty—and interesting that she has no apparent sense of self-contradiction to be embarrassed by. Then again, honest reporting, in the practice of courtier journalists like Bumiller, isn't especially salient anyway: it's an incidental, a grace note, something to be sounded after one's debt to the official line of horseshit (Watershed Presidential Speech, in this installment) has been paid, a nod to the cognoscenti willing to persist through the report past the point where the rubes have broken off and taken themselves to the sports pages.

Speaking of incidentals, happily Lizzy Boo doesn't neglect this little moment of unadulterated Bushian weirdness:

In the evening, the president had a small dinner for his old nemesis, President Jacques Chirac of France, and appeared comfortable next to the man who had infuriated him by aggressively opposing the invasion of Iraq. But when a French reporter asked Mr. Bush if relations had improved enough for him to ask Mr. Chirac to his ranch, the president did not offer an invitation, and instead joked, "I'm looking for a good cowboy."

Looking for a good cowboy? Is Dear Leader in mourning over his lost mandate?

posted by michael  11:16:49 AM  
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Thuneblogging, revisited. Dotty Lynch, senior political editor of CBS News, actually gets it:

Some of the real reporters in the White House pressroom were apparently annoyed at Gannon's presence and his softball, partisan questions, but considered him only a minor irritant. One told me he thought of Gannon as a balance for the opinionated liberal questions of Hearst's Helen Thomas. But what Gannon was up to was not just writing opinion columns or using a different technique to get information. He was a player in Republican campaigns and his work in the South Dakota Senate race illustrates the role he played. It is also a classic example of how political operatives are using the brave new world of the Internet and the blogosphere. Gannon and Talon News appear to be mini-Drudge reports; a "news" source which partisans use to put out negative information, get the attention of the bloggers, talk radio and then the MSM in a way that mere press releases are unable to achieve.

And she follows with a very good summary of Gannon's extra-Talon use as a "dumping ground for opposition research" in the (successful) John Thune campaign against Tom Daschle, and the "symbiotic relationship between the campaign, the bloggers and 'reporter' Gannon," along with the likelihood that such stuff represents an implicit tie from Gannon to Karl Rove. Strong work, worth reading it all.

CBS has actually gotten it, as far as the Thune campaign goes, for a while now; witness David Paul Kuhn's report from early December on Thune's sub rosa employment of ostensibly independent bloggers Jon Lauck and Jason Van Beek as campaign operatives. There's an irony here: much of the notice Kuhn's story might have received on the left seems to have gotten swamped because (in a typical example of false equivalence) it also included a distorted account, never adequately corrected, about Atrios' employment with Media Matters. Follow that the next month with the ludicrous Berkman-sponsored flap over the Dean campaign's (overt, never not-disclosed) employment of Kos and Jerome Armstrong as consultants, and the Thune-blogger story appeared to have gotten lost. (The little ruckus Zephyr Teachout inspired was practically tailor-made for the purpose, wasn't it? And no, that's not an accusation. On the other hand, do a Google compare/contrast between, say, "thune" and "kos zephyr" on Jeff Jarvis's triumphalist site. One of these things is definitely not like the other.)

Double good on Dottie Lynch, then, for recording the Gannon angle that may both extend that story and give new life to the issue of blog misconduct in the Thune campaign. Conscious corruption of the blogosphere by the right-wing propaganda machine is possibly the most serious issue currently facing political bloggers. I don't think I'm being alarmist, envisioning a blog dystopia in which the blogstorm troopers come increasingly readily to hand for the purposes of crafting political smears, and shouting down dissent and independent thought in the institutional media. No, I don't think that codes of ethics or FEC intervention are necessarily what we need (or at all desirable, in the case of government intrusion); unfortunately, I've got nothing to offer against the encroaching dystopia except that old standby, eternal vigilance.

posted by michael  2:15:33 PM  
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Humpty Rick. Salon's Michelle Goldberg took a bullet for us all by subjecting herself to the winger orgy known as the Conservative Political Action Conference, and reports on it today. She winds up her piece discussing Rick "Santorum" Santorum's speech attempting "to unite the various [conservative] constituencies behind the anti-gay marriage amendment," and quotes a little gem of linguistic anarchy:

The assumption seemed to be that homosexuality would make a travesty of matrimony. Like a suburban block where undesirables insist on moving in, its worth would go down. "If we deconstruct marriage in society, if we say marriage is whatever you want it to be, then marriage loses its intrinsic value," he said.

Uh, Rick? Small point—if a thing depends for its value on opinion and social circumstance, then the value being ascribed to it doesn't inhere in the thing, and cannot be called "intrinsic." In fact, my friend, you have neatly described marriage as an institution possessing only extrinsic value, thus putting yourself much closer to "deconstruction" than you'd probably like to be. [Past that, I'm not going to touch Santorum's use of "deconstruct": I was an English Department rat at Yale in the mid-to-late '80s, and as a result was forced to explain deconstruction to all sorts of non-lit-theory friends, with only middling success. (Being a Marxist myself, and also being pretty disdainful of the cool-kid Comp Litters who would—literally—sit at Jacques Derrida's feet in seminar and laugh in all the appropriate places to show how au courant they were.) At this point the word is never going to be recovered, in popular usage, to its original meaning—a nice irony, if you look at it from the deconstructionist point of view.]

On the other hand, Rick, you're a conservative, and thus one of the Masters of the Universe, for whom it's only appropriate that words bend whatever way your mighty faith goddamn tells them to. Now that I think of it, in fact, I realize that I may have just committed treason in doubting you. 'Scuse me, I'm gonna go say a couple of Hail Dubyas and a God Bless America in penance.

posted by michael  11:08:33 AM  
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For my own reference, I want to excerpt a couple of extremely trenchant comments found today at dKos, in a discussion taking off from the AmericaBlog report that "Jeff Gannon" frequently had advance, inside knowledge of major stories not consistent with his lack of journalism experience or the position of Talon News in the media ecosphere—including four-hour advance knowledge of Bush's speech at the launch of the "shock and awe" campaign in Iraq. ("Gannon" is also said to have had advance information about the Rathergate scandal, which if it's true gives some heft to my suspicion that Rove engineered it.)

Here's what grannyhelen has to say:

I'm thinking more and more this is tied to Ketchum and the PR "subcontractors", probably through one of Bruce Eberle's companies that subcontracted work to GOPUSA.com/Talon.

This is seriously starting to sound like something a PR company would come up with - some type of "new media" blog news company that looks and feels like the pajama brigades, because they won't have the taint of Corporate Media attached to them. ...

It is reasonable to assume with Bruce Eberle's connections both to the GOP, the Bush administration and to GOPUSA.com that he may have suggested to someone who suggested to Ketchum that GOPUSA.com fit the bill. That would explain why Talon News just sprang up overnight, as it would take a professional to see that you need that extra layer to persuade people that they are getting "objective news". I doubt Bobby Eberle had that type of media savvy when he started this whole thing.

And, in a reply, Magorn extends the point:

It reminds me a Lot of the viral marketing techniques used by some of the edgier ad agencies. Essentially you pay someone to join a crowd, gain its trust and then start being a mouthpiece for the product they want to sell. You see it a lot in demographics with a strong sense of group identity like teen-agers or young urban hipster crowds....

And come to think of it that answers the most nagging question of the whole affair. What did the WH have to gain from this that justifies such an extraordinary risk? They already had Fuax news if they wanted partisan shilling, and they already had folks like Les Kinsolving if they wanted a friendly face in the briefing room.

Gannon was a plant alright but one aimed not at the American people but other reporters. The simple fact is that reporters really do have a pack mentality, they live in constant fear that someone is chasing down a big story and they will get scooped. Play on that fear a little and you can manipulate the press into covering all sorts of things while overlooking others.

So, you plant Gannon in the WH press corps; give him a few BIG scoops to bolster his credibility with the other reporters, and Bam he's in a great position to whisper in ears around the Press Room Coffee Pot, and start media frenzy's (or cool them off)

To which I add: unravel the PR nexus, because that's where the big story is. The Rove White House has made PR-style disinformation tactics not just an adjunct to governing but a substitute for it—propaganda replacing policy. There've been hints and rumblings of this since we first heard about the Mayberry Machiavellis. Search out the details of Rove's PR operation, and you're bound to find illegality and corruption enough to bring this administration to its knees.

posted by michael  11:40:12 AM  
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MacKinnon's hypocrisy. Triumphablogger Rebecca MacKinnon, in a post I should have noticed earlier, has "final thoughts" (wonderful, how we keep being told we can all pack up and go home now) on the Eason Jordan affair. They're really swell, too.

Of course the U.S. military is NOT out to get journalists. Nor is "the media" out to get the military. But have individual soldiers at times exercised bad judgment that's worth looking into? Perhaps so, though we don't know for sure due to lack of information. All we have is some claims by some people. Have some journalists gotten carried away by anti-military biases and agendas? Absolutely. The point is, there are clearly some real tensions and disagreements about what's been taking place on the ground in Iraq - and why. As a member of the audience during the now-infamous panel, one thing was very clear to me: bad feeling between U.S. servicepeople and journalists in Iraq is coloring news coverage. No matter where you stand on the war or anything else, you have to recognize that nobody is served by letting this bad feeling fester, supported by much rumor and few facts.

I hope that moving forward, people will have the courage to bring discussions about military-press tensions to the fore, not sweep them under the rug.

As thin ex-post rationalizations go, this one—while it ain't "It was always about Iraqi democracy®"—is up there. Apparently, Ms. MacKinnon wants us to believe that Hugh Hewitt dancing around with Eason Jordan's head on a pike marks the necessary first step toward lancing the boil of "bad feeling" between soldiers and journos, and getting everybody together for a group hug and a round of "Kumbaya." It's funny, or it would be if it weren't so completely fucking stupid, that MacKinnon can actually think that the natural outcome of Easongate will be to make professional journalists feel encouraged to talk more about "military-press tensions."

Especially given how MacKinnon herself is handling the topic. For all that it's lathered in pious "on the one hand .. on the other"-ing, this is a scurrilous piece of writing. "Perhaps" individual soldiers have "exercised bad judgement"? "Absolutely" some journalists have "gotten carried away by anti-military biases and agendas"? "Bad feeling between U.S. servicepeople and journalists in Iraq is coloring news coverage." Yeah, that "between" is really the rub, isn't it? Because unless U.S. servicepeople are responsible for reporting the news, and thus in a position to "color news coverage," MacKinnon's "between" masks the fact that she is actually charging only one of the parties with misconduct.

And it is a charge, and MacKinnon is indeed making it, however hedged about with moderate posturing. Let me state her implication plainly, since she won't. Rebecca MacKinnon is slandering the working press in Iraq. From the depths of her comfy Herman Miller chair, MacKinnon is claiming here that journalists, including those who risk their lives daily in a war zone, are slanting their coverage because of "anti-military biases and agendas." She does this blandly, unconcernedly, and (as far as I can see from her dim prose) on the basis merely of having heard Eason Jordan's remarks at "the now-infamous panel." Don't know about you, but I find this rather remarkable in someone with so little tolerance, to quote a comment she cites approvingly elsewhere in her post, for a news executive who goes "passing on ... rumors in a semi-public forum."

Put up or shut up, Rebecca. Where are your facts? In what cases that you know of have journalists distorted the news they report because of anti-military sentiment? Give us details. Name names. You were happy enough to support those demands when Eason Jordan was in the dock; they ought to be just as applicable to you now.

Rebecca MacKinnon has revealed herself here to be nothing more than a rumor-monger and a smear artist. Something tells me, though, that Hugh Hewitt and Jeff Jarvis won't be calling for her to resign from the Berkman Center because of it.

posted by michael  6:18:19 PM  
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Sloppy seconds. Moonlighting from his job as Bill Keller's official ambassador to the conservative movement, David Kirkpatrick does his best to kick the Democrats while they're down:

In their search for middle ground on the subject of abortion, Democrats are encountering a mixture of resistance and retreat from abortion rights advocates in their own party.

Since its defeats in the November elections, nothing has put the fractured soul of the Democratic Party on display more vividly than abortion. Party leaders, including Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York and the new chairman, Howard Dean, have repeatedly signaled an effort to recalibrate the party's thinking about new restrictions on abortion.

"For Democrats, Rethinking Abortion Runs Risks"

Kirkpatrick's bias is apparent from the first sentence: clearly, "middle ground" is the place to be, for a party in recovery. (The fact that not all Democrats, or even most, are engaged in this putative "search" is neatly overwritten in Kirkpatrick's lead.) The rethinkers and recalibrators are the reasonable folks, in this treatment; since it's that kind of piece, Kirkpatrick ratifies them with an approving quote from a Republican, Sen. Sam Brownback, who speaks of the Democrats' "open[ing] up and even encourag[ing] people to run for office" as "an enormously positive development." [Brownback is sponsoring the Unborn Child Pain Awareness Act, aka the How Can We Make You Realize What a Monster You Are You Aborting Witch Act, which would require physicians to offer fetal anesthesia in abortions after the 20th week of pregnancy.] Pro-lifer Harry Reid gets the final word, and Kirkpatrick's implicit endorsement, offering a seen-it-all dismissal of pro-choice concerns as merely the goings-on of people who "have to keep their folks geared up, just like people who work for more highways."

The abortion rights folks, on the other hand, are "roiled," "sounding alarms" and issuing "rallying cries" and threatening "revolt"—note the overloaded use of emotionally charged language, as against a term like "recalibrate." Add to the suggestion of irrationalism Kirkpatrick's crass flattening of the debate on the pro-choice side. Again, he appeals first to a Republican to make his point (funny how often GOP operatives turn out to be the best sources in stories about internal Democratic politics, isn't it?):

Ann Stone, president of Republicans for Choice, an abortion rights group, said her organization's members had not been re-examining their positions, as their Democratic counterparts have. Ms. Stone added a cautionary note that cut across each party's support base. "The Democrats have to be very careful about this because they could end up undercutting themselves with the donor base," Ms. Stone said. "The pro-choice donors in both parties tend to be the more wealthy." ...

Karen Pearl, interim president of Planned Parenthood, said ... "When the day is done, I don't believe [the Democrats] will backslide," in part because of the importance of abortion rights advocates to the party's base of activists and contributors.

As in its coverage of the DNC chairmanship campaign, here too the Times seems incapable of attesting to any intellectual or moral component whatever in a political contest between Democratic party tendencies; it's all merely about money and position.

Kirkpatrick begins to seem like prime evidence that it really isn't healthy to spend all your professional time whoring after access to right wingers. But post-election A1 just can't find too many opportunites to peddle the "broken Democrats at risk" line. Apparently it's so avid for such stuff that in a pinch it's willing to serve up what amounts to Adam Nagourney's sloppy seconds.

posted by michael  5:06:41 PM  
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Welcome to the machine. OK, I lied yesterday: this Eason Jordan thing has really gotten on my wick, and though I'm pretty sure it's getting tired, I find I have a few more thoughts to develop on it. Blame it on the conversational character of the blogspace.

Missing in all the virtual ink spilled so far—startlingly missing, in the case of a ruminative blog like PressThink—is any consideration of the question of responsiblity, of news judgement. By which I mean, not the judgement of the institutional media as evidenced in their willingness or unwillingness to pursue the Jordan story; I mean the judgement of the bloggers who have pushed it, with whatever agenda.

The nearest approach to the question I can find among Easonbloggers appears in Jay Rosen's (optimistically titled) "Closing Thoughts on the Resignation of Eason Jordan" yesterday:

To me, a resignation or firing is totally out of proportion to any offense given in Davos (that I know of.) ... I agree with the Wall Street Journal in an editorial today: "The worst that can reasonably be said about his performance is that he made an indefensible remark from which he ineptly tried to climb down at first prompting. This may have been dumb but it wasn't a journalistic felony."

Not a felony. I say not a crime. But here is what it was: An occasion when a news executive, a senior statesman at the network, miscommunicated about a matter of life and death, not to say a "story" of considerable (to the point of shocking) news value. And not in front of just anyone, but "representatives of the world," an international elite, which is part of the ruling fiction at Davos.

Taken at face value, this suggests an extraordinary, even opportunistic abrogation of news judgement. Past the "matter of life and death" blather, which seems like so much special pleading given the paragraph immediately above it, Rosen is essentially telling us that the story is self-justifying: that the mere importance of Jordan as a CNN executive, combined with the "elite" setting in which his remarks were made, add up (in shocking degree, no less) to "news value."

Eason Jordan lost his job for expressing an opinion—more exactly, for alleging as fact (or appearing to) what can really only have been an opinion, about military targeting of journalists in Iraq. Let's stipulate to Jordan's having expressed this opinion in its most provocative form, though he has explicitly and repeatedly disavowed it: American troops in Iraq have deliberately murdered journalists. Let's stipulate further (though it can't remotely be true, as a look at some genuine, careful blog journalism will indicate) that Jordan possessed no facts at all on which to base that opinion. Is this news? Is it news deserving of a blogstorm? With nothing more than this in the hopper, it's very difficult to see why anybody honest (i.e., who wasn't looking for an opportunity to crank up the right-wing smear machine) would have given what Eason Jordan said a second thought.

People express opinions all the time. In informal settings, even when speaking within their professional sphere of competence, they express opinions that are slapdash, ill-considered, capable of misconstrual. They may think they know things that they really don't. They may repeat the opinions or observations of others as their own, without having first skeptically examined them. None of this, even in the case of a CNN news executive, is a revelation to anybody with any sense. As Jordan was not a reporter on the ground in Iraq, whose coverage might plausibly be imagined to be tainted by his opinion; and as he was speaking unpremeditatedly in a panel discussion, rather than delivering a statement of his or his network's position on military-journalist relations; there seems, as there always did, very little real meat on these bones.

The uncritical acceptance of the Jordan story as Important seems to be structured by an unexamined, and badly outdated, narrative. This is a narrative in which bloggers are the Little Guys, and CNN and its like are the Power from which the little guys are to "seek truth," as Jeff Jarvis has it today. The narrative gains wattage from plugging in a set of loosely conspiratorial tropes that Rosen's writing has had access to: CNN, with its global tentacles, "works like a private network among the powerful"; Davos is an intellectual playground of the "international elite." Notice that I don't say that Rosen indulges conspiracy theory: this is a rhetoric, a tropology, and exists well below the level of theory. And it affords us access to the mythos of Easongate, the story that I think really does animate the right-wing wolfpack here: Jordan is saying things to the elite that he's not saying to us! (The refusal of the WEF to release the tape of his remarks, based on a longstanding off-the-record policy, dramatically boosts the narrative energy here.) He is forming elite opinion out of our view! Somehow (but we have no responsiblity to document how), with CNN and Davos as its instruments, that opinion will have an effect in the world, and we'll be unable to resist it!

And the reality? Jeff Jarvis congratulates the Eason bloggers for having committed real journalism; Jay Rosen congratulates blogs for being "little First Amendment machines." Speaking practically, though, the Easongate blogstorm boils down to a demand that anyone in a position of influence in Big Media be on the record, always, their remarks immediately vettable, whenever they make any even semi-public appearance. ("There is no such thing any more as off the record," as several triumphalist Eason bloggers have proclaimed.) It should be apparent that this is not a demand for legitimate transparency in the gathering and dissemination of news product. Nor is it a demand that seeks to promote the practice of citizen journalism (to which, pace Jarvis, the hue and cry about the withheld Davos tape bears only the most superficial relation). It is a demand, instead, that bloggers should be recognized as a kind of commissariate of the mass media: that blogs should patrol the borders of acceptable opinion, not merely as it appears in print or on the air but in any possible expression of any mainstream journalist's thinking. And that, given the prevailing asymmetries of political power and media access, is a demand for a Gresham's Law effect to take hold in institutional journalism, a demand that only those opinions acceptable to the most avid of the blogstorm troopers be allowed any room to circulate.

Flattering yourself that you're speaking truth to power, when you yourself occupy a position of newly minted power, might feel good but it's retrograde. Bloggers, particularly when coordinated as those on the right are, have shown that they can smash things. Honest bloggers, left and right, are going to have to come to terms with that capacity, and with the responsiblity that having it imposes. It's just not good enough any more to play the game of Little Guy vs. the Machine. The Machine is you now; start dealing with it, or let the worst elements take it over.

posted by michael  1:38:46 PM  
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Another moderate bites the dust. This should be the last post on this particular line, which has consumed too much of my attention here in the last week: but it seems like a necessary footnote to my "blogstorm troopers" post.

At PressThink over the weekend, Jay Rosen responded to my criticism of him as an "enabler" of the Hewitt/Jarvis/Malkin agenda in the Eason Jordan case:

Judge for yourself. In my first post about Eason Jordan I said I was reserving judgment, and I provided links to eyewitness accounts so readers could judge... or reserve. In my second I gave some background on the political nature of Jordan's job, and the diplomacy it requires. In the third I published without comment the statement of an eyewitness, Richard Sambrook of the BBC, generally seen as friendly to Jordan. Am I enabling his agenda? ...

Yet I think the fear and disgust in A1's phrase, "Blogstorm troopers" is part of the blogging story now. ... Whether you agree or not in the case of Jordan's remarks, suspicion of the blog swarm is not crazy or wrong, and fear of mob-like actions by bloggers and others online is going to continue to speak to people, for the same reason invasions of privacy by the press always speak across ideological divides. It doesn't take much to imagine the mob coming at you.

The first paragraph seems like a studied missing of the point. To call Rosen (as I did, with much reluctance) an enabler for devoting sustained and exclusive attention to a (marginal) topic makes no claim about content: indeed, I specifically mentioned that Rosen was reserving judgement about the merits. In this case, pro or anti or agnostic hardly matters. Given the typical length of posts at PressThink, and Rosen's rather deliberate posting schedule, the (unusual) attention he's devoted to "Easongate" in and of itself communicates to his elite readership that the story is important: and important precisely within the frame imposed on it by Hugh Hewitt and his pack. (Read Jay's inaugural post on the affair if you want quick confirmation of this point.) What's odd is that in any other context, about another writer, that's just the kind of point Rosen himself would characteristically make.

And that second paragraph is just laughable. I sympathize with anyone suffering invasions of privacy, of course, even J. D. Guckert, whether bloggers or the traditional press are the invading forces: but that has nothing to do with what I was talking about. Blogstorms like the Eason Jordan one, where the agenda of the principals is clearly not journalistic investigation but the extension of right-wing political control over the mass media, are a danger to our political life and ultimately to the freedom of the press. I should have thought that a press critic, at least one who cares about that foundational democratic freedom, might want to take note of such a criticism, which is hardly trivial or motivated by simple, personal "fear and disgust." I'm afraid Rosen's incompetent response makes my point about his blindness in this matter much more eloquently than I could have myself.

Not so much an enabler, perhaps, more like a fellow traveller. Seems that palling around with the Hewitts of the blogworld has been more intellectually corrosive even than I feared. (I take particular displeasure in noting who represents the "left" in this typically hallucinatory comment from Hewitt, which Rosen quotes at the top of his post's "Aftermatter": "The folks paying attention are spread out across the political spectrum, from Jay Rosen, Jeff Jarvis, and Mickey Kaus on the left to all the usual suspects on the right." Do you have so little self-respect that you're really prepared to take Hugh's marching orders this way, Jeff?) And I'm guessing, on the basis of his response here, that when Rosen does at last turn to consider the question of "Jeff Gannon" it's going to be on the safe ground prepared by Jarvis and Insty and their ilk. I'm sure Jay will be happy to lecture us non-Hewitt-approved lefties then about mobs and the politics of personal destruction.

posted by michael  10:46:08 PM  
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Congratulations to the pack of wingnuts that "investigated" CNN's Eason Jordan into quitting. Your great victory nobly advances us toward that day when no employee of a mainstream media organization will hold an opinion, or indulge the expression of one, that might in any way fail to pass muster with Insty and Jeff and Hugh and their Republican masters. Long live the blogstorm!

Hey, Perfesser, tell me the one again about the Left and political correctness ...

posted by michael  10:13:23 AM  
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How do you not love Charlie Pierce?

I think, just for laughs, and in keeping with what apparently are the new procedures for credentialing the White House press corps, I will call and request to attend the next press conference as I.M. Hacksworthy, Real American Newsman. I mean, good God, this baldheaded galoot apparently would've gotten into the White House if he showed up in a wimple and calling himself Mother Superior. It's harder to get into the press box at Fenway.

I'll second what others have said: Charlie, when are you going to get your own damn blog?

posted by michael  11:04:27 AM  
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Correction. In my post below, I said that "blogstorm" was apparently Hugh Hewitt's preferred term for such things as the Eason Jordan feeding frenzy. I am taken to task for getting the term wrong on an "Easongate" blog:

Secondly, I need to clear up something. What happens when bloggers descend on an issue is a blog swarm - two words - not a blogswarm, blogstorm or blog storm. In BLOG, Hugh devotes a chapter to blog swarms and opinion storms. The analogy describes what happens when dozens of bloggers "swarm" around an issue/story like...a swarm of bees. That's the image. An opinion storm is the result of a blog swarm. This a pet peeve of mine, and I cringe whenever I see "blogstorm." Grotesque.

So obviously Michael hasn't read Hugh's book.

[By the way, sincere thanks to La Shawn Barber, the author here, for calling my writing on the topic "eloquent," even if she thinks it misguided.]

No, I haven't read Hewitt's book, but have read enough by way of description of it to believe I'm not missing anything. While looking around to inform myself on the Eason Jordan issue, I came on the term "blogstorm" in reference to it, but it appears that I may have conflated disparate pages, because in fact I can't find a use of the word where I believed I'd seen it on Hewitt's blog. (Rebecca MacKinnon employs it, prominently, here, in another post I had reference to at the same time.) Knowing the term "blog swarm" was associated with Hewitt (who doesn't seem to use it, either, wrt Eason Jordan), I appear to have made a kind of subliminal re-attribution here.

[I'll add that I find the image of the blogging community as a sort of hive mind no less creepy than the notion of it as a phalanx of storm troopers. It's just a different sort of creepy.]

Sloppy of me, and my apologies to Mr. Hewitt. Thanks also to La Shawn for pointing out my error. Doesn't in any way alter the point of the earlier post, of course.

posted by michael  10:24:36 AM  
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Bravo, for once, to Kit Seelye and the Times, for picking up the Gannon/Guckert story and writing it straight: no bad-blogger snark, no gay-prostitution irrelevancies. The lead is really a small thing of beauty for stating as succinctly as possible the nub of the issue:

Two Democrats in Congress are pressing for investigations into how a Washington reporter who used a pseudonym managed to gain access to the White House and had access to classified documents that named Valerie Plame as a C.I.A. operative.

"Democrats Want Investigation of Reporter Using Fake Name"

[And, speaking of pipelines from blogs into the mainstream press, note how ours worked here—via the agitation of Congressional Democrats, who raised the issue's profile in just the right way at just the right moment. We don't have Howie Kurtz (nor should we want him), but we do have John Conyers and Louise Slaughter, and more power to 'em. And more power to dKos, because the legislators are learning to pay attention to what goes on there.]

Seelye gets it a bit wrong when she fails to note, contra Scott McClellan's statement, that Talon News was not "a news organization that published regularly" at the time "Gannon" was credentialed (dKos reference here), but that's a small quibble and there's time to make up for it. And take especial note of the last graf, which as so often is meant to set the terms for how the story is received and disseminated:

Karl Frisch, a spokesman for Ms. Slaughter, said: "This is a guy who could not get credentialed by the House or the Senate press galleries, and yet managed to get into the White House and question the president" and have access to a top-secret document.

He added: "To imply he has no connection to the White House is just not credible."

That's a hell of a punch. No, this isn't A1—but for the Times to take this up now, and under Seelye's byline, and without minimizing it, is a major step in the insertion of this story into mainstream discourse. It's only a step: and the real story, the large and ugly story of deliberate, secret White House manipulation of the press and the public information space, has yet to be unravelled and told comprehensively. But I'm starting to get my hopes up that it might.

posted by michael  9:24:04 AM  
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Blogstorm troopers. Last year, before my extended hiatus, I spent a fair amount of time reading Jay Rosen's PressThink: Jay himself, though often in need of an editor, was a valuable, rumantive voice about the intersection of journalism and blogging, and the conversations he started were unusually thoughtful and wide-ranging. Since taking up this blog again, I've looked in on PressThink much less: so take this with a grain of salt. But my impression is that Rosen has slipped into the same fundamentally uncritical infatuation with the supposed "revolutionary" potential of blogging vis a vis mainstream journalism that people like Jeff Jarvis and Hugh Hewitt trumpet so relentlessly. And it's had a bad effect on the tone and approach of the PressThink project.

Palling around with the likes of Jarvis and Hewitt can't, on the face of it, be good for anybody. It's with serious disappointment that I note, as of this writing, that the last three entries at PressThink are taken up with the Eason Jordan flap (see below), which has been Hewitt's hobbyhorse for the last couple of weeks now. I don't remotely think that Rosen has the same kind of poisonous ideological agenda as Hewitt or Jarvis, by any means: but though he insists on reserving judgement, Rosen (whose first post on the matter was occasioned by his appearing on Hewitt's radio show to discuss it) is essentially acting as an enabler of that agenda in giving the issue such sustained and exclusive attention.

It's a prime example of how, even for somebody basically of good will like Jay Rosen, there's a drastic loss of perspective once you decide that virtually any blogger interventions that appear to upset the big-media apple cart are to be celebrated. The Jordan thing is obviously driven by the desire of the "support-the-troops" right to inflict another blow on CNN and make sure they stay in line (though by now it's hard to see how anybody on the right could question their loyalty), laughably so: but Rosen seems unable to see it.

Not all blogstorms are created equal. ("Blogstorm" appears to be Hewitt's preferred term for the descent of the Web wolfpack: has a nice Third-Reichish ring to it, don't you think? Ed. note: The attribution of "blogstorm" to Hugh Hewitt is in error. Correction is posted here.) We now have three ready-to-hand examples of the phenomenon, all widely celebrated on the right: Rathergate, the Ward Churchill mess, and now Eason Jordan. (No, Churchill isn't a media personality, but otherwise the modus is the same.) In each of these cases, the citizen bloggers, while clothing themselves in the mantle of truth-seeking, are really and entirely engaged in enforcing ideological conformity.

How many of these campaigns are we going to see before people get wise? The blogspace turns out to be an extraordinarily powerful site for coordinating opinion, and for driving action: but it matters a great deal what opinions are being coordinated, and what actions driven toward. When your population of bloggers is strongly oriented, by temperament and training, to finding enemies under the bed and conducting witch hunts, then your "citizen journalism" quickly veers from being a tool of citizenship to a tool of political control.

Rathergate, in particular, stinks of Karl Rove from start to finish. The rest appear to be exercises in keeping the machine oiled and in good order. All such things take is a light push on the appropriate levers, and a blog system with a few ready outlets to the institutional media (an ever wider pipeline, by the way, as big media are trained to fear the "power of the blogs"), and boom! another blogstorm coalesces. These really aren't much different from the Astroturf tactics the GOP/corporate PR axis has specialized in for years: they're only more virulent, and the goal is different, namely to suppress any appearance of ideological incorrectness in the mainstream media. (A remarkable feature of the Eason Jordan tempest is that nobody that I can see has even suggested that Jordan's opinions can be shown to have had any effect on CNN's coverage of Iraq. His having an opinion, in itself, is the beginning and end of the thing.) And we are left with a right-wing "citizen" blogspace happily and entirely assimilated to the propaganda direction of the Republican party. And unlike Armstrong Williams, these guys will do it for free.

posted by michael  9:50:09 AM  
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Covering his ass, since the heat on the story obviously requires it now, Jeff Jarvis finally manages to notice the Jeff Gannon/Talon News scandal today: and for the sake of his own honor he really ought to have just left it alone.

Not only is Jarvis not celebrating today's story of the triumph of the blogosphere, per my post below: in fact he's lying about the Gannon story. That, or he's managed so woefully to misinform himself as it call into question his ability to read and comprehend. "It seems there are two stories" in the Gannon controversy, Jeff tells us:

1. What the White House did:

The argument on Media Matters and Kos and other sites has been that Gannon is a ringer put in the White House with a fake "news service" called Talon and that he only pitches softball questions and only repeats the official line. If the White House gamed the press corps in that way, that's a story.

2. What bloggers did:

The bloggers went after Gannon personally, first trying to expose his real name and then his sex life. If Gannon is part of a homophobic organization and if he is gay, then that's a story about hypocrisy. But is it a news story? I'm not comfortable with outing as news, for there was a time not long ago enough when revealing someone's homosexuality was a story and a scandal and a crime when it should not have been; to use that sort of attack by innuendo for the other side -- just because it's for the other side -- doesn't make it right. So here, the bloggers end up as the story.

Notice the deft way Jarvis splits this in two pieces. One the one hand we have an "argument" made about Gannon's status as a journalist, and Talon's as a news service; on the other, the investigative work (done largely on Kos), in which "bloggers end up as the story"—not for their citizen journalism, as it happens, but for their questionable behavior in indulging in "attack by [sexual] innuendo." As if the one had nothing really to do with the other.

Notice, too, how quickly that phrase "expose his real name" flits past in Jarvis's account: his sole reference to the fact that "Gannon" was operating under a pseudonym. That's how you know Jarvis isn't just too stupid to get it, that instead he's deliberately distorting the truth. Jarvis is concerned to avoid giving "Gannon's" pseudonymity its proper place in his account, because he wants to obscure from his readers the actual logic of the Kos investigation to this point. So, for any Jarvis readers who might find themselves over here, let me spell it out for you.

"Jeff Gannon" was accredited to the White House under an assumed name. This is not only not the common procedure for accrediting journalists; it appears to be unprecedented. Given "Gannon's" employment with a shady, recently created news organization (with links to the Texas GOP), his written work essentially plagiarizing RNC press releases, his apparently cozy relationship with Scott McClellan in White House press conferences: the fact of his working under a pseudonym suggests that somebody is hiding something, and allows the inference that the something may have to do with Talon News and with the White House press operation. Under these circumstances, any competent—any rational investigator—would follow the pseudonym: would start by trying to recover the identity the false name has masked.

Not two stories, in other words, but one, with an obvious logic: uncover "Jeff Gannon's" real identity as an avenue into the story of a White House intent on crafting the means of, as Jarvis so delicately puts it, "gaming the press corps." (A less delicate way to put it would involve the use of the term "covert propaganda.") Nobody pursuing this story gives a rat's ass about Gannon except as a way in to whatever's being hidden. If he has, in fact, been outed as gay, that's an incidental effect of the pursuit of the real and only story ("collateral damage," a term I'm sure a warblogger like Jarvis is on comfortable terms with). To pretend that making a personal, sexual smear is on anybody's agenda is to utterly, and contemptibly, mischaracterize an extraordinary act of citizen journalism. (Yes, there was a certain surprised, amused reaction when the gay angle emerged, but nobody thinks that angle is anything except a momentary diversion from the actual investigation.)

This logic really can't be that difficult for anyone with a journalism background to understand. (It especially shouldn't be difficult for someone who spends so much of his time promoting the "citizen journalism" he and his blogger pals think they're doing.) I'm sure Jeff Jarvis understands it perfectly well. He just doesn't want his readers to. Oh, and the next time Jarvis starts crowing about blogging and citizenship and all that: well, now you know what that's worth.

posted by michael  11:54:38 PM  
tell me about it []  

 

Another triumph! If you're a frequenter of left-liberal blogs, you probably already know—since this somewhat undernourished one's unlikely to be your first stop—about the "Jeff Gannon" story: how an untrained, inexperienced non-journalist, one J. D. Guckert, become the "Washington bureau chief" of a shady, cut-out conservative "news agency," Talon News; how he was credentialed, under the Gannon pseudonym (and thus in an inexplicable break from the ordinary rules), to the White House press office; how he was used, willingly and often, as a source of softball, RNC-scripted questions at White House press conferences—ready to hand for Scott McClellan whenever things threatened to get sticky.

Following Media Matters' lead, and in the entire absence of interest from the major press (including those sadsacks from organizations like the New York Times, who after all only shared the room with this self-evident fraud), a bunch of members of the Daily Kos community got to work and, in an extraordinary piece of collective citizens' journalism, exposed Gannon's actual identity. (This Daily Kos diary is a good starting point if you want to get further into the thing; scroll down a bit into the comments to find a short list of key earlier diaries in the investigation.) And just this morning we learn that Gannon/Guckert has had enough and is headin' for the hills.

And I find myself wondering: why do I hear no sound of celebration from the big blog triumphalists?

You know the guys I mean: the Instapundits, the Power Liners, the Hugh Hewitts and Jeff Jarvises; the passel of right-wingers who blow so hard so often about the power of blogs to displace and demolish the hated MSM. Cause it's all right here, isn't it, in the Gannon story? Yet another victory for the blogspace over the institutional media! Yet another example of how the massively-interlinked community of bloggers can gnaw at a story, refusing to let it drop, until they force accountability in the offline world! Come on, Jeff, Hugh, the Daily Kos people have done exactly the kind of thing that always seems to get your rocks off. Why not join the party?

Granted, Gannon/Guckert is a relative small fry, in spite of having been an accredited White House correspondent: and besides, after having made a meal of Dan Rather and CBS over the forged TANG papers, maybe the boys are busy digesting. Urp, sorry, no, can't eat another bite—nope, not even if it's wafer-thin.

Alas, here I have to call a Sadly, No! on myself. As it happens, there's been blog triumphalism aplenty on the right these last two weeks, sucking up a lot of the oxygen. The deal: speaking at Davos last month, Eason Jordan, CNN's Chief News Executive, may have said—or may have said something that could be interpreted as saying—that journalists who have come under fire in Iraq have in some cases been targeted and killed by American troops. The tempest-in-a-teacup of "journalism" that ensued (they like to call it a "blogstorm" in the Instysphere) wasn't, in fact, about trying to ascertain whether the supposed accusation was true or not: it was about forcing Eason Jordan to put up or shut up what Hugh Hewitt calls, tellingly (and on only hearsay evidence) his "malicious blast at the troops." Yesterday, Jordan, via Howard Kurtz in the WaPo, came forth with what appears a reasonable and issue-ending clarification—and let's let Jeff Jarvis, a bit chastened but triumphalist nevertheless, clean up in its wake:

Meanwhile, Jay Rosen sends an email to blogging friends (which I assume he'll turn into a post soon) that talks about how bloggers filled out the story with journalism while the press remained silent. (Says Jay: "That is not necessarily bad that the press remains silent. If it's a non-story, remaining NON is just fine." I agree.) Sisyphus gets the WEF to admit it has a tape of Jordan's comments and tries to get them to release it. He "commits an act of journalism in a shockingly simple way. Email the right guy." ... Yes, there was a snitfit, a blogstorm -- and until there was clarification, that's what it takes sometimes. And there was also journalism. Both were pressure to get to the bottom of the story. ...

This is about the death of off-the-record at any event citizens attend. The WEF is now trying to decide whether the event was or wasn't off the record. Doesn't matter anymore, folks; that's irrelevant. The citizens in the room haven't agreed to play by your rules the way journalists have. If they hear something, they'll repeat it. If Jordan had, in fact, said that journalists were targeted as journalists by soldiers -- which he didn't; just speaking in the hypothetical here -- then how can anyone expect the citizens, the citizen journalists, the bloggers in the room to remain silent? They shouldn't.

So, let's see if I understand the difference here between the Gannon story and the Eason Jordan foofaraw—beyond just the fact that CNN's bigger than Talon News, which I'm confident would cut no ice with crusaders like Hewitt and Jarvis:

• A CNN executive is caught making remarks, possibly imprudent, and bloggers leap in to enforce a speech code on him, wresting a clarification in response;
• A phony reporter, operating under a pseudonym, is mysteriously accredited to the White House for a shady conservative news outfit with funding ties to the Texas GOP—and bloggers search out his identity and expose him and his organization.

Clearly, we have somewhat divergent ideas of "citizen journalism" operating on the two sides here.

When bloggers work together to damage the credibility of a "liberal" media organization: Huzzah, for the Day of the Blogs is at hand! When they work together to damage the credibility of a bogus conservative outlet—and, in the process, lay another brick in the larger, not to say epochal story of the Bush administration's covert domestic propaganda machine—er, not so much. Thanks for clearing that up, Jeff.

posted by michael  11:33:23 AM  
tell me about it []  

 

I've been writing a decent amount the last few days, but none of it here: I registered over the weekend with a couple of poetry-workshop forums (Gazebo, and Poetry Free-for-All), and I've been spending time there, writing critiques and recovering the pleasure of actively engaging in criticism. (And trying to decide whether I'm going to post my own fairly un-workshoppable poetry for review.) It's a bit of the kid-with-a-new toy syndrome—even if the new toy in this case is incredibly geeky. So, I've been neglecting the Times and the politics, but not abandoning—it's just that there's only so much writing I can manage in a day before my head starts to throb.

Oh, and also I'm trying to figure out the making-a-living thing in my spare time.

Anyway, pending another dive back into the media-critique waters, I'm posting this here, from a forum session discussing how to read John Ashbery. Because I like what I formulated, and because it's one of the very few pieces of actual literary criticism, short though it is, that I've written in a long time:

The trick with Ashbery—I think he's said it himself—is to avoid focus. It's not the ordinary way you read poetry, at least not if you're an engaged reader, and if you come to the poems with the ordinary expectation of getting clear about them you're likely to hurt yourself. I think of one of those stereograms, if you remember that fad, where the only way to see the image was to focus past the image on the page. My touchstone here is "Loving Mad Tom," from Houseboat Days, which seems like Ashbery's instructions to the reader—his creating the taste by which he's to be enjoyed:

You thought it was wrong. And afterwards
When everyone had gone out, their lying persisted in your ears,
Across the water. ... Their word only
Waited for you like the truth, and sometimes
Out of a pure, unintentional song, the meaning
Stammered nonetheless, and your zeal could see
To the opposite shore, where it was all coming true.

That's the great pleasure of Ashbery, for me: the "pure, unintentional song" (how beautiful is that phrase?) that, at moments, is on the verge of bringing something into focus on the opposite shore—and the focus fading again without ever having quite coalesced, without leaving any certainty that the thing was actually real. That flux of attention and insight is Ashbery's response to the Wallace Stevens dictum, about the task of poetry being to make the visible a little harder to see.

posted by michael  9:35:03 PM  
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Literary hubris. One thing that English grad students at Yale did (still do, I'm sure) to earn a bit of money in the summer was to serve as screeners for the Yale Press's annual Younger Poets Series competition. Hundreds of book-length manuscripts were submitted; you'd plow through as many of them as you could, as quickly as you could while getting (you hoped) a fair impression, grading them on an A - F scale (though anything C or below was failing) and writing a paragraph for the judge on the submission's merits, or lack thereof. Every manuscript was assured of at least two screener readings, to correct for anyone's idiosyncracies.

A very few manuscripts you'd feel like going to bat for, and you'd give them slightly longer writeups. Funny thing is, I don't really remember any of those: I don't even recall checking the Series results to see if a winner ever passed through my hands. No: the ones I remember are the cranks. The best thing I ever saw screening for the Series was a collection of poems on the sole subject of Brooke Shields—not dedicated to Brooke, mind you, but treating her, from every possible angle. This was not some sort of self-conscious, Warhol-esque exercise, either. The MS was divided in three sections—I believe they were "Child-Woman," "Mega-Star," and "Goddess"—each section prefaced with its own title page featuring, no kidding, a crayon drawing of Brooke in the appropriate phase of life. I had an instinct to hold on to the MS and call the FBI on Ms. Shields' behalf. I had an instinct to filch the thing for myself as an artifact, return policy be damned. Sadly, I did neither.

Yesterday, in the course of some aimless surfing, I stumbled into the Schneiderverse: the poetry world of Dan Schneider, at Cosmoetica.com. No, Dan's not the long-lost author of Brooke Poems, but he is a world-class poetry crank, and highly recommended. In particular, I give you his series "This Old Poem," in which Dan—who is confident that he's a greater poet than Walt Whitman, or practically anybody else who ever took up pen—plays literary contractor, engaging himself to renovate the atrocious, cliché doggerel of old and contemporary masters and bring the structures up to his own rigorous standards. And you've got to admire his moxie: the first old boy he takes on is none other than W. B. Yeats, one of the great poets in the language. Here's a glimpse of the results, as Dan spruces up the lovely early poem "Into the Twilight"—Yeats first, then Schneider:

Out-worn heart, in a time out-worn,
Come clear of the nets of wrong and right;
Laugh, heart, again in the grey twilight,
Sigh, heart, again in the dew of the morn.

Outgrown part, in a time out-worn,
Come clear of the nets of wrong and right;
Laugh there, again, in the grey’s delight,
Sigh then, again, with a dew not the morn’s.

That first bolded revision practically defines the term "tin ear." So does the clotted mouthful of "with a dew not the morn's" (say it aloud if you don't believe me). And how do you sigh "with" (in the sense of producing) a dew: isn't that less a sigh than an expectoration? [But who am I to quarrel? Dan appends a score to each of his reconstruction projects, the original versus his revision: Yeats gets a "Bad to Terrible" rating of 55 on a 100-point scale, while Dan manages to bump the poem all the way to an Excellent 87. Clearly, the objective numbers are against me.]

Dan runs a poetry group in Minneapolis, dedicated apparently to hacking away at candidate poems until they bleed, which on the evidence of Cosmoetica must be the workshop equivalent of Jim Jones' People's Temple. There's a long and uncondescending article on Schneider from a few years back in the Minneapolis City Pages, if you want to get more a flavor of the man than his own pages offer. Me, I wouldn't ever want to meet him, but I'm glad he exists.

posted by michael  1:23:08 PM  
tell me about it []  

 

Remember Bulgegate? In the waning days of the election, Salon reported a JPL scientist's photographic analysis that made the very strong case that the bulge caught on tape under Dubya's jacket was, indeed, a communications device and that the Bush camp had cheated in every single debate with John Kerry. Writing in FAIR's Extra, David Lindorff (one of Salon's bulge reporters) gives us the backstory ("The Emperor's New Bulge"): turns out the New York Times had the photographic analysis first—had pursued the story aggressively, and then at the last minute spiked it. This one's a must-read. [Thanks to Suburban Guerilla for the link.]

Of particular interest here is the after-the-fact role of the Times' so-called public editor, Dan "See No Evil" Okrent. Knowing the FAIR piece would be going to press, Okrent preemptively posted a CYA item on the Bulgegate controversy on his website (and NOT in his column, where the Times readership might actually see it):

I checked into Lindorff’s assertion [that the bulge story had been spiked], and he’s right. The story’s life at the Times began with a tip from the NASA scientist, Robert Nelson, to reporter Bill Broad. Soon his colleagues on the science desk, John Schwartz and Andrew Revkin, took on the bulk of the reporting. Science editor Laura Chang presented the story at the daily news meeting but, like many other stories, it did not make the cut. [Nothing to see here—ed.] According to executive editor Bill Keller, "In the end, nobody, including the scientist who brought it up, could take the story beyond speculation. In the crush of election-finale stories, it died a quiet, unlamented death."

So the story was merely speculative, and on that basis couldn't make the cut? Ben Bagdikian, quoted in Lindorff's piece, has a few choice words on that topic: but let's note some direct evidence, a couple of emails written late in the game to Dr. Robert Nelson, the JPL analyst, by one of the Times reporters assigned to the investigation:

Hey there, Dr. Nelson—this story is shaping up very nicely, but my editors have asked me to hold off for one day while they push through a few other stories that are ahead of us in line. I might be calling you again for more information, but I hope that you’ll hold tight and not tell anyone else about this until we get a chance to get our story out there. [Oct. 26]

Subject: Re: reanalysis of debate images more convincing than before
Dear Dr. Nelson,
Thanks for sticking with me on this. I don’t know what might convince them—and the bar is raised higher the closer we are to the election, because they don’t want to seem to be springing something at the last moment—but I will bring this up with my bosses. [not dated in the piece; presumably post-spike]

Does this sound to you like the story was never a serious contender—or that its "speculative" character is what motivated the editors to kill it?

Alright, so Okrent's helping Bill Keller to smooth over (not without a dose of snide condescension—"unlamented death," indeed) one more flagrant episode of editorial cowardice. Merely a venial sin, on Dan's part. Never fear, though: it's not far to go to witness Okrent's essential thuggishness. Here's what transpired before Danny posted that dismissive Web notice: After a Times journalist told Lindorff, contradicting other statements, that the paper had indeed put significant work into the bulge story,

efforts to learn more about the history and fate of this story at the New York Times met for weeks with official silence. Several inquiries were made by phone and email to Times public editor Daniel Okrent over a period of three weeks, eliciting one response—an email from his assistant asking for the names of Extra!’s sources at the Times. He was not provided with the sources, but was given the names of the three reporters who worked on the piece, which had been disclosed by Dr. Nelson. (At deadline time, Okrent did finally call, and promised to seek the answer to the story’s fate. A week later, at press time, he had yet to do so.)

He tried to get Lindorff to betray his Times source. That, until publication loomed, was the "public editor's" sole response to the investigation. Don't tell me the Times didn't know what they were buying when they tapped Okrent for his job. This, I think, has to go down as the proudest, most upstanding moment in all of Dan Okrent's proud tenure. Forget integrity: how does a journalist even consider asking another journalist to do something like this? Does Dan Okrent have the self-respect god gave a lanced boil?

It's official: the Times under Bill Keller's editorship is irredeemably corrupt. I'm about this close to cancelling my fifteen-year subscription.

posted by michael  7:22:58 PM  
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Weak framing. If I have relatively little to say in this space about Social Security privatization, it's not because I'm uninterested in the topic, God knows, which promises to be the defining domestic policy struggle of the new century: but because the barricades are already being so ably manned by the well-informed likes of Atrios, Josh Marshall and Max Sawicky, and most of my understanding of the topic is derived from them anyway. (And on the Times front, eRobin at Fact-esque is keeping a weather eye on the paper's rhetorical conformance, or non-conformance, with the BushCo privatization playbook.)

But one thing stuck out at me in yesterday's post-SOTU analysis from David Rosenbaum and Robin Toner ("Introducing Private Investments to the Safety Net"), and since I haven't seen much comment on this particular aspect of the topic, I thought I'd step in:

The theory behind the [phase-out] proposal is that the government can make the Social Security system financially solid by reducing guaranteed retirement benefits, but ideally workers' retirement income would not be lower because their investment accounts would make up for the lower guaranteed benefits. [Ideally? Rosenbaum and Toner really ought to have availed themselves of the handy benefits chart reprinted at Eschaton—they'd have realized that there's no "ideally" shoring up benefits anywhere in sight, not even in the plan's own benefit schedule—ed.]

Workers could participate or not, as they chose. Those who did might fare better financially than those who relied on guaranteed benefits. Though Mr. Bush did not acknowledge any risk, they could also do worse. Bush administration officials say the accounts would be heavily regulated, but even so, the unpredictability of the financial markets would be injected into what has always been a straightforward social insurance program.

The political struggle over the proposal will revolve around those risks.

This is a telling example of what I'd call weak framing. [And I want to call it also a tendentious misstatement of the terms of debate: how much of the ferocious blast of anti-privatization analysis and commentary has been devoted to talking about risk, anyway? Yet it was possible to detect a drift toward "risk" talk in the Democratic Congressional response to the SOTU, for instance when Harry Reid labelled the plan "dangerous," so this needs to be taken seriously.] In fact, it was weak framing when Al Gore tried it in 2000 with the "risky scheme" mantra—a look at the gloating right-wing response suggests just how weak, and how tone-deaf the "risk" formula was, and would be again this time.

"Risk," in the entrepreneurial frame, correlates with "reward": both are properties of investments. Social Security is not an investment program, it is social insurance; and to harp on "risk"—even though the Bush proposal does, indeed, place the retirements of almost all working people at risk—is to engage a frame that obscures that fact, and plays into Republican hands. Emphasize risk, and you (as an opponent) assign yourself the risk-averse position in the entrepreneurial frame—you become the everlasting caricature weak Democrat, forever seeking refuge against the stormy, value-creating free market of capitalist legend.

Pair up Rosenbaum and Toner's piece with yesterday's other A1 analysis, Todd Purdum's sycophantic tribute to the Big Bold Boldalicious Boldness of our Bold Leader's privatization scheme: and you see just how instinctively the press works to wrap the "craven Democrat/bold Republican" narrative around the kind of test of will that the Social Security fight amounts to. It's crucial that we avoid the weak-framing trap; we can't lose the rhetorical battle and expect to win a future for the great progressive legacy of social insurance.

Addendum: Of course, if you are going to talk about risk, you could do worse than to take Digby's line.

posted by michael  2:17:47 PM  
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Rereading Frank O'Hara's "Personism: A Manifesto" this evening, as refreshment from a day spent in the tooth-pulling duty of revising my resume. (Is any less gratifying writing task imaginable? The headache's just now starting to subside.) As much as I love the piece, I was surprised by a line that I'd forgotten—and that has to be one of my favorite aphorisms ever:

Pain always produces logic, which is very bad for you.

I don't ordinarily think of Frank as a Zen master, but I may have to revise that. It's practically a gloss on the Four Noble Truths.

The paragraph that follows is as clear (and genial) a statement of poetic intentions as I can think of, and a great spur to my own practice:

I’m not saying that I don’t have practically the most lofty ideas of anyone writing today, but what difference does that make? They’re just ideas. The only good thing about it is that when I get lofty enough I’ve stopped thinking and that’s when refreshment arrives.

Much as I still love the beautiful high seriousness of Keats' letters, which I first read when I began discovering poetry, back in high school, this is a poetics I can live with. ("Personism" also has the advantage over most statements of poetics of being dead funny.) It's still founded on a notion of negative capability, but as an Americanized, vernacular anti-sublime.

And yeah, no politics in this post. Especially post-SOTU, I just want to spend a little time in a world where words actually mean things.

posted by michael  8:34:44 PM  
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Adam Nagourney has his story line, and he's by God sticking to it.

Howard Dean emerged Tuesday as the almost assured new leader of the Democratic National Committee, as one of his main rivals quit the race and Democrats streamed to announce their support of a man whose presidential campaign collapsed one year ago. ...

There were few Democrats in Washington who doubted that Dr. Dean, the former governor of Vermont, was on the verge of taking over the party, with the support of much, though certainly not all, of its establishment. Democrats marveled at how someone who had been viewed as a symbol of some of the excesses of the party - [Gerald] McEntee [of AFSCME] described Dr. Dean as "nuts" after he withdrew his endorsement of him in the middle of the presidential campaign - was now on the brink of becoming a face of the opposition to President Bush.

The A1 lead article, which for some unknown reason is not headlined, as it ought to be, "Big Loser to Lead Loser Party further into Loserdom," takes a somewhat more restrained tone than Nagourney's projectile-vomiting of snark following the New York DNC Regional Caucus (blogged on previously here), but is otherwise of a piece with it.

Nagourney is such an apt channeler of Democratic feeling that he can intuit the "marvel" that Democrats feel at watching Dean's ascendancy, their concern to be assured that Dean "was not the liberal and undisciplined caricature that many said they saw last year," apparently without needing actually to talk to any of them. Certainly he can't be bothered directly to quote these concerned marvellers. Nor can he be bothered to talk to anybody in the Dem fold who, you know, might see a rationale for Dean's becoming chairman of the party, much less feel in a mood to celebrate it. (It's a striking fact of the political landscape in Nagourney's writing that Dean seems to have endorsements, and very nearly a lock on the position, without having any actual constituency in the party. That'd be a nice trick if Dean had managed it—but a look over at Daily Kos, to name just one source, might have showed Adam that something other than sleight-of-hand is going on here.)

Ad Nags is more than happy, on the other hand, to spend several paragraphs quoting Republicans, upon whom he relies to supply his minimum daily requirement of snotty attitude:

Republicans, who had already been portraying the Democrats as obstructionist and extreme, seemed somewhere between being delighted and amused to have Dr. Dean to kick around again, instantly invoking a defining moment in his career.

"After 10 years, you wonder if Democrats are running out of ways to say no," said Representative Tom DeLay of Texas, the House majority leader. "But then again, if they make Howard Dean the party chairman, I guess you could scream it."

Richard Bond, the former head of the Republican National Committee, said: "He's a very capable guy, he's got high energy, but he will reinforce all of their worst instincts. His style and message is one that will narrow his party's options rather than expand them."

"I think it's a scream," Mr. Bond said.

The fact that that "defining moment" in Dean's career was entirely an invention of the media can hardly be expected to enforce circumspection on Republicans—but oughtn't it chasten a reporter just a little? A useless plea, I know, yet I make it anyway: is it really too much to expect that the "liberal" New York Times might assign a reporter to cover the Democratic party who can find the strength not to treat it (and its constituency of just slightly under half of the fucking national electorate) as the punchline to a tired joke?

Update: Ben Brackley offered his complaining letter to Dan Okrent about this article in comments, below; but it's nicely formatted in his Daily Kos diary here, and worth the read.

posted by michael  12:49:04 PM  
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Banana Republicans. The motive behind the GOP push to "reform" the medical liability system was clear enough when I wrote about it a week ago, still it's nice to see it so neatly confirmed (in the LA Times, via Suburban Guerilla):

One of the clearest examples is an effort to limit jury awards in lawsuits against doctors and businesses. The caps might not only discourage "frivolous" lawsuits, as Bush argues, but also deprive trial lawyers of income from damage awards that they could then give to Democrats.

"If we could succeed in getting some form of tort reform passed — medical malpractice reform or any of part of that — it would go a long ways toward … taking away the muscle, the financial muscle that they have," said Sen. John Thune (R-S.D.), who ousted Senate Democratic leader Tom Daschle last fall despite a heavy flood of trial lawyer money backing the Democrat.

On issue after issue, the White House is staking out positions that achieve a policy goal while expanding the GOP's appeal to new voters or undermining the Democrats' ability to compete. Interviews with Bush advisors, a recent memo drafted by a senior White House strategist and a speech last month by the Republican Party's new chairman show that the political advantages are very much part of the calculation.

And while this is probably belaboring the obvious, let's just be explicit about it: this is not ordinary politics. Damage to the Democrats' financial muscle isn't just a happy corollary of tort reform, not just "part of the calculation" that goes into policy-making: it's the strategic goal. It's not even just the obverse of the strategic goal of enriching and emboldening the GOP's donor base (in this instance, HMOs, Big Pharma, and the medical lobby).

The Bush-DeLay GOP aims at creating an electoral dictatorship in this country, as simple as that. Institutionalized vote-stealing, radicalization of the GOP base, ever tighter consolidation of government, media and public relations, the financial desiccation of the other side: all of these are tools in the same toolkit. The Democrats are to be devolved into a rump caucus, just strong enough to contest elections and provide a fig leaf of democratic process, never strong enough to win (above the local level). Every significant policy direction that will be taken in the Bush second term will be taken with that aim in view. This is the game they're playing, and determined to win: to turn the United States into Mexico under the PRI. (Don't think the Texans didn't learn a few things looking across the border over the years.) Which is why every initiative that comes out of this White House and the Republican Congress has to be fought.

posted by michael  9:39:58 AM  
tell me about it []  

 

A blank check for Microsoft. Tom Zeller's A1 piece on email spam this morning looks like an innocent enough rehash of a topic we all feel pretty much the same about, pegged to the first anniversary of a federal law meant to rein in at least some of the spammers. Zeller's contention that the law may have had the paradoxical effect of increasing spam is meant to up the volume of controversy a bit, but still, this one seems basically ho-hum, right?

Until you dig under the hood, and start to see something that looks for all the world like product straight out of Microsoft PR. Is Zeller just playing the Redmond stenographer here? It's a bit long, from all the quotes, so the full post is continued below the fold ...

posted by michael  4:49:13 PM  
tell me about it []