A face in the crowd. Via Avedon Carol, I see that Susie Bright has a longish post on our friend "Jeff Gannon"/James Guckert, and the connection between his past and current professions:

Bulldog [Guckert's Web porn alias], if he is anything like other gay hookers, has been at this for years, and has grown into his present persona. He moved up into a position a younger man wouldn’t have, where he learned a lot of dirt about people because he was fucking them and getting high with them. He advertised that he likes “to party,” which in sex ad jargon means that he was up for doing speed/ecstasy/cocaine. He would do a little bump with you, or more. This infers he got to know his client’s drug preferences as well as their erotic ones.

A pro like Guckert is going to inevitably have men who want to feel close to him, who wish the fantasy would be “more real,” or at least more frequent. As any pro will tell you, if you want to get closer— if you want them to turn up the volume— an escalating stream of money and presents is how you make that happen. It is the only way. ...

I am convinced Bulldog got into the press corps because someone was deeply in love with him, i.e, with the fantasy he provides. Others in the game saw what he could be used for. Jeff's client wanted more of Jeff, he wanted preferential status, he wanted promises. Gannon, like any pro with a big fish on the line, was growing weary of diamonds and furs.

A mature hooker wants something that will lead to independence; like property, inheritance rights, or a new career. The ultimate way to win your hooker’s favors is by offering something that gives them the same kind of independence that you, the civilian, possess.

Now, Susie Bright knows sex work in a way I can't possibly—but she's wrong about JimJeff, wrong in a way I think a lot of people are, wrong in a way that says something quite interesting about this story.

Hookers don't take day jobs. Certainly not successful, well-connected hookers of the sort Susie imagines James Guckert to have been. Certainly not the sort of forty-hour-a-week, fifty-weeks-a-year, soul-sapping small office jobs that James Guckert worked for twenty years before he moved to D.C. to become "Jeff Gannon." Successful, well-connected hookers don't live for years in two-bedroom duplexes on nowhere-in-particular stretches of suburban road on the Pennsylvania-Delaware border.

The verdict may not be completely in, but if James Guckert ever traded sex for money, at best he did it part-time. He likely did it with no more success than he seems to have done anything else. And I'd say the odds are he wasn't really a prostitute at all—he just played one on the Web. Everything we know about him suggests a somewhat thwarted, small-time fantasist—play Marine, play hooker, play journalist.

A small-timer who got caught up in something bigger. That's James Guckert. A lot of the excitement behind his story is attested to in Susie Bright's post—the idea that JG is the loose thread that unravels, say, some cabal of closeted, self-hating gay White House insiders. It's a product of the natural perceptual tendency to assign outsize importance to an anomaly—and of the desire, given the extraordinary and virtually uniform media discipline of this administration, to seize on any lapse in the hope that this one's going to be the one that lets us open the curtain and finally, incontrovertibly demonstrate to the world the machinery behind it.

And this is a story about the machine, but not in the dramatic, All the President's Gay Men way people want it to be. It's a story about small-timers and their dodges. It doesn't take place, except peripherally, in the halls of power: it shows the machinery from another, but maybe more illuminating, angle, by showing us the rabble of hustlers and wannabes that circulate in its lower reaches, some of them with, some without money, but all of them looking for a leg up.

It's a story about people like Bob Johnson, a Domino's Pizza franchisee with more money than brains, who thought he'd get to be a player by funding a Web-based talk radio network for his buddies in the Free Republic organization. It's a story about GOPUSA's Bobby Eberle, who saw a good business model in a phony news service. It's a story about Morton Blackwell's Leadership Institute, a credentials mill for aspiring right-wing activists, where "Jeff Gannon" got certified (to Bobby's satisfaction) as a journalist. It's a story about a cadre of wingers who saw the Internet and new media as their own, still relatively untrodden path to the big money. It's a story about a hierarchy of Republican grifters, running from little fish in little local offices in the western Philadelphia suburbs all the way up to sharks like Grover Norquist and Alan Keyes in their Arlington suites.

James Guckert didn't get promoted into the machine because he was a gay hooker—or, for that matter, in spite of it. He got promoted because he had a plausible look, he knew to say the right code words in the right order, and because nobody knew what he'd been doing on the Web in his spare time or bothered to look. (With so many hustlers to pick from, who would have taken one up with a gay porn past if they'd been aware of it? Who would have risked spoiling their shot the way Bobby Eberle's has been spoiled?) Guckert got promoted because people get careless—careless from hunger, from opportunism, careless most of all because the ascendancy of the Right seems like a guarantee of impunity to anybody looking to separate the boobs from their bucks. And God knows there are lots of bucks, lots of them sloshing around through lots of interlinked organizations, and lots of opportunities (if you're not especially burdened with scruples) to grab your share out of the churn.

That's the story: a Right so awash with money, so certain of being untouchable by the law, so infested with grifters, that a "Jeff Gannon" becomes inevitable. James Guckert wasn't smart, he wasn't talented, he wasn't connected—at least, past whatever one small-time connection piped him into the machine. All he was was available and willing. Just a face in the crowd.

posted by michael  11:40:43 AM  
tell me about it []  

 

Bad apples. Susie Madrak posts on this Reuters report of the ACLU's release of a FOIA-obtained memo from Gen. Ricardo Sanchez authorizing abusive interrogation tactics in Iraq, and heads it "The Rotten Apples Are at the Top of the Tree":

The top U.S. commander in Iraq authorized prisoner interrogation tactics more harsh than accepted Army practice, including using guard dogs to exploit "Arab fear of dogs," a memo made public on Tuesday showed.

The Sept. 14, 2003, memo by Army Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, then the senior commander in Iraq, was released by the American Civil Liberties Union, which obtained it from the government under court order through the Freedom of Information Act.

"The memo clearly establishes that Gen. Sanchez authorized unlawful interrogation techniques for use in Iraq, and in particular these techniques violate the Geneva Conventions and the Army's own field manual governing interrogations," ACLU lawyer Amrit Singh said in an interview.

The existnce of the memo has been reported previously, but its contents were withheld by the Pentagon on national-security grounds.

And while there's no defending Sanchez, it has to be stressed, I think, that he really doesn't sit at the top of this particular tree. He can't really even be said to have grown from the same tree as produced these particular bad apples. What Sanchez was ratifying in this memo was a torture regime which had already been elaborated in Afghanistan and Guantanamo, and was imported into Iraq through the good offices of Gen. Geoffrey Miller, the Gitmo commandant and Pentagon torture entrepreneur, who was dispatched into the theater in the summer of 2003 for just that purpose by Stephen Cambone, Rumsfeld's henchman/undersecretary for intelligence—who, as much as anyone in this awful affair, deserves to be haled before a war-crimes tribunal. The Sanchez memo comes just a week after Miller had completed his Iraq mission—and its requirement that the worst techniques be signed off prior to use by Sanchez himself, which may have been intended as some sort of (terribly inadequate) brake on the system, was likely already in the process of being effectively superseded from below.

One's best guess is that the torture system in the Iraq gulag was created and designed, for the sake of obfuscating responsiblity, as a parallel command. Sanchez signing off on a version of the torture rules is part of that obfuscation; he didn't devise the system and it would certainly have operated regardless of any intentions he might have had in the matter. (Gitmo Miller didn't travel to Iraq for the scenery.) If anything, giving Sanchez on-the-record authority over it may have had more to do with establishing a convenient fall guy in the regular chain of command than anything else. The gulag is Rummy's baby, and Cambone its midwife.

On a side note, sort of: Little noticed at the time, two weeks ago now, one of those bad apples has come home to poison a few more barrels. MG Barbara Fast, who was responsible for creating the Joint Interrogation and Debriefing Center at Abu Ghraib—Torture Central, in other words—was formally given command of the Army's Intelligence Center at Fort Huachuca, AZ, an assignment she had been intended for following her stint as chief of military intelligence in Iraq, but which had languished in administrative limbo following criticism of her performance by the Schlesinger panel. She'll be there training the Army's next generation of bright young torturers—and I can't think of a better example of the degree to which torture is now being not merely condoned but promoted within the Pentagon bureaucracy. That, along with the utter Vietnam-style demoralization of the Army, will be the enduring legacy of the Rumsfeld era.

For a nauseating look at the culture of responsiblity within the Pentagon hierarchy, here's Fast remarking on the abuse that occurred on her watch at Abu Ghraib in a press conference following her installation in command of Huachuca:

When you look at those pictures you are appalled that there was conduct of this type. It is not within the standards and what we teach our soldiers to do, so I think we all feel that there was certainly behavior and certainly activity that did not reflect well on any of us. ... This isn't the America we know. So, of course, you have to look at these pictures and feel revulsion and feel 'Gosh, what could I have done? Could I have done something to prevent this?'"

Gosh, General, you couldn't have prevented it? Well, if "prevent" means "not allow to begin," then gosh, I think you could've. It was Gen. Fast, after all, who brought the 519th MI Battalion over from Afghanistan to staff her spiffy new JIDC: a unit that had long since perfected the use of the techniques mentioned in the Sanchez memo, and that had already been documented by the Pentagon as having been responsible for the torture and murder of detainees.

posted by michael  2:41:02 PM  
tell me about it []  

 

Busy the last several days—including a disorienting Monday morning trapped in the offices of a start-up insurance company, interviewing for a software development job that I became almost desperate not to take—so I missed seeing Richard Stevenson fellate Karl Rove all over the front page, the sort of gig normally reserved for the Washington Bureau's female staff. (Though the gender balance on the polishing of Republican knobs at the NYT has lately been swinging more into equilibrium, it seems.) More significant bloggers than Your Humble have already expressed their offense; the best takeout comes from Mick at Arran's Alley.

Still, like Jello, there's always room for snark. Let's note that the Times' assiduous post-election campaign to worm its way (back?) into the provisional good graces of the Bush White House seems to have evolved into something like a permanent beat. And let's further note that Stevenson's piece, which relies on a parade of Republican courtiers to attest to the absolute rightness and historical inevitability of Rove's ascension to deputy chief of staff for policy, is a piece of independent journalism in only the most laughably nominal sense. This is entirely a Karl Rove production—a mark of (ominous) favor given the Times, and a demonstration of the extent of Karl's unchallenged sway. Think any of Stevenson's "informants" (every one of them named, the better to underscore their submission) would have dared speak about Unka Karl on the record without his say-so?

To outsiders, it is hard to know exactly what to make of Mr. Rove's new role as one of two deputy chiefs of staff. ... Mr. Rove does not really need a new title to convey his power, especially after guiding the president to a convincing re-election last year. In retaining his title as senior adviser, he in any case has a job broadly defined enough to weigh in on big decisions whenever he wants.

But on the organization chart, the new post leaves him - or the half of him that is purely policy - beneath Andrew H. Card Jr., the chief of staff and one of only two people in the White House (Vice President Dick Cheney being the other) whose power and reach are in the same league as Mr. Rove's.

"I count on him to keep me well informed and have me get engaged at the right time to help drive policy recommendations to maturity so the president can consider them," Mr. Card said.

Mr. Card said, gritting his teeth down to a fine powder as he did so.

Given that the Stevenson article represents a Rove PR maneuver, can I add that I think this may be a good sign? DINO Marshall Wittmann is given the one modestly pointed, semi-outsiderish quote Stevenson is willing to allow himself:

"[Rove] blends political hack and propeller head in a way no one has ever achieved," Mr. Wittmann said. "No one is going to question his political expertise or his policy expertise. The question for him is always one of hubris."

The question is already answered. If Karl Rove believes that, at long last, it's his time to shine—if he really thinks he's ready for his close-up—well, by all means, Karl. Let's let him plaster his puffy, oleaginous visage over everything that happens these next few years. It may not register in Texas, where they're used to big ones, but most people get squeamish when roaches come out into the light.

posted by michael  2:03:21 PM  
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John Cole is an honest man, and he deserves the credit of it. He's been writing a series of no doubt personally painful essays on the Terri Schiavo controversy, and coming to terms with his own role as what he calls an "enabler" of the odious theocrats who have utterly hijacked his party.

It took me a while to realize it, to realize what I had helped to create, what I had enabled, but I have not been laboring for conservatism. It's Big Government, Morality Edition, with a healthy dose of Corporate Cronyism, and they are just as troubling as the statists on the left. ...

We were warned about the growing power of the theocrats, and we ignored those warning us. Hell- I derided them and chided them- at every opportunity. The day of reckoning is here, and it is going to be of Bibilical proportions. And I only hope that many of the Republicans in Congress, who like me were playing with fire and brimstone, begin to recognize it.

Unlike at least one of the commenters on this post, I would never even think of suggesting that the solution for John Cole is to come over to the Democratic party. I don't want him anywhere near it. I want him in a sane, responsible Republican party, one of the thoughtful people whose deep philosophical errors I will enjoy debating, as equal members with me of a polity in which civil and intellectually free dispute is the norm. I just hope we haven't already entirely and permanently lost our hold on that polity.

posted by michael  8:12:42 PM  
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Honoring the memory. Remember the great days of the civil rights era, when Martin Luther King used the power of office and a state militia to stage an anti-judicial coup that ended segregation?

Yeah, neither do I. Bill Bennett does, though:

It is time ... for Governor Bush to execute the law and protect [Terri Schiavo's] rights, and, in turn, he should take responsibility for his actions. Using the state police powers, Governor Bush can order the feeding tube reinserted. His defense will be that he and a majority of the Florida legislature believe the Florida Constitution requires nothing less. Some will argue that Governor Bush will be violating the law. We think he will not be violating the law, but if he is judged to have done so, it will be in the tradition of Martin Luther King, Jr., who answered to a higher law than a judge's opinion.

And you know, I'd like to leave off with a funny remark here, but I can't find it in me. Once upon a time, in the late '60s, William Bennett was a racial liberal who so prized Dr. King's Letter from a Birmingham Jail that he taught it as a provocation to classes at the University of Southern Mississippi. Today his sense of justice, not to mention responsibility to history, is so far attenuated that he can exploit the occasion of that letter to justify what would amount to a fascist putsch.

One ought to be sad for Bennett, I suppose. But I wouldn't mind it if his tongue should rot from his mouth the next time he so much as thinks of uttering Martin Luther King's name.

posted by michael  9:18:57 AM  
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Pre-Dominant Link Hierarchy Subversion (Good) Friday, Maundy Thursday edition. (I'll be out of range tomorrow, and probably all weekend, since I'm going home for Easter. I'll light up a fatty with Resurrected Jesus for y'all.) Just a couple, because I'm not yet being very diligent about searching out blogs that I don't know—and, in fact, one of these is a blog I know very well, but don't link to often enough. So, OK, not unclear on the concept, just lazy ...

I think of Fact-esque as kind of my sister blog, since eRobin started it just a day before I started mine, and with the same media-watching intent. Robin (I can't write the name for long with the "e" prefix) has been a lot more diligent and consistent than I've ever dreamed of being. More to the point, her post yesterday at American Street (which I'm not linking because it compliments a post of mine, honestly, though thanks, Robin!) reminded me of what's emerged as Robin's best and most characteristic quality as a blogger: her emphasis on going beyond analysis to action:

We [lefty bloggers] have no shortage of brilliant minds (A-List and otherwise) who rail eloquently and cogently against the dangerous machinations of the radical Republicans, but we are missing the will do take the step that would turn our "generally agreed upon" into political action.

Robin dreams of a March on Washington against the Bush agenda. That's the kind of dreaming we'd all be better off doing more of.

And via the completely indispensible Avedon Carol (who's been subverting more dominant link hierarchies longer than anybody else), I'm adding Bitch, Ph.D. and War on Error to my groaning Bloglines blogroll. (Which I should really use to replace the current static blogroll on the left, though I hate giving up my cute category headings, though I'm probably the only one amused by them.) Bitch, Ph.D. because—well, with a title like that, do you have to ask? Ex-academic that I am, I've spent surprisingly little time hooking up to academic bloggers, and Professor B.'s gonna help me with that. And War on Error's Emma Goldman is writing a series of posts (starting here), both personal and theoretical, on social class in America that are a model of this sort of engaged writing. Great stuff.

Oh, OK, one more. Jon Garfunkel has a funny and link-rich abecedarium of blogging ("From the A-list to the Z-list") over at Civilities. Warning, though: with all those links, reading it is a bit like getting into a fight with the Tar Baby ...

That's it for this installment. Now back to my (ir)regularly scheduled grindstone.

posted by michael  10:01:41 AM  
tell me about it []  

 

By proxy. I'm immersed right now in non- (or extra-)blog work, but the Cunctator—who has an agenda, since he doesn't want Reading A1 to give up entirely on the Times-watch modus—is graciously stepping in to give us the word on a turnabout piece from our old pal Ad Nags. Many thanks from me. The next voice you hear will be his:

Man bites dog! Adam "Some Democrats Worry" Nagourney has written another of his by-the-numbers dissension-in-the-ranks hit pieces in today's New York Times. For the first time the target of his negative framing is the GOP, infighting over Terri Schiavo. (Essay question: Nagourney frames the participants as "conservatives" as opposed to "Republicans." What are the reasons and implications? Discuss.)

Nagourney has written any number of Democrats-are-flailing pieces, but never before about the Republicans. Does this represent a sea change for Nagourney? For the New York Times Washington bureau? Or has Karl Rove lost his ability to control the GOP message as Bush becomes a lame-duck president and the positioning for the 2008 GOP presidential ticket begins? After all, Nagourney is one of the kingmakers.

Whatever the case, it's interesting seeing the Nags turned on the GOP, with his infamous "some are worried" constructions:

The vote by Congress to allow the federal courts to take over the Terri Schiavo case has created distress among some conservatives who say that lawmakers violated a cornerstone of conservative philosophy by intervening in the ruling of a state court. . . . Some more moderate Republicans are also uneasy. . . .

In interviews over the past two days, conservatives who expressed concern about the turn of events in Congress stopped short of condemning the vote in which overwhelming majorities supported the Schiavo bill, and they generally applauded the goal of trying to keep Ms. Schiavo alive.

It's personally entertaining when it's the other side exposed to Nags's sloppy writing, but that's no real defense for the method. The sad thing is that Nagourney could be saved if once, just once, an editor cut out the generalizations. But that's not ever going to happen, is it?

The Cunctator

posted by michael  1:51:30 PM  
tell me about it []  

 

Objectivity, propaganda, and honest brokers. Digby has some reaction over at Hullaballo to yesterday's post on the Dana Millbank thumbsucker and my offer of at least two cheers (based on a reading of press history) to partisanship in journalism.

It appears to me that some of the conditions that created the concept of "Objective Journalism" in the first place have strongly re-emerged. The right is not running a partisan press. It is running a corrupt partisan propaganda machine based on the techniques of public relations and paid for by big money interests. That's why I was a bit rueful in my piece the other day. I don't particularly want to be part of a propaganda machine. I have no problem being a fiery partisan and working hard to persuade people to my side. But outright lying for the cause turns my stomach. And that's what the other side does.

But at this point I am resigned to the idea that we are going to have a partisan media battle for the forseeeable future so I'm not fighting it. It may, as Michael suggests, turn out to be a good thing in the long run, revitalizing our political system and getting people engaged. In the meantime, however, I would very much like the allegedly non-aligned media to come out from behind their absurd notion that they are objective because "both sides complain so they must be doing something right" and simply report when people are not presenting the facts accurately. That's all I want. When you have the government, business and the radical right consistently cooking the truth you really need somebody, somewhere who can be an honest broker of the facts.

A comment I left over at Digby's joint properly belongs in this space as well. To wit: The phrase Digby uses, "honest broker of the facts," makes an extremely apt contrast with "objective," an ideological term rapidly and I think rightly becoming discredited. And it brings up the thought, which was lurking in the background of my earlier post (and which a late-night writing spell did nothing to help articulate), that we may be witnessing the birth of an opportunity, against a flagrantly propagandistic right-wing media, for a responsible left-wing media to assume the honest broker's role for at least a significant piece of the American electorate.

Not only don't we want to lie for the cause, it's against our interests to do so. We don't need to become propagandists to fight the propaganda wars. I think to the extent that it's fair in the way it assesses antithetical perspectives, and forthright and transparent in its arguments from fact, a left media has a chance at establishing trust, where Fox and the like have already flagrantly thrown away any opportunity at that, at least for an audience that hasn't already drunk Roger Ailes' Kool-Aid. The discourse that's emerged within the left-liberal blogosphere seems to me, by and large, a model for the style of engagement that might well be able to gain a wider (and more politically salient) reach than we now have.

And in the "by the way" department, Digby discusses the history, and clarifies something I might (late night, as I said) have left vague:

I'm no expert, but my understanding is that the partisan press began to die out around the turn of the last century with the commercialization of the press and the big media barons (along with the general revulsion amongst the population at the corruption of the parties.) And I think that journalism reacted strongly to the new field of public relations in the 20's and 30's by developing this professional code of objectivity quite a while before the cold war.

The dying out of the partisan press took a long time, and has its beginnings in the early part of the last century: my reference to the Cold War had specifically to do with the installation of the "objective" press, which by then pretty much commanded the field, as a kind of constitutional partner with government. Down the (typically interesting) comments thread, one of Digby's other readers mentions the movie His Girl Friday, and the great scene in the press room after Earl Williams' escape, to talk about the earlier era's common understanding of the (flagrant) subjectivity of the print press. (The movie's critique, significantly, doesn't emerge from a standard of "objectivity," but of moral engagement—its horror is for the crushing uninterest of the "gentlemen of the press," to use a phrase Rosalind Russell makes scalding, in the human cost of their hunger for story.) Worth remembering that the movie was made as late as 1940, from the 1928 Hecht-MacArthur play. Incidentally, His Girl Friday is one of my all-time favorite Hollywood movies, possibly Cary Grant's best performance ever in a comedy, and it's not only a marvelous, vivid source for anyone interested in the history of American journalism, it's an extraordinary artistic document as well. (Ask me sometime about the virtuosity with which Howard Hawks creates a moral rhetoric of enclosed spaces in the film.) If you've never seen it, you must rent yourself a copy pronto. You won't be disappointed.

Thinking of the way HGF depicts the print press—and remembering how young journalism on radio was, still, at the time—it's worth noting that one piece of the history here that I haven't attested to is the extent to which radio played a hand in creating an expectation of objectivity, and led to the enforcement of a new standard on the older print press. (I think there's an argument to be made that the technology of broadcast, as well as its economics, lent itself very readily to tropes of "objective" journalistic practice, but it's beyond me at the moment to develop that MacLuhanesque hunch further.) There may be some relevance in this to the engagement of blogs with traditional media that we're seeing now.

posted by michael  5:16:51 PM  
tell me about it []  

 

All theocrats are pretty much alike, and Juan Cole has the goods today on how that applies to our plague of Congressional theocrats:

The cynical use by the US Republican Party of the Terri Schiavo case repeats, whether deliberately or accidentally, the tactics of Muslim fundamentalists and theocrats in places like Egypt and Pakistan. These tactics involve a disturbing tendency to make private, intimate decisions matters of public interest and then to bring the courts and the legislature to bear on them. President George W. Bush and Republican congressional leaders like Tom Delay have taken us one step closer to theocracy on the Muslim Brotherhood model.

The Muslim fundamentalists use a provision of Islamic law called "bringing to account" (hisba). As Al-Ahram weekly notes, "Hisba signifies a case filed by an individual on behalf of society when the plaintiff feels that great harm has been done to religion." ... In this practice, any individual can use the courts to intervene in the private lives of others.

Cole goes on to discuss a case in which a happily married couple were forced to flee Egypt rather than submit to court-ordered divorce when the husband, a scholar of Koranic law, was accused of sacrilege for having argued in favor of the equality of women. Uncomfortably reminiscent of the Frist-DeLay intervention in the private life of a married couple, eh?

All theocrats are pretty much alike, but some theocrats are bigger pansies than others. Witness Robert Brom, Catholic Archbishop of San Diego:

The head of the Roman Catholic Diocese of San Diego apologized Monday to the family of gay nightclub owner John McCusker, less than a week after decreeing that McCusker couldn't have a Catholic burial because of his "business activities," according to a statement released by McCusker's family.

In a stunning twist to a controversy that has created an uproar in the San Diego gay and Catholic communities, Bishop Robert Brom also promised to preside at a mass in memory of McCusker at The Immaculata Catholic church on the campus of the University of San Diego.

[Link thanks to Suburban Guerilla.] One good—or bad—PR turn deserves another, I guess. Think Bishop Bob's apology comes from an attack of conscience, or just an upset stomach? And here he thought a big public show of fag-hating was gonna earn him points ...

Speaking as an ex-Catholic, one of the many nasty legacies of the current Pope is his installation in the American episcopate of preening right-wingers like Brom, self-promoters who figure that intolerance sells, at least when it comes to advancement in the hierarchy. As a further instance, take (please!) Raymond Burke, Archbishop in my hometown of St. Louis, who attached himself to last year's "controversy" over John Kerry being denied communion as a pro-choice politician by suggesting in an interview that Catholics who voted for pro-choice candidates would put themselves in a state of sin requiring confession. Burke, too, was forced to "soften his stance" when he came in for criticism in the preparation of a voter guide for St. Louis Catholics that appeared ready to make Burke's earlier warning official. (The Bish, by the way, has his right-wing victimization tropes down pat: here he is suggesting to a like-minded audience that if you criticize the Catholic stance on abortion and homosexuality, you're persecuting the Church.)

posted by michael  9:28:17 AM  
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When I say that the chief function of the phony, parallel right-wing press is to exert a disciplinary influence over the neutral "mainstream" press, this is exactly the effect I'm talking about.

Recent polling data, in outlets from Fox News to the Washington Post, shows that an overwhelming majority of Americans back the position of Michael Schiavo, Terri's husband, that he, and not his wife's parents, should have the final say about removing the feeding tube of his wife, who has been severely brain-damaged and incapacitated for the past 15 years. The polling data seriously undercuts the notion that Americans are deeply divided on the Schiavo case. Yet ever since March 18, when Republicans began their unprecedented push to intervene legislatively in a state court case that had already been heard by 19 judges, the press has all but disregarded the polls. ...

Which is why it has been so startling to find so few mentions by major news outlets of the recent polls regarding the Schiavo controversy. For instance, last Friday at 11 a.m., a Fox News reporter referenced a poll from earlier this month conducted by Fox that found that a strong majority -- 59 to 24 percent -- would remove Terri Schiavo's feeding tube if they were her guardian. According to TVeyes, a digital, around-the-clock television monitoring service, that was the last time a Fox News reporter mentioned Fox's own poll. ... But perhaps even more shocking are ABC News and the Washington Post, which, like Fox News, commissioned their own poll regarding the matter, and yet, again like Fox, neglected to present the findings once the story became a political one. On March 15, when ABC devoted its "Nightline" program to the Schiavo story, host Chris Bury informed the audience, "A new ABC News poll suggests that a clear majority of Americans, 65 percent, believe that husbands and wives should have the final say in family disputes over life support. Only 25 percent say parents should make that decision. And when asked, 'Would you want to be kept alive in Terri Schiavo's condition?' an overwhelming number, 87 percent, said no." ...

The next morning, ABC's "Good Morning America" repeated the poll's finding. On March 17, however, as conservative Republicans in Congress announced that they would try to intervene on Terri's behalf by passing legislation, it became clear that the story was morphing from a legal and ethical one into a political one. That night ABC's "World News Tonight" covered the story, but suddenly any references to the network's own poll had disappeared. The next night the same program opened with three straight reports about the day's developments in the Schiavo story. But again, not once did anchor Peter Jennings or ABC reporters inform viewers that just a few days earlier 87 percent of Americans had said they would not want to go on living with a feeding tube if they were in Schiavo's condition, or that they sided with the husband in this saga by a margin of nearly 3-to-1.

Meanwhile, as of Sunday the Washington Post had not yet published the results of a poll it paid for in any of the nearly dozen stories it ran regarding Schiavo over the previous seven days. For Post readers, the data simply did not exist.

This isn't a question of bias, in any usual sense: it's a question of a corporate press utterly cowed by the institutional power of a right-wing media/Republican government complex, and incapable of understanding that to report facts, certain facts anyway, you have to be willing to set an opposition agenda. Fox, of course, coordinates directly with the DeLay Congress: but ABC News, the Washington Post, and the NYT coordinate with it in effect, by omission. Kinda puts things in context, doesn't it, when Dana Millbank (see the next post down) congratulates himself about how crucial the "truth-telling" function of the mainstream media is to honest, nonpartisan public discourse?

posted by michael  2:34:30 PM  
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In praise of partisanship. Reckless partisans are killing independent journalism—and if there's anything that pompous, self-satisfied bloviation can do to stop it, Dana Millbank (" My Bias for Mainstream News ") is the man for the job.

Millbank wants us to understand that the "independent press," the "traditional," "truth-telling" press, as he also calls it—by which he means (more accurately and less flatteringly) the sort of big, formally unaffiliated news corporations that employ the likes of Dana Millbank—is a national treasure, and that when we critique it for political bias we run the risk of destroying it, and probably democracy too in the bargain.

The Project for Excellence in Journalism asserts that, at a time of media fragmentation, the traditional press's truth telling is more important than ever. "In this new world, we continue to believe journalism is not becoming irrelevant," the new report argues. "The need to know what is true is all the greater, but discerning and communicating it is more difficult." But we're up against some short-sighted partisans who would prefer to do away with this truth-telling role.

Stephen Hayes of the conservative Weekly Standard protested in a November article that during the campaign, "journalists at the New York Times and the Washington Post and the television networks saw themselves not as conveyors of facts but as truth-squadders, toiling away on the gray margins of the political debate." These journalists, he continued, "fancy themselves thinkers, not mere scribes. They go to work every day to tell us not what the Bush administration has said, but what it has left unsaid."

Imagine that! An independent press looking for the truth rather than serving as stenographers for the powerful. It's a quaint tradition Americans would be wise not to abandon.

Want an emblematic instance of Mr. Millbank's fearless commitment to truth-telling? (That is, if the fact that a writer for the courtier Washington Post can manage, without embarrassment or evident self-consciousness, to disparage the practice of power-stenography doesn't already tell you all you need to know about the bankruptcy of Millbank's little game.) Try this on for size:

Two decades ago, the late senator-scholar Daniel Patrick Moynihan remarked that "everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts." Now, ideologues are claiming their own facts as well. ...

"Today, a host of new forms of communication offer a way for newsmakers to reach the public," the Project for Excellence in Journalism observed in its annual report last week. "Journalism is a shrinking part of a growing world of media. And since journalists are trained to be skeptics and aspire at least, in the famous phrase, to speak truth to power, journalism is the one source those who want to manipulate the public are most prone to denounce."

In place of the traditional press, outlets once seen as alternative have become a new mainstream media. Conservatives tune in to Rush Limbaugh (20 million weekly listeners) or Sean Hannity (12 million), and log on to the Drudge Report (claiming near 10 million visits a day). Liberals opt for the late-night commentary of Jon Stewart, Web sites such as Salon and Daily Kos, and Michael Moore's films. Those on either side can scan the Google news headlines and click on those that fit their worldview.

The intellectual dishonesty that can measure the entire lockstep apparatus of right-wing talk radio and Fox News against a few left-liberal websites, an anti-Bush movie, and the Daily Show, for the sole (self-aggrandizing) purpose of maintaining a stance of anti-ideological purity against the undifferentiated "partisan" hordes, would be staggering if it weren't par for the course for this sort of big-media thumbsucker. This is false equivalence escalated to the level of pathology. But Digby and Avedon Carol have already taken Millbank to the woodshed on the topic, so it's wasting words for me to go on about it further here.

What really interests me about the Millbank essay is its (utterly unexamined) myth of the press as some sort of neutral arbiter of the limits of public discourse—its implicit notion that the natural and historic role of the press is to establish the ground of fact on which, and only on which, legitimate partisan contest can take place. Absent that operation of the Fourth Estate, we're to imagine, we find ourselves in a kind of political Twilight Zone, "a postmodern morass," to quote Millbank again, "where there are no such things as facts, only competing perceptions of reality."

This is a myth that has a considerable hold on the imagination: better and more critical thinkers than Millbank attest to it. Kevin Drum, reviewing the Millbank piece, worries that the "relentless barrage of partisan media criticism in the blogosphere" is "unhealthy," that its "eventual result will be an almost universal ability to ignore any news report you don't like simply by claiming it's the result of bias." (Isn't the ability to ignore news we don't like pretty much a universal trait of human psychology already?) And Digby confesses that he, too, "struggles" with the issue of partisan media critique, "because I really don't want to have two competing discourses out there. It's a risky and frightening thing to do and I honestly don't know where it will lead." (Though Digby, at least, realizing that Rupert Murdoch isn't going to just pull up stakes and leave the field because we'd all like our nonpartisan press back, argues that the Left has no choice but to fight fire with fire.)

And to Kevin and Digby I say, stop worrying. A little historical perspective works wonders here. The simple truth is that, for most of its proper existence—from the beginnings of mass-distribution journalism in the mid-nineteenth century to roughly the start of World War II—the American press has been explicitly partisan. Newspapers were often the overt organs of political machines; when they weren't, they differentiated themselves for their audiences based on ideology and partisan identification. Competition was fierce, and was very often a competition over what facts were actually facts, and over what sorts of things ought to be reported. (Strangely enough, this situation was understood by no one during the period as some sort of "postmodern" hell. Nor was it considered a challenge to the very possibility of democratic self-government.) The neutral, "objective" press that we now think of as a natural property of democratic civil society is, broadly speaking, an invention of the corporate, managerial capitalism of the twentieth century, and tracks its growth.

As I've written previously, the elevation of the "objective" press to almost an institution of state, a semi-official fourth branch in the American constitutional system, is a phenomenon of the post-World War II period. Like so much of what we regard now as the natural order of political things, in other words, the constitutional place of our so-called mainstream press is an artifact of the Cold War. In its pose of objectivity, the corporate press had a central role to play during that struggle: both in the maintenance of the internal consensus necessary to confront the Soviet Union over a long period, and as a support for, and embodiment of, the claim of Western liberal democracy (over against Communism) to represent a universal, historically unconditioned solution to the question of political and social freedom.

Well, the Cold War is over (though the Bush administration is trying for a replay, in its global war on Terror), and so is the era of consensus. Even if we hoped to return to consensus (really an ideological fantasy, which was never all it was cracked up to be), we live in a post-broadcast information economy now: the machinery to maintain consensus doesn't work as it used to. No point mourning the situation.

Nor is it worth mourning. When did the consensus-era press ever really speak the truth to power, except from the fringes, or opportunistically? (Not even Watergate, the press's shining constitutional moment, would have been Watergate without a Democratic Congress determined to use its investigative power against the Executive. Consider Iran-Contra as an instructive counter-example.) The ground of "fact" that we imagine the unaffiliated press to be responsible for policing is the ground of the unexamined assumption, the generally-agreed-upon. Fact in itself has no power to transform the life of the nation until and unless it becomes truth, political truth, made so by people committed to political engagement. To the extent that belief in a neutral press lulls us into believing that political truth is the result of some sort of technical or institutional process, something properly entrusted to a professional elite, to that extent it lulls us from our responsibility as citizens in a democracy to marry information to action.

As far as I'm concerned, the best if not the only encouraging feature of American journalism at the moment is the blogosphere's partisan engagement with the mainstream press. Let disagreement, even unfair disagreement, run rampant: we need disagreement if we're to have democracy. Granted, the Right—which has bought itself an entire parallel press, and has already begun extending political coordination into its share of the blog space—has an enormous head start of us. But the weak have won asymmetric wars in the past, and in any case we have no alternative but to fight. And while we still have the chance to fight, we ought to be glad of it.

posted by michael  12:05:46 AM  
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Darwish gets interestinger. On Wednesday I posted a dossier on Muhammed abu Darwish, a Lebanese "businessman" who shows up in the background of the story of the assassination of American arms broker Dale Stoffel last December in Iraq. Today I find that Rodger, who blogs (from the Right) at This isn't writing, it's typing and has been following the Stoffel story himself, has made a fascinating catch (I'm kicking myself for not having found it on my own) that, at the very least, complicates my suggestion that Darwish is some kind of bagman for the anti-Syrian Lebanese right. Turns out he's not just a businessman, he's a politician. This report, by Lebanonwire, has him the founder of an ostensibly pro-Syrian Shiite political "group":

On Aug. 1, 2004, a new grouping was proclaimed in the southern Lebanese town of Musseileh, only a short distance from [Lebanese House Speaker Nabih] Berri's residence. Issam Abu Darwish, a prominent Shiite businessman who is close to Speaker Nabih Berri and also a close friend of former President Amin Gemayel, proclaimed on Sunday the birth of a new Shiite group called al-Kiyan (entity) Gathering, AS SAFIR and daily AL MUSTAQBAL said August 2.

"I would like to point out that our friends and contacts are numerous ... We will put up with those who fought against our group before it was even born. And regardless of the obstacles we will work because the nation requires sacrifices regardless of the price," Abu Darwish said.

"We are not a party and we will never be one. We are not against any of the forces existing on the political scene and not an alternative to anyone. We don't want to cancel the others... However, we will be in the forefront of the march to defend the nation, which is passing through very dangerous phases and circumstances," he added. ...

The new group underscored the need for excellent and distinctive relations with Syria, the main power broker in Lebanon with some 20,000 troops deployed in several Lebanese regions. "Syria saved Lebanon from being partitioned and backed the process of liberating the south..." Abu Darwish said urging an end to hostile campaigns against Damascus.

What to make of this? Why would Amin Gemayel, the anti-Syrian, Christian ex-president of Lebanon, be mentioned as a close associate of a pro-Syrian Shiite businessman? Who's playing what kind of game? Impossible to say—we've gone well outside the penumbra of my dim understanding of Lebanese politics. But note the headline of a second Lebanonwire piece that mentions Darwish's organization (it appeared two weeks after the first), inter alia: "Shiite ranks dominanted by political rivalries, dissent," an article that focuses on "signs of dissension and rebellion against the prevailing state of the community, including internal disagreements, rivalries and attempts at monopolizing leadership." In fact, the lead of the prior article may be as much clue as we're going to get here:

Attempts are being made to break up the monopoly of leadership of the Muslim Shiite community, the largest single community in Lebanon, according to a report published in the liberal daily Al Balad on Aug. 1. "There are signs of movement and action within the Shiite community aimed at changing the traditional equation whereby Amal Movement and Hizbullah are the monopolizing leadership of the 1.2 million-strong Shiite community," said Ali al-Amin, Al Balad's expert on Shiite affairs.

That's some kind of opaque politics they've got themselves in Lebanon. Could this thing get any further into Graham Greene territory?

posted by michael  3:58:27 PM  
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Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Blogger. Tough to believe, but I'm not making this one up, really. Pretty much all you need to know about Jeff Jarvis's ear for language—not to mention his political-marketing savvy—is revealed in his enthusiasm for the German term "Volksmedia" as a fancy name for the corps de bloggers.

It has a funky, retro, populist, Volkswagen feel, of course, with that buggy attitude. NYTimes Executive Editor Bill Keller complained that "citizens' media" -- my moniker of choice, was a bit pretentious or at leas [sic] presumptuous. I don't disagree. He proposed "people's media," but that seemed all too Internationale to me. I once called it "populist media," but that brings too much baggage.

Ain't that just like a crypto-rightist? Populist has "too much baggage": but Volk is apparently baggage-free.

posted by michael  10:25:16 AM  
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You had me at goodbye. Exiting his stint at Josh Marshall's blog, Jonathan Chait has to go and ruin the good impression he made writing against Social Security privatization. His (intended) final word exhorts us all to go read and subscribe to The New Republic: and some reaction to that prompts an add-on:

I've gotten several emails from readers who claim they won't read me, or won't read TNR, because of this or that disagreeable position we've taken. To be perfectly frank, if you think like this I pity you. Why on Earth should anybody confine their reading to those writers with whom they agree on everything? The best way to learn is to read arguments you disagree with. I voraciously consume analysis with which I disagree, both on the right and on the left.

TNR, more than any other magazine, publishes a range of dissenting views. Yes, we editorially criticized Howard Dean and supported the Iraq war. But we've also run plenty of pro-Dean and anti-war articles, including prominent cover stories. It's fine if TNR isn't your cup of tea. But if you spurn it or any other voice solely on ideological grounds, you're dooming yourself to small-mindedness.

Sorry to get preachy. I just find this mentality baffling.

Sorry to get preachy, but I just find this kind of condescending self-righteousness shit-stupid.

Do they require some kind of training in political obtuseness at neo-lib school, Jonathan? Possibly the reason that people like me don't read you, or that rag you used your last TPM post to hawk, is because of your habit of gratuitously insulting us, viz. this from one of your earlier TPM posts:

Marshall [Wittman,of the Bull Moose] responded [to criticism of his whitewashing Lieberman's cloture vote on the bankruptcy bill] by launching a counterattack on "dogmatic idealogues" and "hyperspace lefties" who gang up on Lieberman. That's fine as far as it goes. I actually agree with Marshall and the DLC on the suicidal purity of the Democratic party's left wing, embodied by the Howard Dean movement and its fanatical internet contingent, even if I disagree with his support for Lieberman in particular.

You can disagree with support for Lieberman all you want, Jonathan, but here's a clue: your employer is the spiritual and institutional home of Joementum, and has been since long before Joementum even had a name. I don't read TNR, not because I'm afraid that its "range of dissenting views" will open my narrow, blinkered little left-wing perspective: I don't read it because your shit is tired. I don't give money to TNR for the same reason I won't give money to Lieberman in 2006, or Biden (or Hillary) in 2008: because I want the (corporatist, Vichy) tendency you represent in the Democratic party to wither and die.

I gave up my subscription to TNR years ago (many years now), and reading Jonathan Chait this morning renews my lack of regret over that decision. I don't need TNR to find analysis I disagree with, and I don't need it to save me from smallness of mind. [Since Chait's only prior blogging experience was running a TNR anti-Dean blog, he may be unaware of just how easy it is to find occasions for disagreement in this opinion space.] But there's the rub: TNR types like Chait don't really credit honest disagreement, not when it comes from their left. They spend a lot of time congratulating themselves on how much braver they are, how much wider their ideological horizons, than us nasty lefty dogmatists: but their "bravery" is only brave on the southpaw side, and their "broad-mindedness" is really just a reckless willingness to truck with the Right. Leave them to their Republican and crypto-Republican friends. Meanwhile the only goddamn good being done in the Democratic party will continue to be done by, and under pressure from, the organized Democratic left.

So long, Jonathan, and don't let the door hit you on the ass on your way out of history.

posted by michael  9:39:37 AM  
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So who is Mohammed abu Darwish? Well, for one thing, he seems to have an affinity for armored vehicles. More than a year before he shows up in the murky background of the story of Iyad Allawi's show-pony tank division (see the post below for background), he was involved in an odd little smuggling episode: Darwish was arrested in January 2003 at the Baghdad airport, where he was a security official, for attempting to transport (presumably for laundering purposes) almost $13 million in new Iraqi dinars with him to Lebanon. (Darwish and his co-defendants were all let off the hook, by the way, when a Lebanese court dismissed charges against them last year.)

Darwish told the Times and others that he had been authorized by the American-led authority to take the money to Lebanon, where he intended to purchase armored cars to be delivered to Baghdad.

That story was subsequently backed up by Paul Bremer, the top American official in Iraq at the time, who said that the funds were for an urgent purchase of armored vehicles and security equipment.

Eddie Curran, Mobile Register,"Kidnapped in Iraq?"

Darwish has pull with more than just Paul Bremer. The smuggling incident reveals the further extent of his patronage:

The impounded plane was piloted by Mazen Bsat, a prominent Beirut businessman who owns a chain of pharmacies and a company that leases planes for charter flights. With him was Mr. Darwish and Richard Jreissati, who held the portfolio for foreign affairs of the Christian right-wing Lebanese Forces Militia during the country's civil war. Waiting to meet the plane was Michel Mkattaf, who owns a foreign exchange business and is married to the only daughter of a former Lebanese president, Amin Geymael.

And on the subject of security at the Baghdad airport, who do we find Darwish associated with in his capacity as an official there? Again, from the Mobile Register:

Abu Darwish, according to [a lawsuit filed by an Alabama-based disaster recovery firm], formed the Lebanese company called Custer Battles Levant that is co-owned by Custer and Battles.

That would be well-known wired-in GOP fraudsters Scott Custer, a former Army ranger, and Mike Battles, a former CIA officer, whose McLean, VA-based Custer Battles won the contract to provide security at Baghdad airport without ever having previously won a government contract and without any prior experience providing site security. [Interestingly enough, in context with the smuggling incident, Custer Battles also holds a contract (estimated allowable profit of $20 million) to support Iraqi currency distribution!] Among the litany of complaints about how Custer Battles does business in Iraq, it's worth noting here that the firm stands accused of creating a variety of sham companies that would allow CB to inflate expenses on its airport security contract.

In other words, Mr. Darwish is one connected guy. He seems to be a node that links together, on the one hand, a bunch of shady American "businessmen" with ample CIA and military-intelligence ties (and some schooling in creative ways to make money disappear), and on the other a set of wealthy, politically significant right-wing Lebanese Christians. I think you can see where I'm going with this.

Are we looking at a simple corruption story here? Or are we seeing the trace of a program in which American intelligence services are siphoning money from the Iraq occupation to favored elements in the Lebanese anti-Syria coalition? The skim off a $300 million tank-division project can fund an awful lot of political agitation. The assembled facts don't demonstrate it, certainly: but, especially in light of our history in the region, they make it awfully difficult not to want to ask the question.

Update:A somewhat head-spinning addition to the Darwish dossier is posted above.

posted by michael  11:35:20 AM  
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The LA Times has lifted the corner of a veil covering some very skanky doings in Iraq, but they're not giving you a very clear picture yet of what's underneath.

Today's LAT offers another installment in the story of the death of Dale Stoffel, an American weapons dealer contracted last summer to provide hardware for an Iraqi Army tank division, an expensive and militarily useless toy that PM Iyad Allawi wanted to give himself as a display of his political pull. Stoffel and a partner were killed early last December, apparently an assassination (his vehicle rammed by another, then fired upon), just days after Stoffel insisted, in a letter to a senior Pentagon official and in a meeting with aides to Rick Santorum (Stoffel was a constituent), that Iraqi Defense Ministry officials were raking off kickbacks from the nearly $300 million project. (The LAT's initial reporting on the story is here.) It's a nasty episode in the history of business under the U.S. occupation; here are the key facts:

• Stoffel, an ex-Special Forces arms broker with a network of contacts in former Soviet Bloc countries, was awarded a no-bid contract by Army Lt. Gen. David Petraeus, who was tasked with getting the armored division outfitted before the Jan. 30 elections.
• Stoffel, who had "a long history" of acting "on behalf of U.S. intelligence agencies to covertly buy foreign military equipment for research and testing by the U.S. military," according to today's LAT, was doing business under at least two different company identities unrelated to weapons brokering or military technology, Wye Oak Technology, a web development consultancy, and CLI Corporation, a coal and mineral processing company. (There's more about this, and a good compendium of information in the case as of late January, here.) The "broker's agreement" for outfitting the armored division was awarded to Wye Oak—which, as a Web developer myself, I can tell you is an unusual contract for a Web agency to win.
• Stoffel was required by Iraqi Deputy Defense Minister Mashal Sarraf to conduct all financial transactions through a third party, Raymond Zayna. Stoffel alleged to the U.S. military that Zeyna was charging a 3% fee on all transactions passing through his hands (which he thought was being kicked back to the Defense Ministry), and also trying to force him to use subcontractors who Stoffel thought were under the control of Zayna and Iraqi officials. At the time of his death, Stoffel was awaiting payment, through Zayna, of nearly $25 million issued to him by the Iraqi Defense Ministry; the money has disappeared.
• Petraeus's office has been lying to the press, as the LAT report makes clear today, about the extent of its involvement in setting up the Iraqi tank division. In spite of Stoffel's warnings, and his subsequent murder, the U.S. military is continuing to work with Zayna, who is now doing "construction work on a U.S.-controlled military base outside Baghdad related to the project."

The Times report strongly implies that the U.S. military may have unwittingly signed Stoffel's death warrant, which is perhaps why it's tried to maintain the appearance of distance from the whole affair:

"When told that there was a holdup regarding refurbishment of the armored vehicles, Lt. Gen. Petraeus did ask the ministry to get on with whatever they were going to do with the contract so that the stand-up of the mechanized brigade would not be delayed," Alvarez said.

By late November, Stoffel had returned to the United States to seek help in getting his payment. He asked Pentagon officials and Santorum's office to pressure the Iraqis to release the $24.7 million to him. ...

U.S. military officials informed Zayna about the allegations of corruption, according to several people familiar with the matter. British Brig. Gen. David Clements summoned the parties to a Dec. 5 meeting in Iraq. Afterward, Clements ordered Zayna to release the money to Stoffel, sources said.

Ugly, yes? Arms dealing, graft, assassination and military coverup? But while the Times primarily sees this as part of the larger story of business corruption and lax financial oversight within the American occupation, it's uncovered a nugget of information that suggests the real story lies elsewhere:

In September, Stoffel signed a limited power of attorney allowing Zayna to "arrange financing and request banking guarantees" for the contract, records show. Zayna was to act as a broker between Stoffel and the Defense Ministry, reconciling invoices and disbursing payments.

Another Lebanese businessman, Mohammed abu Darwish, worked with Zayna's firm, General Investment Group, on the contract and participated in meetings with task force officials, e-mails and interviews show. In an unrelated case in September, the Pentagon barred Darwish from receiving future American contracts because of his alleged role in a scheme to defraud the U.S. of millions of dollars on a security contract in Iraq, according to a U.S. Air Force document.

That name, Mohammed abu Darwish, is an extremely interesting find. Darwish, not Zayna, who seems to be serving as Darwish's cutout in this business, is where the story acquires another dimension. And since this is getting long, having provided you the background, I'll tease out that extra dimension in the next post.

posted by michael  10:28:38 AM  
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Speaking of quid pro quos, just noticed this from a couple of days ago in the Houston Chronicle:

Correspondent Scott Pelley talks with former Enron Corp. Chairman Ken Lay in an interview that will air Sunday on 60 Minutes, CBS confirmed Wednesday.

The interview is in conjunction with the release of the book Conspiracy of Fools, written by New York Times reporter Kurt Eichenwald.

"Although there are a number of conclusions in the book with which Mr. Lay strongly disagrees, he believes that Mr. Eichenwald's book has done a better job than the other Enron books of explaining what caused the collapse of Enron," said Kelly Kimberly, a publicist for Lay.

That's a hell of a nice mutual back-scratching club Kurt and Kenny Boy have got going on there. Gotta love the whole CBS/NYT/Random House synergy, too.

Tell me again where I was wrong about the ethical compromises inherent in this sort of reporting, willya, Kurt?

posted by michael  7:14:42 PM  
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Kurt cashes in. In December, just as I was easing my way back into blogging, NYT business reporter Kurt Eichenwald favored me with a visit: more specifically, he came by to call me a liar and an incompetent for a post ("so loaded with falsehoods it is ridiculous") I'd written months earlier reacting to his splashy, Sunday-A1 exclusive interview with Ken Lay, then soon to be indicted for Enron crimes. [Having left a drive-by accusation, containing no specifics to back it up (supposedly an earlier comment had, but he hadn't been successful in posting it, or something), Eichenwald then never bothered to respond to my thoroughly polite email asking for clarification, and offering to correct the record if he were to show me that any of his complaints had merit: behavior which as far as I'm concerned entitles me to consider him a putz.]

One thing I wrote in the offending post was this:

A1 placement in the Sunday New York Times is a PR gold standard; Ken Lay's media people are definitely earning their bones. It's a transaction that works for all concerned: Ken Lay gets to peddle his story in an enormously influential venue, with a tacitly understood guarantee of sympathy; having the interview conducted by someone with a reputation as a ferreter-out of financial shenanigans is an especially fine PR touch, lending as it does an extra sheen of credibility to the proceedings. And Eichenwald, who's hawked his reporting in two previous books, including a volume about corruption at Archer Daniels Midland, gets a plum interview and, who knows, a leg up on his next shattering corporate exposé.

Well, color me prognosticated! There taking up half yesterday's Business front page, complete with big full-color illustration, were excerpts from Kurt Eichenwald's forthcoming book on Enron (Conspiracy of Fools: A True Story). Which means that there's at least one thing I wrote that Eichenwald can't have been accusing me of getting wrong.

In fact, yesterday's excerpts (caution, non rot-safe NYT link) are only the first of two parts: we're promised more flogging of Eichenwald's book in next Sunday's Business section. [I can't help wondering whether this very pricey gift promotional real estate from his bosses gets figured in at all in Eichenwald's compensation. Money in the bank, boy. What author with a book to push wouldn't kill for this kind of treatment?] And, as you might have guessed—as I might have guessed, given my earlier looks at Eichenwald's coverage—Ken Lay, faithful, ill-used, unculpably-out-of-it Ken Lay, is front and center:

Ken Lay settled into his black Mercedes 600 SL on the morning of Oct. 24, 2001, easing out of his parking space at the Huntingdon condominiums. ... Ahead, the morning sun rose behind a glittering tower that defined the architectural rhythm of Houston's skyline. It was the headquarters of Enron - his Enron - the once-obscure pipeline company that in a matter of years had been transformed into a politically connected energy colossus. ...

His company was under attack; Lay was sure of it. Stock traders who had bet that Enron's share price would fall were whispering rumors - no, lies - about his company. The Wall Street Journal was running a series of articles suggesting Enron had played games with its finances.

They just don't understand.

By all rights, Lay shouldn't have been stuck with the mess. He had stepped down as chief executive the prior February, handing the reins to Jeffrey Skilling, the brains behind Enron's growth. Then, in August, with almost no warning, Skilling resigned. The bombshell had left Lay with little choice; he headed back to his old post.

If any better treatment could have come for Ken Lay out of his (and his team's, let's not forget) cooperating with Eichenwald, I can't imagine what it would be.

As for the rest: well, the Random House blurb calls the book "a you-are-there glimpse behind closed doors ... an all-true financial and political thriller of cinematic proportions," and the excerpts read like Eichenwald is sweating hard to deliver on the marketing-speak. (And he must have been sweating anyway, to get this on the shelves before the likely summer date of Lay's trial.) The style is all breathless short sentences and exclamation marks: everyone rushes, everything happens at a frantic pace (and a worrying one at that, considering how many of the protagonists are overweight middle-aged white guys). It's like Boy's Adventure Crony Capitalism, or something. Let this passage stand for the whole:

Waiting inside the doorway of the conference room, Whalley saw Palmer dashing toward him. How bad was it this time? He darted over to his public relations chief.

"What do they know?" he asked hurriedly.

Palmer looked at Whalley and said nothing. Whalley noticed Palmer's eyes were watering. Palmer's mouth filled with saliva as a wave of nausea washed over him. He was about to vomit, right in front of Whalley.

He turned, dashing into the men's room. He ran to the farthest sink.

Hell, if one more of these guys dashes anywhere, I'm gonna hurl. Based on what I've seen so far of his stylistic and intellectual accomplishments, I'll have to recommend giving Kurt's latest opus a pass.

posted by michael  5:50:35 PM  
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The torture regime. Quoted in Emily Bazelon's Mother Jones article about detainee abuse in Afghanistan, former Army interrogator Chris Mackey talks about a technique called "monstering," a technique he thought of at the time, in early 2002, as being on the "absolute edge" of permissible interrogation practice:

His team realized that they often got their best information in the last half-hour of a 10-hour session, and they concluded that fatigue was their best available weapon. “We decided by committee that we couldn’t get away with sleep deprivation under the Geneva Convention,” Mackey says. “So we came up with this technique we called ‘monstering.’ We said that if you put one interrogator in with one prisoner and scrupulously gave them the same water and food and bathroom breaks, the interrogation could go on as long as the interrogator could stand it. Of course, we were hoping that the interrogator would be fully rested, whereas the prisoner would have just come off the battlefield.” ...

The Bush administration had decided at the beginning of the conflict that the Geneva Conventions did not apply to the Afghan detainees. But Mackey’s commander never told him of that decision, and Mackey worried that he could be disciplined for breaking the rules. “As part of your training as an interrogator, it’s hardwired into your system that a violation of the Geneva Convention will bring swift justice down on you,” he says. At one point, Mackey remembers, a military police official at Bagram suggested that the interrogators use dogs to scare the detainees. “He was a reservist from Michigan, where there’s a big Arab population, and he said that Arabs are terrified of dogs,” Mackey says. “I remember sitting in a hot pizza oven of an office, arguing with everyone, trying to figure out how we could do this. But we couldn’t—not out of any love for the enemy. We just thought we would get into trouble.”

It's remarkable that Mackey was unaware during his stint of the administration's withdrawal of Geneva Convention protections from Afghan detainees. Carolyn Wood, whose 519th MI Battalion replaced Mackey's unit at Bagram Control Point, was evidently less in the dark:

Wood rewrote the interrogation policy set by Mackey’s group, adding to it nine techniques not approved by military doctrine or included in Army field manuals. Her expanded list included “the use of dogs, stress positions, sleep management, [and] sensory deprivation,” according to an internal Pentagon investigation known as the Fay-Jones report; the report noted that other techniques, such as “removal of clothing and the use of detainee’s phobias,” were also used at Bagram.

The pattern suggested here seems to have obtained subsequently, in amplified form, in Iraq: an early, haphazard security regime, one mostly (but inconsistently) respectful of Geneva Conventions restraints, is replaced over time by a regime operated at much higher pressure and with a much greater bias toward rationalizing abuse.

Like Guantanamo commandant Geoffrey Miller, whose mission to review intelligence collection in the Iraqi gulag prefaced the worst of the abuses there, Carolyn Wood and the abusive 519th MI were known quantities when they were dispatched to Abu Ghraib. Looking over my own posts on the detainee torture scandal from last summer, what strikes me strongest is how rapidly, and with what an extraordinary convergence of activity, the torture regime in Iraq seems to have been precipitated. Consider what is on the record as happening within a very short span of weeks in late summer - early fall of 2003:

• Sometime in the summer, Maj. Gen. Barbara Fast, from her post as second-in-command of the Army intelligence school at Fort Huachuca, is given command of American intelligence in Iraq. (During her tenure at Fort Huachuca, the school features a program called "Intel Support to Counter Terrorism," which offers "lessons learned from Guantanamo to our folks in Afghanistan and Iraq.")
• At the end of August, Miller is sent by Rumsfeld deputy Stephen Cambone from Guantanamo to consult on interrogation and detention procedures in Iraq.
• Pentagon officials direct Fast to bring the abusive methods of a top-secret Battlefield Interrogation Facility (BIF) at Baghdad airport, run by Delta forces, to Abu Ghraib and other facilities. The BIF may be one of the black-ops Special Access Programs recounted by Seymour Hersh last May in the New Yorker.
• Sometime in September, Gen. Fast brings Carolyn Wood and the 519th MI to Abu Ghraib to set up the prison's Joint Interrogation and Debriefing Center.
• On Oct. 9, the JIDC issues a "memorandum for the record" allowing wide latitude for abusive and degrading interrogation techniques, including the use of military dogs to intimidate prisoners. The techniques are similar to those written by Wood for Bagram; they also echo Guantanamo practices. This seems to be the formal beginning of the ugliest period of torture at Abu Ghraib.

Does anything in this set of events suggest an undirected process, the work of a few rogue elements? Do these events suggest, in fact, anything other than a determined and coordinated effort from on high to create a systematically abusive detention regime in Iraq?

posted by michael  10:54:15 PM  
tell me about it []  

 

Bagram to Abu Ghraib. Yesterday's front-pager by Douglas Jehl on the horrible beating deaths of two Afghan prisoners more than two years ago ("Army Details Scale of Abuse of Prisoners in an Afghan Jail") has been receiving some passionate comment since it appeared:

Two Afghan prisoners who died in American custody in Afghanistan in December 2002 were chained to the ceiling, kicked and beaten by American soldiers in sustained assaults that caused their deaths, according to Army criminal investigative reports that have not yet been made public.

One soldier, Pfc. Willie V. Brand, was charged with manslaughter in a closed hearing last month in Texas in connection with one of the deaths, another Army document shows. Private Brand, who acknowledged striking a detainee named Dilawar 37 times, was accused of having maimed and killed him over a five-day period by "destroying his leg muscle tissue with repeated unlawful knee strikes."

The attacks on Mr. Dilawar were so severe that "even if he had survived, both legs would have had to be amputated," the Army report said, citing a medical examiner.

The reports, obtained by Human Rights Watch, provide the first official account of events that led to the deaths of the detainees, Mullah Habibullah and Mr. Dilawar, at the Bagram Control Point, about 40 miles north of Kabul. The deaths took place nearly a year before the abuses at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.

Among those implicated in the killings at Bagram were members of Company A of the 519th Military Intelligence Battalion, from Fort Bragg, N.C. The battalion went on to Iraq, where some members established the interrogation unit at Abu Ghraib and have been implicated in some abuses there.

Despite the heavy breathing about "reports that have not yet been made public" and "first official accounts," this is the Times playing catchup, and not very vigorously at that. Everything in this report, except for a few minor details, has been previously and even copiously reported, as Jeralyn at TalkLeft reminds us. One has the distinct impression that the HRW document release is being used by the Times as cover (perhaps feeling that the media/political winds have shifted a bit?), allowing it to ease its way back into a story it briefly handled, then abjectly dropped, last summer.

Typically, the crucial information, the information that points to the planned, systematic nature of the abuse, gets buried after the jump, and Jehl merely waves at it in passing:

Among those mentioned in the new reports is Capt. Carolyn A. Wood, the chief military intelligence officer at Bagram. The reports conclude that Captain Wood lied to investigators by saying that shackling prisoners in standing positions was intended to protect interrogators from harm. In fact, the report says, the technique was used to inflict pain and sleep deprivation. ...

Captain Wood, who commanded Company A in Afghanistan, later helped to establish the interrogation and debriefing center at Abu Ghraib. Two Defense Department reports have said that a list of interrogation procedures she drew up there, which went beyond those approved by Army commanders, may have contributed to abuses at Abu Ghraib.

That's all Jehl can give us on the genuinely significant subject raised by this report, which is the preparation of torture tactics in Afghanistan prior to their importation to Iraq. (In a stunning display of credulity—or what would be a stunning display of credulity, if we weren't dealing with the New York Times—Jehl pre-emptively absolves the chain of command of responsibility for Wood's interrogation procedures, relying on DoD reports to do so as if they were neutral statements of fact.) If you want to read somebody really getting the Afghan abuse story, and working to find the thread that Jehl so clumsily fails to pick up here, read Emily Bazelon in the March/April issue of Mother Jones, "From Bagram to Abu Ghraib."

In August 2002, ... the detention unit in Bagram [was turned over] to the 519th Military Intelligence Battalion from Fort Bragg, North Carolina. The new head of the interrogation unit was Captain Carolyn Wood, a 34-year-old officer and 10-year Army veteran. Wood rewrote the interrogation policy set by Mackey’s group, adding to it nine techniques not approved by military doctrine or included in Army field manuals. Her expanded list included “the use of dogs, stress positions, sleep management, [and] sensory deprivation,” according to an internal Pentagon investigation known as the Fay-Jones report; the report noted that other techniques, such as “removal of clothing and the use of detainee’s phobias,” were also used at Bagram. ...

By the summer of 2003, it was the 519th’s turn to leave Bagram. Despite [Times reporter Carlotta] Gall’s report [on detainee deaths] and the ongoing criminal investigation, they were redeployed to run another prison—Abu Ghraib. There, Wood proceeded to implement new interrogation rules that, as a Pentagon report later noted, were “remarkably similar” to those she had developed at Bagram. ...Chris Mackey [a reserve MI officer at Bagram prior to the 519 deployment] had trained with Wood before she got her command at Bagram. He says that while he was “gravely disappointed” when he found out about her changes to the interrogation rules, he understands what might have been going on. “After she took over, the stakes got very high,” he says. “We went from losing three or four soldiers a month to scores of them. She must have been under a tremendous amount of pressure.”

Mackey also says he couldn’t imagine that Wood’s superiors didn’t know what she was doing. “I don’t think it was sinister and programmatic,” Mackey says of the military’s handling of detainees in Afghanistan and Iraq. “But there was horrible incompetence at the leadership and oversight level. People were aware of what we were doing because we were open. [The prison] was practically a Disney ride, with lots of higher-ups and officials coming through. But the common response we got was, Aren’t you kind of babying them?”

[Chris Mackey, actually a pseudonym for the Army interrogator who wrote The Interrogators: Inside the Secret War against Al Qaeda, seems like a very significant informant.] Under these circumstances it makes no sense whatever to regard Wood, as Jehl is evidently satisfied to do, as a rogue officer. At the very least, the dispatch of the 519th MI to Abu Ghraib following its documented participation in atrocities at Bagram was an act of criminal negligence on the part of the higher command. At most—well, I'll talk about the "most" scenario in a follow-on.

posted by michael  12:37:09 PM  
tell me about it []  

 

The propaganda regime. The Sunday Times is devoting major space to a sweeping examination of one of the pillars of the Bush program to institutionalize a controlled media, the video news release (VNR). This is a long-standing corporate public relations practice—a thoroughly corrupt practice, which succeeds only to the extent that all parties conspire to keep the public in the dark about it—being extended into the realm of government propaganda; we're now almost at the anniversary of this story first entering consciousness, in the flap over Karen Ryan's work for HHS shilling the Medicare drug benefits bill. Haven't had time to digest the piece yet, but it obviously gets the key points right, and makes them right up front.

Under the Bush administration, the federal government has aggressively used a well-established tool of public relations: the prepackaged, ready-to-serve news report that major corporations have long distributed to TV stations to pitch everything from headache remedies to auto insurance. In all, at least 20 federal agencies, including the Defense Department and the Census Bureau, have made and distributed hundreds of television news segments in the past four years, records and interviews show. Many were subsequently broadcast on local stations across the country without any acknowledgement of the government's role in their production. ...

Federal agencies are forthright with broadcasters about the origin of the news segments they distribute. The reports themselves, though, are designed to fit seamlessly into the typical local news broadcast. In most cases, the "reporters" are careful not to state in the segment that they work for the government. Their reports generally avoid overt ideological appeals. Instead, the government's news-making apparatus has produced a quiet drumbeat of broadcasts describing a vigilant and compassionate administration.

Some reports were produced to support the administration's most cherished policy objectives, like regime change in Iraq or Medicare reform. Others focused on less prominent matters ... They often feature "interviews" with senior administration officials in which questions are scripted and answers rehearsed. Critics, though, are excluded, as are any hints of mismanagement, waste or controversy. 

An examination of government-produced news reports offers a look inside a world where the traditional lines between public relations and journalism have become tangled, where local anchors introduce prepackaged segments with "suggested" lead-ins written by public relations experts. It is a world where government-produced reports disappear into a maze of satellite transmissions, Web portals, syndicated news programs and network feeds, only to emerge cleansed on the other side as "independent" journalism.

David Barstow and Robin Stein, " Under Bush, a New Age of Prepackaged News "

That last is an extremely telling point, indeed the crux of the whole matter. The news distribution system, loosely coupled as it is, serves admirably to launder propaganda as "news," while allowing almost everyone involved in the pipeline the opportunity to disclaim responsibility. Increasingly, that potential in the system is being used to rationalize it, to create ready channels for the quiet circulation of managed opinion. Yet it should be self-evident that a practice that depends on the public being kept gullible as to the origins of the "news" it's fed can only be useful for gulling the public.

The article catches up with Karen Ryan, by the way, still unrepentant: her complete inability to see a distinction between independent journalism and what amounts to running a PR con speaks volumes about the degree to which the news profession has already been corrupted by its cozy affiliation with corporate public relations. On that subject, Jay Rosen was eloquent when Karen's story broke a year ago; by all means supplement the Times piece with his PressThink take-out.

posted by michael  11:42:38 PM  
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Quote of the Day comes from Jesse Taylor, who writes:

Honestly, I wouldn't mind it if there was one triumphalist visionary who was actually a self-promoting asshole. Maybe a few. But a group of several thousand self-flagellating triumphalists no longer make up a visionaries' club - it's a big, messy-ass circle jerk.

Jesse writes this a propos of—well, some National Review hack I've never heard of—but you're free to mentally adapt this reference to your own favorite self-promoting blog triumphalist, as I already have mine.

Meanwhile, in a happy synchronicity, Jon Garfunkel emails to point me in the direction of this bit of deep thinking from Rebecca MacKinnon, who's been getting busy in Madrid, at the just concluded International Summit on Democracy, Terrorism and Security:

Here in Madrid ... there are a lot of people who study terrorism and try to figure out how best to counter-act it: government officials, law enforcement people, technologists, psychologists, sociologists, and academics. Many of them are honorable, hard-working, ethical, and admirable people.

However I've also encountered a number of people - mainly academics as well as people from government agencies and even non-governmental organizations - who are using the terrorism phenom to advance their careers and get grant money. This is disgusting. It reminds me of journalists who are gleeful about covering wars because it advances their careers. Sick.

MacKinnon's reflexive anti-intellectualism (academics are "mainly" at fault, though with no reason given, and she's got a special disgust available for journalists, as well) along with her apolitical naivete make her a perfect tool for such stuff as the Eason Jordan bloghunt, as I've noted elsewhere. Really: MacKinnon's shocked that careerism might raise its head at a great big international terrorism wankfest? At a conference of academics, politicians and government/NGO bureaucrats? How the hell old is she, eighteen?

Perhaps it's uncharitable of me to point out that MacKinnon is getting all pious about careerism in a venue where she herself is aggressively plying her new career as a public intellectual of the Blog Millennium. But I hardly even need to point it out. Just go to her immediately prior post, where she flogs a document she helped draft called "The Infrastructure of Democracy: Strengthening the Open Internet for a Safer World," a document which claims the internet as "a foundation of 21st Century democracy, and a critical tool in the fight against terrorism." Hitch your wagon to a star much, Becks?

If you're going to be a full-on blog triumphalist, I guess it's best if you're not afflicted with an excess of self-knowledge. But in future, Rebecca, maybe you should think about having somebody vet your posts before you embarrass yourself like this again.

posted by michael  9:38:56 PM  
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He's a bit late to the party, but Barack Obama has a nice reaction reported today to the Bush gambit for black support for Social Security privatization: gambit being, that the existing system is a raw deal for African-Americans because they don't live as long as whites.

He criticized what he said was the cynical use of disparities as a reason to dismantle Social Security. Instead, people should be talking "about how are we going to close the health disparities gap that exists, and make sure that African-American life expectancy is as long as the rest of this nation."

"The notion that we would not be talking about lack of health insurance, and reducing diabetes, and reducing incidents of AIDS, and making sure that African Americans have the wealth and the income to save into retirement and supplement Social Security is stunning to me." ...

Said Obama, "This is as if the president is arguing for privatization of fire protection because our houses aren't worth as much as houses in rich neighborhoods. Or maybe we could privatize police protection because if we get robbed, our stuff is not as nice. It defies logic.''

On a side note, while doing some quick Googling on the topic I ran across this Josh Marshall post from all the way back in 2002, in which we find GOPAC making a really egregious version of the "bad-for-blacks" argument against Social Security. (The phrase is "reverse reparations.") It also contains a note about an earlier attempt to enforce the ban on the use of the word "privatization" in the discussion. Plus ça change ...

posted by michael  9:38:42 AM  
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Blog subversion. Speaking of subverting the dominant link hierarchy, I notice that these days—for a while now, really, but it's only just kind of swum into the foreground of my attention—Eschaton is no longer the top aggregator-blog I look at. In fact, it's not even close. For me the most valuable work of this sort is being done by Susan at Suburban Guerilla, and by the team at First Draft. Those are the folks I check pretty much first thing, and often, for my basic Left-Wing Orientation, with Atrios now a distant third, and really no longer part of my complete breakfast. Just sayin'.

On a fundamentally unrelated note, I'm thinking of rechristening this blog—I'm fond of "Reading A1," partly because I kind of fell into a halfway-decent title and I suck at making up titles for anything, but it doesn't really fit anymore, my having largely grown weary of the Times-critique beat. (How much good does it do, after all, and why am I wasting my time on the mediocrities that populate the Times' political corps?) I probably won't make the change unless/until I'm inspired enough to do some redesign work—but I have an alternative title I like (it came to me the other day in meditation, oddly enough), one that speaks to my own literary orientation and also suggests some of the personal ambivalence I have toward the blogging enterprise. And I'm not going to say what it is till I decide to use it, even though part of me wants to know how it sounds outside my own head.

posted by michael  1:46:31 PM  
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So it's on to Damascus, and let's win there. Offering an "analysis" of George Bush's speech Tuesday at the National Defense University, Todd Purdum leads by insisting that the President "has gone out of his way not to crow, or even to take direct credit" for the direction (more equivocal than not, as Purdum of course refuses to acknowledge) of events in Lebanon and elsewhere in the middle east. Then again, why should Dear Leader crow, when he's got sycophant Todd and the Times to do the job for him?

But not quite two years after he began the invasion that toppled Saddam Hussein, and not quite two months after a second Inaugural Address in which he spoke of "ending tyranny," President Bush seems entitled to claim as he did on Tuesday that a "thaw has begun" in the broader Middle East.

At the very least, Mr. Bush is feeling the glow of the recent flurry of impulses toward democracy in Iraq, the Palestinian territories, Lebanon and even Egypt and Saudi Arabia, where events have put him on a bit of a roll and some of his sharpest critics on the defensive. ... The failure to find unconventional weapons in Iraq, his administration's shifting rationales for the war, the lingering insurgency and steady American casualties there were a drag on Mr. Bush's political fortunes for most of last year. But a wave of developments since the better-than-expected Iraqi elections in January - some perhaps related and others probably not - have brought Mr. Bush a measure of vindication, which may or may not be sustained by events and his own actions in the months to come.

"For Bush, a Taste of Vindication in Mideast"

As reported in the accompanying straight-news piece by Richard Stevenson—yes, the Times is giving this the full Presidential Moment treatment, even if on an inner page—the speech is the usual Bush foreign-policy melange of muscle-flexing, sweeping, contentless rhetoric, and cynical abstraction. (Shorter Dubya Doctrine: Democracy is on the march wherever foreigners do what I want them to do. Freedom's just another word for my enemies getting the shaft.) It appears, even in the saber-rattling toward Syria, to have no news value whatsoever: the Times would have done a kindness to all concerned simply to have ignored it.

But if you're going to go so far as to provide "analysis," would it not be a service to the subscribers to offer them some, any, informed perspective on the recent political developments in the region? Instead of just retailing the Administration's laundry-list of putative democratic "successes" there, ranging from the sham promise of openness in Egypt's forthcoming elections to the burgeoning narco-warlord-opoly being created in Afghanistan? (None of these things is very much like the other, except in their more or less equal inapplicability to the notion of a general, historic flowering of democracy. Hell, Egypt and Afghanistan aren't even in the same region. Sorry to all those who want this to be Eastern Europe circa 1989.) But critical thinking, obviously, is only (occasionally) for the op-ed pages: the news columns demand cheerleading. (It's more objective if you take everything Dear Leader says at face value.) I can't think of anything more revealing of the Times' contempt for its readers, or for the record, for that matter, than setting a stenographer of the Washington CW like Todd Purdum on to "analyze," and smother in the rhetoric of Importance, what at bottom is just one more disposable moment in the sad history of BushCo bunkum.

posted by michael  4:42:53 PM  
tell me about it []  

 

Liberal's liberal Jeff Jarvis offers a substantive, one-line critique this morning of Robert Fisk's piece on the Syrian withdrawal from Lebanon under the heading "Eeyores":

Of course, Robert Fisk sees Syria's withdrawl from Lebanon as bad news.

That's some mighty fine analysis there: but since Hizbollah remains in place, as well as the political and demographic logic of Syrian dominance in Lebanon, Jeff might possibly be counting his chickens before they've hatched.

Then again, if we fail to express insane, groundless optimism about Middle Eastern politics whenever the Bush Administration cues us, the terrorists have already won. And worse, Jeff Jarvis will think we're politically immature ...

Update: Speaking of the premature counting of chickens, notice this in the Times:

Lebanon's pro-Syrian president, Émile Lahoud, is set to call back Omar Karami as prime minister, nine days after he was forced to resign under pressure from opponents to the Syrian occupation of Lebanon. ...

The nomination is certain to be a disappointment for those who had sought an end to the interference of Damascus in Lebanon; it threatens to lock the small Mediterranean country in a political impasse and calls into question the parliamentary elections scheduled in May.

Jad Mouawad, "Pro-Syrian Prime Minister Set to Return in Lebanon"

Must get old being wrong all the time, huh, Jeff?

posted by michael  8:19:46 AM  
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Always worse than you think. When I wrote about the blogstorm troopers who brought down Eason Jordan's CNN career, I assumed that the coordination between them was an artifact of the tendency toward coordination within the right-wing blogosphere, rather than the more nefarious and directed coordination suggested by Rathergate or the stealthblogging of the Thune campaign. Well, I should have been more suspicious. Via Suburan Guerilla and Attytood, we find that The American Prospect has connected the various dots:

Jordan ... was brought down not by outraged citizen-bloggers but by a mix of GOP operatives and military conservatives. Easongate.com, the blog that served as the clearinghouse for the attack on CNN, was helped along by Virginia-based Republican operative Mike Krempasky. From May 1999 through August 2003, Krempasky worked for Blackwell as the graduate development director of the Leadership Institute, an Arlington, Virginia–based school for conservative leaders founded by [Morton] Blackwell in 1979. The institute is the organization that had provided “Gannon” with his sole media credential before he became a White House correspondent. It also now operates “Internet Activist Schools” designed to teach conservatives how to engage in “guerilla Internet activism.” ...

Also part of the Easongate.com team was La Shawn Barber, who writes a biweekly column for -- again, the name pops up -- GOPUSA and has written for AIM about “the Bush-bashing media.” Working alongside Krempasky and Barber was another site, RedState.org, “a Republican community weblog” registered with the Federal Election Commission as a 527. Krempasky helped found that site along with Senate staffer Ben Domenech, the chief speechwriter for Bush ally and Texas Senator John Cornyn; and former U.S. Army officer Josh Trevino, a conservative blogger who used to write under the name “Tacitus.” The goal of RedState.org? “[T]o unite … voices from government, politics, activism, civil society, and journalism” in service of the “construction of a Republican majority.”

The addition of "military conservatives" to the pack adds a nice fascist flavor to the whole thing, doesn't it?

As I said earlier—but more literally than I meant it at the time—the Jordan affair was another instance in the continuing work of keeping the right's discipline-the-press machinery oiled and in good working order. Think any of those triumphalists who were crowing about "citizen journalists" taking on CNN will bother to notice this?

posted by michael  5:58:25 PM  
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Poverty and journalism. Back in 1997, the year that I transitioned from being an English professor to being whatever-the-hell-I-am-now (out of work, among other things), I spent a number of months working on a plan to create a free (advertiser-supported), alternative weekly paper for the Baton Rouge market—a market at the time badly underserved by its only regular print publication, the atrocious, retrograde Baton Rouge Advocate. I partnered with a local political journalist, who'd come back to LSU to finish an interrupted B.A. and who I'd met when he took one of my classes: we'd been working together a bit on a sporadically published cultural tabloid called gris-gris, and decided we could do better. We had a some good ideas, a media kit, a business plan, and barely a nickel between us—and in spite of my ex-Marine partner's connections and his somewhat, let's say overcaffeinated energy, no hope of finding the funding that would have given us a shot at bringing even a pilot project into existence.

One of my hopes for the paper was that I'd be able to gather some young writers together and get them interested in telling stories, the sort of stories that seem to get beaten out of most reporters early on (if they were ever in them to begin with): particularly, stories about lives that you never otherwise saw in the media, the lives of homeless people, poor people, people who lived in Chemical Alley, people caught up on both sides of the prison system. It seemed to me that there was a vast amount of human-interest material going begging—and I imagined it would be possible to build a taste in what would have to be a largely middle-class readership for narratives about the marginalized populations that they were otherwise being trained not to see. (I remember that at the time I was creating the prospectus for our free weekly, I also briefly took up an allied project of driving into blighted areas of Baton Rouge, of which there were plenty, and photographing the ruins—literally trying to recover to sight, white middle-class sight anyway, an environment that people like me knew, all but instinctively, to ignore. We learn from such an early age to occlude the ills we deplore and can't imagine doing anything to remedy.) Looking back now, I think that project would have taken off in Baton Rouge like the proverbial lead balloon. Louisianians generally have a greater interest than most Americans in the ruder, meaner, more out-of-the-way areas of their own cultural landscape: but Baton Rouge is a town an hour-and-a-quarter from New Orleans that really wishes it were an hour-and-a-quarter from Dallas. Not a place particularly willing to look squarely at its own reflection—and no doubt, like most of the rest of this country, even less so now than it was ten years ago.

I've been reminded of all this, and tempted to reminiscence, by a couple of things I've run across the last few days. Michael Bérubé, for one, wrote a lovely, appreciative essay about the historical palimpsest that is St. Louis that made me think of the contrast between my current home, Chicago, an example of the creative force of capital, and the ruined city on whose northern periphery I grew up, an example as much as anything of capital's malevolence. And I noticed a new Salon blog, called Philadelphia Access, not much more than a promise yet, but a promise from a welfare worker who wants to write through her becoming educated to the experience of poverty, and to whose project I wish a lot of luck. Many more such things are needed.

Finally, I came on a post by Jon Garfunkel, who blogs about journalism and blog-journalism issues at Civilities, and who reported about a passing encounter with a homeless man on his way to a National Writers Union meeting in Cambridge. It's on the way toward the kind of journalism I was hoping we'd be able to commit back in Baton Rouge—though not a full-fledged story as much as a set of questions and implicating gestures that might become a story:

Can I take your picture for a buck?

"What for?"

For my website.

"I don't want you exploiting me. A lot of people just think they can exploit us homeless people."

Fair enough. I started to him that I really wasn't interested in a picture ... And then he told me his story, so I took out my notepad. He was incredibly lucid and engaging. He told me his name was Chris, he had been repairing and rebuilding bicycles for Solutions at Work--a program which provides transitional jobs to homeless people in the Boston area.

But he feels that he got kicked out on his own too soon, and now is on the outside. He needs $109 to take a bus to Southern California, out of the cold, and towards the palm trees and the sailing. Chris had a houseboat out there, but it got wrecked, I recall, so he came back up here. He likes it here, actually, he likes the people. Chris had no kind words for somebody at Solutions at Work, and said he felt exploited. As long as I was there with my notepad, he asked me to investigate. Chris was also bitter that most shelters turn away the clean people like him who stay off the drugs and booze.

The wheels of journalism started turning in my head. Is this a news story? ...

What does it mean to be exploited, I wonder now. You start from a place where you're in no position to bargain-- as Chris was-- and and then you still get the short end of the bargain. Chris felt that he put his heart into the wheels program, and maybe he didn't get enough in return. What did he expect in return? I didn't ask.

It's a piece that's almost too fragile for its own good, but well worth a look. Movingly, it ends with Jon getting his picture anyway, and Chris making sure to retain his dignity in the transaction.

posted by michael  4:53:23 PM  
tell me about it []  

 

Stripper names. You know this one, right? First pet's name, street where you grew up. Go here for the official rules. I'm GeeGee Bluebird, and I'll thank you to address me as such from now on.


posted by michael  2:01:11 PM  
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The ingredient purges. I wanted to point to a worthy article in Salon yesterday (and would have pointed to it earlier, but for a mild bout of, ironically enough, food poisoning) discussing the coming war on trans fat (Katharine Mieszkowski, "Now serving no trans fat!"). The article starts too cute for my taste, describing a restaurant meal in Tiburon, CA, the nation's self-proclaimed first "trans fat free city," but after the setup it starts hitting all the right notes.

That's the paradox of the great trans fat purge that leaves nutritionists and public-health advocates frustrated at the "zero grams trans fat"-hype now sweeping a grocery aisle near you. Sure, trans fat should go. Who doesn't think that?

But nutritionists fear that focusing on one ingredient creates the illusion that purging it will make up for our other crimes against the waistline. Health advocates say the war on trans fat has become little more than a marketing opportunity for the major food companies to continue serving junk food with a healthy conscience. Meanwhile, with its new guidelines about avoiding trans fat, the USDA can appear to be doing the healthy thing without really causing the food companies to change their fatty ways.

The real money quotes in the article have to do with the systemic causes behind the cyclical ingredient purges that structure our nutrition discourse in this country:

"It's a joke to me," says Michele Simon, director of the Center for Informed Food Choices in Oakland, Calif. "As if taking the trans fat out of something makes it healthy. This is a typical food industry strategy. They turn it into a marketing gimmick. This is the problem with the focus on a single ingredient. The industry will just find some substitute." ...

One reason trans fat oil has been so attractive to companies has nothing to do with taste, consistency or the shelf-life it gives products. It's very cheap. Soybeans, which trans fat is often derived from, are a heavily government-subsidized commodity. In the '90s, the domestic soybean industry waged war on Malaysian palm oil, a major source of saturated fat. "They organized this huge campaign," [NYU Dept. of Nutrition and Food Studies chair Marion] Nestle says. "Everybody took the palm oil out of their foods." She thinks it would be "very ironic" if the campaign against trans fat brings it back. ... She maintains that in a business that depends on cheap government-subsidized staples such as corn and soybeans, the food companies are under constant pressure to get customers to stuff more and more into their mouths.

"The real root of the problem is Wall Street," Nestle says. "You've got a situation in which every company is trying to grow and there's only so much people can eat." While valiantly working to take trans fat out of their food products -- and advertise that fact -- companies can look as though they're doing their part to improve Americans' health without cutting into profits: "In a sense, it's a bone thrown to the food industry: Here's something you can do to clean up your act that won't put you out of business," she says.

And the government neatly avoids antagonizing the food industry by never saying you shouldn't eat what they're selling. Imagine federal dietary standards that said, "Stop eating Big Macs, Doritos and Oreos," Simon, of the Center for Informed Food Choices, has written. "Those are recommendations that most Americans could understand, but not ones we are likely to hear."

Which puts the case quite neatly. As much a loser as the idea of suing McDonald's for its customers' obesity may have been—both legally and in PR terms—there was a real critique that underlay it. It's all too easy—and it's every bit as much a part of the obesity discourse as are the ingredient purges—to think of the fattening of Americans in terms of morality and lifestyle choice: fat people in our imagination are lazy, probably poor, uneducated about nutrition; thinness by contrast is the reward for hard work and good personal habits. Obesity is an individual choice, and the remedies for it, whether moral or pharmacological, are also a matter for individuals.

The American agricultural economy has been badly skewed, over decades of policy and thanks to heavy subisidies (which are, of course, used to in a vicious circle to pay for policy), toward the overproduction of fat and sugar. Giant agribusiness spends billions of dollars annually to promote consumption of the products made with that oversupply: we are bombarded with messages that work on a (literally) visceral level—a level at which the notion of "personal choice" is almost entirely empty. (Food, thanks to our genetic wiring, seems to be harder for most of us to resist even than sex. The science suggests that people who advertise junk food are about on a moral level with crack pushers.) The agribusiness-advertising complex is a direct and all but unacknowledged threat to our public health, and though it may be obvious to anybody who's read Fast Food Nation it's a message that bears repeating.

posted by michael  12:32:42 PM  
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Josh Marshall is too polite. Josh noticed Joe Klein saying this in an exchange with Paul Krugman during a Meet the Press roundtable yesterday:

I agree with Paul in that private accounts have nothing to do with solvency and solvency is the issue. I disagree with Paul because I think private accounts a terrific policy and that in the information age, you're going to need different kinds of structures in the entitlement area than you had in the industrial age.

Josh is doing his level best to enter into a rational debate with Klein on the subject of what, exactly, Klein thinks an "information-age" retirement benefit might look like—to the extent of asking TPM readers to provide him with anything in Klein's written work that explains the argument here. But this is lost labor, and Josh is too polite.

I'm less polite, so I'll just say it: Joe Klein is a fuckwit. Josh isn't going to find an argument, because an argument is the product of thought, and this is just sloganeering—moronic sloganeering at that. Putting "information age" and "Social Security" together like this bears the exact relation to intellectual activity that a crow collecting shiny things bears to sculpting.

But since I briefly thought about taking Josh up on his reader challenge, I'll just note where this meme may have entered Klein's system, as if virally: from that star collector-of-shiny-bits of the advanced punditry, David Brooks. Here he is, way back in 2002, in a Slate "Breakfast Table" exchange with Klein, making hay out of the Enron collapse:

The Enron executives, who professed a love of free market capitalism, kept their love pure by never applying it. They are the enemies of the free market. If, as you say, the Republicans decide that their real allies in this are the plutocrats, then they are going to destroy themselves. But if they decide their real duty is to protect free competition, then they have a big progressive-conservative agenda ahead of them, which will be widely popular and could recast domestic politics. ...

If the Republicans can clean up the information-age economy so that people have faith in it, then privatizing Social Security will be easy.

One gets the impression that Joe Klein heard the phrase "information age" sometime in the early '90s and it scarred him for life. Every time he uses it now he feels like he's a real interlectual, surfing right out on the edge of history. Give Brooks credit, he knew just how to bait the hook. His abilities as a prognosticator, on the other hand? ... But I'm sure that "widely popular progressive-conservative agenda" is gonna emerge any day now, and just utterly transform the Social Security debate.

posted by michael  5:04:06 PM  
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The press and the new order, again. Jay Rosen takes another stab this morning at thinking his way through what he calls the "de-certifying" of the press in the Bush/Rove era. Here's the core of the post:

"It's been apparent since the day he took office... that George Bush has little love for the press," [Howard] Kurtz writes. But what wasn't apparent, at first, was the different philosophy of press relations the Bush White House held, and advertised that it held. Why have a different theory, why talk openly about it, if you intend no changes in practice?

There is no Fourth Estate, says the Bush Thesis. The White House press has no check and balance function. As for journalists, "they don't represent the public any more than other people do," according to Chief of Staff Andrew Card. "In our democracy, the people who represent the public stood for election."

Of course the whole idea of having a White House press corps is that the reporters in it do represent the American public's common interest in seeing executive power questioned, monitored, examined, explained. The President needs an interlocutor, it was thought.

Keep in mind how often it has been observed that the British have the ritual of Question Time in Parliament--where the Prime Minister must answer the opposition-- while the U.S. has the White House press conference to serve a roughly similar goal. Maybe it doesn't serve very well, but on the other hand if the press does not have an accepted right to question time with the President, who does?

This is the most disturbing part of the entire pattern: To answer questions from informed people who might doubt him is not an essential responsibility that Bush, as President, feels he even has.

The reference to Question Time is helpful: it grounds what I meant in my Wednesday post on this topic, when I talked about a change being under way that redefines the constitutional position of the press. The interlocutory function of the White House press is, obviously, unspecified and unimagined in the text of the Constitution: but the White House press conference represents an enactment, a practical interpretation (one of the most visible and significant of the past era), of the meaning of the First Amendment guarantee of press freedom—and its association of the freedoms of conscience with the right to seek redress from the government. Understanding this aspect of the issue is crucial if you're going to form theory about it.

What Jay Rosen isn't seeing—what isn't being seen generally yet, which is why I'm repeating myself here—is that one constitutional order doesn't pass away without another taking its place. Rosen is focused entirely on the negative moment of the "de-certifying" of the press, which he approaches as a kind of distressing mystery. That's an artifact of a weak theoretical foundation.

Bush doesn't simply refuse to hold the press conferences his predecessors held. His press secretaries don't simply practice a global obfuscation that renders their daily briefings exercises in futility. Bush takes questions from a "Jeff Gannon." His administration suborns "professional" journalists, like Armstrong Williams, to create propaganda for its programs. It broadcasts its messages, all but unedited, through the cheerleading medium of a Fox or a "Talon" News. The institutional, "objective" press is not simply being de-certified. A parallel press, one with a rigid ideological mission, is being set up against it, and drawn into an ever tighter governmental embrace. This controlled press, funded through the deep (and still half-secret) financial networks of the Right, ideologically coordinated through its "scholarly" institutions, staffed by "professionals" schooled less in journalism than in the disinformation tactics of public relations, has now become an arm of Republican government. It is already in a position, with its extension into the blogspace—as the muscle-flexings of Rathergate and the Eason Jordan affair have demonstrated—to exert a powerful disciplinary pressure against the as-yet unaffiliated, neutral press. Indeed, that's now the primary job of the controlled press, to beat the uncontrolled press into submission. This is a movement that clearly marks, and is clearly intended to establish, a deep change in the constitutional relation between the Executive and the press, and with it the social means of opinion formation as a whole.

We are emerging into a new constitutional era, the era of the controlled press. Will any of the professional journalists who still believe they work in the former era manage to figure this out before they're finally ushered into history?

posted by michael  9:31:32 AM  
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Not to rain on everybody's hysteria parade, but the already much-remarked-on C|Net interview with FEC commissioner Bradley Smith, touting the supposed "coming crackdown on blogging" looming with the threat of FEC regulation of Internet political activity, has to be taken with a bunch of big grains of salt. For starters, Smith is one of the Republican commissioners, and it's at least worthy of skeptical note that he's positioning himself as a defender of freedom of speech against Democratic willingness to abide by a judge's decision (of last October, by the way) that revokes an FEC exemption of Internet adovcacy from regulation.

In 2002, the FEC exempted the Internet [from McCain-Feingold] by a 4-2 vote, but U.S. District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly last fall overturned that decision. "The commission's exclusion of Internet communications from the coordinated communications regulation severely undermines" the campaign finance law's purposes, Kollar-Kotelly wrote.

Smith and the other two Republican commissioners wanted to appeal the Internet-related sections. But because they couldn't get the three Democrats to go along with them, what Smith describes as a "bizarre" regulatory process now is under way.

A commenter on the First Draft post points out that the C|Net interviewer is "a notoriously conservative Libertarian who's often willing to paint Repugs as natural friends of free speech." And the interview itself consists of a series of overreaching, alarmist comments with no apparent grounding in the reality either of Kollar-Kotelly's ruling or of whatever regulatory plans might be under consideration.

Q: What rules will apply to the Internet that did not before?

... The real question is: Would a link to a candidate's page be a problem? If someone sets up a home page and links to their favorite politician, is that a contribution? This is a big deal, if someone has already contributed the legal maximum, or if they're at the disclosure threshold and additional expenditures have to be disclosed under federal law. ...

How can the government place a value on a blog that praises some politician?

How do we measure that? Design fees, that sort of thing? The FEC did an advisory opinion in the late 1990s (in the Leo Smith case) that I don't think we'd hold to today, saying that if you owned a computer, you'd have to calculate what percentage of the computer cost and electricity went to political advocacy.

It seems absurd, but that's what the commission did. And that's the direction Judge Kollar-Kotelly would have us move in. Line drawing is going to be an inherently very difficult task. And then we'll be pushed to go further. Why can this person do it, but not that person?

It makes a great deal of difference, in evaluating this, what's happening on the Democratic side (which us nowhere addressed in the article), and what Smith's motives are and how far they can be credited. Let's just note that, on the face of it, FEC regulation (which is much likelier to be circumspect in this area than not, as that latter comment implies in spite of Smith's huffing and puffing) is more a problem for the dirty-tricks right than it is for any left-wing political advocates. The proper context here, after all, is the Thune campaign's stealth employment of bloggers to job media coverage of his race against Tom Daschle last year—as well as an apparent smear campaign in Baltimore coordinated through FreeRepublic.com.

I'm not saying that the regulatory process will have a good result, necessarily: just that I'm unwilling to be immediately, hyperbolically suspicious of it without knowing more than I know from hearing Bradley Smith try to whip up a "libertarian" frenzy. And I'm certainly not opposed to there being mechanisms in law to punish political bad action on the internets, nor do I think such mechanisms must necessarily violate free-speech principles. Let's not get in a tizzy over this until we have to.

Update: I am seconded by the Iron Mouth, who apparently was more enterprising than I was and got Josh Marshall to notice this line of argument.

posted by michael  2:12:59 PM  
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The press and the new order. If you scroll down through the comments that follow Jay Rosen's post about Gannongate and the Bush/Rove decertifying of the media, you'll find Jay engaged at a number of points with his readers. In one of those exchanges, Rosen speaks a bit more forcefully than in the main post about how the White House-media struggle has been joined, and why the institutional press are currently losing it; the comment is worth highlighting for readers who don't persist that far on the page:

Among Bush's many talents he has a sense for who's weak. Rove has more than a sense; he builds strategy (and theory, which informs the strategy) on it. But they come together very well in assessing weakness.

They saw a weak adversary in the White House press, which cannot fight back in most cases without appearing to be drawn into a partisan struggle, a step that instantly erodes its authority and one that mainstream news organizations are extremely reluctant to take.

It's an odd feature of the PressThink discussion—one that goes to what I think of as the somewhat compromised position that a commentator like Rosen, with his multiple implications in the blog-journalism ecosystem, occupies—that there's a kind of throwing-up of hands when it comes to following through on the necessary implications of this point. The Aftermatter section of Jay's post ends in an aporia typical of Rosen's commentary, at once forthright but also (not deliberately, I think) obscurantist. He offers a helpful condensation of his own work on the decertification subject, and concludes:

Finally, Bloggers Are Missing in Action as Ketchum Tests the Conscience of PR described the falsification of journalism by means of a public relations firm, Ketchum, favored by the Bush Administration with $97 million in contracts, one of which went to conservative columnist Armstrong Williams.

Now the trail has led to Jeff Gannon, and In the Press Room of the White House that is Post Press. As far as I'm concerned, it is all one story. But I do not pretend to understand it yet.

Is it really that difficult to understand? Or is it that Rosen's tendency to want to celebrate "post-press" as a wide-open moment of possibility for a de-centered, or re-centered journalism (the tendency that led him to function as an enabler in the Eason Jordan witch hunt) makes the evident hard to see? Since it's practically staring Jay in the face here.

In a follow-on to this post (yeah, I know, another one!) I want to unpack that term "post-press," and take a stab at undersanding why, structurally, our institutional press is in this particular state of weakness at this particular moment. (What makes this press, as opposed to the press of, say, eight years ago, uniquely vulnerable to having its authority eroded by the appearance of being drawn into partisan struggle?) But for now let's just stipulate it. What opportunity does this weakened state of the institutional media present to Rove's GOP?

Rosen's term "decertify" is very aptly chosen: compare it with the parallel "de-legitimize," for instance. The point is that the professional position is under assault, the idea that there is or can be a professional, disinterested practice of journalism. I think it's hard to overstate what an epochal assault that is. What we're looking at, in fact, is nothing less than an attempt to overthrow what has been a mostly stable American constitutional settlement of more than fifty years' duration.

Perhaps not "overthrow": that constitutional settlement is already broken, and the contest now is over what takes its place. The professionalization of journalism, the elevation of the press into an independent actor outside-but-not-outside the state, a Fourth Estate, is a defining feature of the post-World War II American governing consensus. (It's hard to recognize, at this distance, just how much the presence of the press within that governing consensus represented at the time a constitutional innovation. One might consider the Supreme Court decision in NY Times v. Sullivan as the locus classicus for the full recognition of that innovation within the constitutional system.) Allowed more or less wide critical latitude, within the bounds established by Cold War bipartisanship, the national media played a role that we've long since taken for granted, even mythologized as a fundamental and natural aspect of the working of a liberal democratic society. (This was the real "liberal media": not the liberal media of conservative myth, not liberal in adherence to a political tendency, but in its allegiance to the broad post-New Deal consensus, one that bought conservative tolerance for the maintenance of a modest welfare state with a platform of anti-Communist internationalism and official suspicion of organized labor.)

What does Karl Rove want to make out of the ruins of this broken consensus? Or, better, what does Rupert Murdoch want to make out of it? To ask that question is to answer it. A single trajectory unites Fox News, "Karen Ryan," Armstrong Williams, and "Jeff Gannon." The right is buying itself a sham press, one entirely under ideological control, and intends to put in place a new constitutional order, a parody really of the old postwar one, in which any remaining "neutral" institutional press does business under the effective supervision of the rightist-affiliated and all but openly government-sponsored "press." ("Jeff Gannon" was in the White House press room exactly to fill that supervisory function, even to be seen to fill it.) That dominance, and that sponsorship, will be established as a permanent feature of a political regime allowing minimal opportunity for organized, articulate dissent. The aim, in other words, isn't simply to "decertify" professional journalism: it is to create a new structure of press legitimacy, one based on the (limited) sufferance of the state power, in which the major media become a more or less coordinated arm of the GOP propaganda machine.

This new constitutional landscape is coalescing all around us; it only takes eyes to see it. This article by Robert Parry, for instance, has eyes, and uses them to pick out the shape of what he calls "managed democracy," and I call electoral dictatorship, now looming in our future. (Thanks to Billmon for the link. Billmon, in his own inimitable mode, is seeing it, too.) To return to PressThink for a moment: the sad thing is that Jay Rosen is too implicated in the Eason Jordan blogstorm (however hedged his position) to complete his thought here, to recognize that the Jordan affair represents a significant moment in the very process that his post on Gannongate almost clearly sees, and not quite forthrightly enough decries.

posted by michael  10:34:11 PM  
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I've been mulling over Jay Rosen's Gannongate post at Press Think for almost a week (a blog eternity); today's article by Eric Boehlert in Salon ("Tearing down the press"), which covers much the same territory, but permits itself a more direct expression of outrage over the Bush administration's press strategy, finally crystallized my desire to write in response to Rosen—or, not so much in response as within and around the problematic he articulates.

Rosen assimilates the Gannon scandal to a critique he's been developing for a while now, about the Bush/Rove desire to, as Rosen puts it, decertify the institutional press. Here's the core of his argument:

Before the certification of "Jeff Gannon" as a White House reporter who was good to go there was the Bush Administration's de-certification move against the Washington press, which it felt had to go. These two things are deeply related.

The idea that joins them was stated by Andrew Card, Bush’s chief of staff: "They don’t represent the public any more than other people do. In our democracy, the people who represent the public stood for election," said Card. "I don’t believe you have a check-and-balance function.” ...

"Jeff Gannon" (really James Dale Guckert) can be thought of as the replacement press, a fake journalist with a fake name working for a fake news organization, asking fake questions at a real press event. ... Creating "Jeff Gannon" as a credible White House correspondent, and creating radical doubt about the intentions of mainstream journalists (in order to de-certify the traditional press) are two parts of the same effort, which stretches beyond the Bush team itself to allies in Republican Party politics, and new actors like Sinclair Broadcasting, or FreeRepublic.com, or Hugh Hewitt, or these guys.

The first thing to say is, this is a welcome discussion; as is the focused and intense debate joined in the comments below the post, which themselves are worth taking time over. It's a pleasure to see that the wider dimension of the Gannon story isn't lost on Rosen, since it seems to have eluded so many other press critics. The second thing to say follows, which is that I owe Jay an apology for a comment of my own, made at the time I complained about his coverage of the Eason Jordan flap, to the effect that he might be expected, when he at last turned his attention to Gannongate, to follow the path of crypto-rightist Jeff Jarvis by playing it as centrally about the bad behavior of lefty mobs and "the politics of personal destruction." I let my irritation get the better of me, and I was aware even at the time that was a presumptively unfair comment; Rosen is much smarter and much more honest than that.

Past that, there's a particular line of discussion I want to take up concerning the issues Jay raises in his post, and the ones he almost-but-not-quite raises; and that's turning into a fairly extended essay on its own. So I'll put this bit up now, and follow on somewhat later with the meat of what I want to say, because I don't want that getting obscured (and unread) by its having to live either after a jump or toward the bottom of an overlong scrolldown. Jay doesn't mind that sort of thing, but he has enough of a position that he can presume on his reader's patience more than I can, I think.

posted by michael  12:49:00 PM  
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