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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