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  
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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  
tell me about it []