Debbie Wasserman Shultz's communications director received a threatening email the other day, which read, "I'm giving you until 10 am tomorrow morning to answer this question, [sic] then I'm reporting that [The chairwoman of the DNC] is not supporting Eric Holder." The staff cried foul and forwarded the email to Buzzfeed, which published the accompanying story. It reads like blackmail, but there may be a more innocent motive at work here.
Perhaps there is some precedent to using this sort of tactic. A pivotal story scene in All the Presidents Men unfolds along this tactic. (Disclaimer: I don't have a copy of the book handy, so I'm describing the film, which will tend towards more dramatic but factually inaccurate sequences).
Woodward and Bernstein published their biggest mistake of the Watergate story. Their source was refusing to speak to a certain question, and they attempted to work out an impromptu code: 'if you're still on the phone in ten seconds, that's a yes?' The source hung on the line for ten seconds, and the Washington Post published unconfirmed reports about the Nixon administration's coverup, alleging more than they could prove. So what went wrong? The source reversed the code; he was trying to tell Woodward that the story was not quite right.
The journalistic precedent for 'if you don't respond, we have an understanding' is terrible. It led to the paper publishing a calamitous story. It's from an at least partially fictionalized universe. And of course the technology difference means that even if it had been a legitimate practice at that moment, it no longer is; telephone conversations are cooperative enterprises. Email that demands a response, 'or x will say y about you' is certainly more threatening than asking a question and using a silent code. The explanation that this was a poor imitation of a bad practice is a weak one.
Boyle did not appear to go that route. Instead, he pushed the bounds of self-awareness and severely crippled his eventual civil defense by attempting to normalize his email:
Boyle, in an email, defending his warning.
"I've sent several inquiries to the DNC on this," he said. "They've had ample opportunity to respond with an indication that they support the attorney general. I wanted to give Brad plenty of time to respond before we reported, correctly, that the DNC would offer The Daily Caller no verbal support for Eric Holder."
This is a common practice rooted in the culture of the Daily Caller, it would seem. Boyle describes a routine of borderline extortion and drumbeat of inaccurate reporting at the Daily Caller, ostensibly supported by the the editorial staff. It's an ethics-free zone. This must be what working at the Sun or News of the World was like before the arrests. Rupert Murdoch may not own the daily caller, but they sure emulated his management style.
This headline came to me in a dream, and it seemed to capture the crisis in hit-focused website journalism. Headlines have become overblown, journalist-centric, and lacking useful information. At the same time as it obviously focuses on a celebrity, this headline attempts to masquerade as related to world news. My favorite aspect of the headline is that the New York Post is the subject of the sentence. It just seems appropriate.
Update:The post has become a self-fulfilling prophecy, and I'm getting above-average traffic on this one post, largely from URLs containing "Charlize+Theron."
Scott Conroy, a reporter at Real Clear Politics, broke the news that Palin is producing a film explaining her abrupt departure as governor of Alaska. The former-half term governor fled her responsibility to her state amid a flood of complaints of multiple and flagrant ethics violations, including using state resources for family travel. Similar complaints would be aired after the 2008 presidential campaign, when she abused staffers' credit cards and donations to purchase clothes and accessories for herself and her family.
Joshua Green at the Atlantic thinks that the film will be a disaster. I would tend to agree with him, but for different reasons. He sees a missed opportunity of showcasing pragmatic non-ideological leadership during Palin's half term, although I'm not sure that bridging differences between Alaska Republicans and Alaska Democrats is quite as impressive as the President's accomplishments of bridging differences between North Dakota Democrats and Vermont Democrats. Palin's audience is the Republican base, which is mostly interested in finding a candidate who is least like a democrat. Showcasing bipartisanship is not a winning strategy in the 2012 Republican primaries.
Editors at the Seattle Times bothced this headline about a Rhode Island state legislator losing his leadership position. The headline reads "RI GOP lawmaker in Conn. pot bust loses top job." This is the first two paragraphs of the story:The top Republican in the Rhode Island House has lost his leadership position over a recent arrest in Connecticut on charges of driving drunk and possessing marijuana.
Republican lawmakers Tuesday decided Rep. Robert Watson will be replaced as minority leader by Rep. Brian Newberry.
The Seattle Times apparently think the more sensational story here is for a legislator to possess marijuana, not to stupidly endanger lives by driving drunk. Why might the Seattle Times push the pot angle? It appears that the legislator has cover from the Rhode Island medical marijuana law:>Police say they found marijuana in his pocket. He says he wasn't drunk and he uses pot to treat pain related to his inflamed pancreas.
No word yet on whether Rep. Robert Watson is actually a registered medical marijuana patient. my guess is that it has something to do with the Medical Marijuana Dispensary bill that was just stomped by Washington Governor Christine Gregoire.
Seattle Times editors saw an opportunity to put "Marijuana" in more than one headline today, and they took it, regardless of the underlying story. It's an interesting, if bald-faced, example of how newspapers attempt to create coherent narratives within their coverage of disparate events. In this case, it does appear to be inartful at best and inappropriate at worst.
Dave Weigel questions where the liberal anger is over the budget cuts advocated by Paul Ryan. A few Republicans have faced embarrassing questions after flip flopping to support the far-right agenda that demolishes Medicare and cuts even more taxes for the wealthiest Americans. Weigel notes that there's simply no comparison to the outpouring of anger over the Affordable Care Act that was ginned up by talk radio, Tea Party organizers, and Koch money. The angry protests, often armed and dangerous, at Congressional town halls shocked the media narrative into Republican hands, handing the GOP footage of old Americans, demanding "Keep your damn government hands off my medicare!"
I have less faith than Weigel does that "liberal anger" would be as well received by the corporate media as the apparent outpouring of pro-corporate values in the summer of 2009. First of all, Conservatives already invoke the specter of of angry brown and black people whenever they want to support an unfounded point. It excites their largely white and often racist base. Whereas conservatives have wrapped anti-government anger in the American flag, they have consistently cultivated an image of any sort of liberal demonstrations as inherently violent. They claim that a return to historically moderate tax rates on the super-wealthy would amount to a class war against the rich. They claim that "union thugs" intimidate poor old Republican state house members while they illegally attempt to strip unions of existential rights.
Republicans are going to claim that liberals (read: historically moderate voters) are inherently violent anyway. Why give any credence to their noise? The mainstream media will inevitably carry any mention of "liberal anger" alongside a Republican denunciation of liberals as radical individuals. Democrats turned backflips in the summer of 2009 to avoid calling Republicans carrying guns to town hall meetings radicals. They insisted that the display of unhinged absurdities would backfire on Republicans. They did everything but call the anger what it was.
Politico elucidates a telling flaw of the 'both sides have points' journalism paradigm. Ben Smith has apparently been racking has brain to normalize the statistic that half of Republicans believe that President Obama was not born in Hawaii, and that consequently, a massive fraud was performed 50 years ago to fake his eligibility. The Politico leading light compares the shocking 45% of Republicans who believe that President Obama was born outside of the U.S. to Democrats who answered either 'very' or 'somewhat' the question:"How likely is it that people in the federal government either assisted in the 9/11 attacks or took no action to stop the attacks because they wanted the United States to go to war in the Middle East?"
This comparison is completely inadequate, inappropriate, and embarrassing for a major media outlet to make, even off-hand at a cocktail party. Ben Smith wrote it on his official blog.
First of all, the facts behind the questions are distinctly different. "people... taking no action to stop the attacks" is not exactly a statement that was contradicted by evidence. Evidence proving that inaction was due to an absence of knowledge is hard to imagine, much less come by. President Bush and his national security team had even been briefed with a daily update titled "Bin Laden Determined To Strike U.S." about a month before the attacks. On the other hand, President Obama's birth certificate is a matter of public record, and the contention that "the President was born outside of the U.S." has been flatly contradicted by... well, reality. It would be difficult to disprove the 9/11 inaction theory empirically, though believing it certainly requires believing the worst about American leadership. On the other hand, birtherism requires a dogmatic rejection of reality.
Liberal American ideology would tend to provoke Democrats to believe that someone somewhere in the government had forewarning about the 9/11 attacks. The tendency among the party that erected the Great Society and offered the New Deal is to emphasize the government's capabilities. If someone in the government hadn't had prior knowledge of the attacks, it strikes at a core trust in the capability of the state to protect Americans. The error behind the "Bush Knew" conspiracy theory results from placing too much faith in government.
The pertinent question is: what does the error behind the Birther conspiracy say about the Republican party? Republicans are distrustful of government, sure, but distrustful to the point where they believe that local newspapers, every current media outlet, and the State of Hawaii perpetrate a fraud allowing the country to democratically elect Barack Obama? The only plausible lesson that we get about Republicans is that they believe their political opponents don't legitimately exist. Some democrats had doubts about the intentions of the Bush Administration; some Republicans steadfastly refuse to believe the reality around them. The two statements are simply not similar.
But even if they were equivalent statements (or said something fundamentally similar about the respondents), the numbers don't stack up to make Ben Smith's case.
In is swampland blog on the Time magazine website,Michael Sherer does a great disservice to electoral organizers and campaign workers. To be fair, his general theme-hunting Barack Obama's reelection campaign announcement video is not particularly problematic, and could even prove insightful. However, his fourth point rests entirely on an elitist distaste for campaign workers, volunteers, and organizers:4. Obama will be running on his character. The most interesting quote of the video comes from the southern white guy. "I don't agree with Obama on everything. But I respect him and I trust him." Consider what an extraordinary line this is for a video meant to recruit volunteers to organize for a presidential campaign. Have you ever met a campaign organizer that goes door-to-door or works the phones for a candidate that they admit they don't agree with? The reasoning behind this line can be found in a recent Associated Press poll. As of late March, 53% of the country approved of the way Obama was doing his job as president. But 59% said they had a favorable view of Obama, 59% said Obama "cares about people like" them, and 84% said he was a likable person. Obama would rather make his pitch to 84% of the country than from 53% of the country. That white guy from North Carolina represents the gap between.
Well now you have. I have campaigned door-to-door for candidates with whom I hold fundamental disagreements. I also doubt that I'm in the minority of campaign workers, who are as able to balance conflicting allegiances as reporters, if not more so.
The first-past-the-post electoral scheme encourages exactly this hold-your-nose-and-work for the candidate attitude. Campaign workers commonly disagree with the principals on a variety of issues, but strategically devote their resources to work for the best possible option. It's as if Michael Sherer has never heard of politics being the art of the possible.
Campaign workers, volunteers, and supporters are generally derided as "idealistic," especially if they are young and liberal. That perception is based on sloppy accounts like Sherer's which fail to take into account the contradictions that strategic actors face when evaluating opportunities to achieve incremental change. A campaign works because everybody pitches in towards a common goal, which the same reason that a corporation works. Yet no serious reporter would describe all employees of GE as "doe-eyed" idealogues hoping that pooling capital and laobr will deliver incremental improvements in their individual lives.
The fact is that campaign workers have as many disagreements with their bosses as people in any other field, from tactics to strategy to goals. I'll never forget the arguments in the Iowa field office where I worked over whether the individual mandate should be a part of the health care plan. The organizers simply didn't let their personal preferences from interfering with their jobs: amplify and organize support for the candidate.
The myth of a sheep-like following for any candidate is an obvious falsehood, yet elites are willing to baste in the fantasy. The lie allows political actors to dismiss the will of the voters, even to the point of encouraging eliminationist thinking. The tendency is perhaps more forgivable for arm-chair bloggers who uncreatively imagine unintelligent, undifferentiated opponents. Coming from a journalist, the idea that politicaly active workers are simple-minded, or can't carry two ideas in their heads at once, is offensively lazy.
The game from now on is to follow a link into the NYTimes website and grab as many links as possible without clicking on any content links yourself. Repost on your blog, and you give your readers unlimited access behind the NYTimes paywall.
The CIA is on the ground in Libya, repeating the tactics that brought a (relatively) swift rout against the Taliban in 2001, partnering with the Northern Alliance and directing American air strikes against government forces. The Libyan rebels, however, have much less combat experience than the Northern Alliance had, and it seems less likely that Qaddafhi's regime will be as comfortable melting away to form a long-running insurgency, settling for local protection rackets and drug money to finance personal fortunes. The oil wealth inherent in control of a united Libya is a much stronger reason to stay in power, and Qaddafhi's regime is more entrenched than the Taliban were in Afghanistan.
Government bailouts are paying off for the American taxpayer, bringing in additional revenue.
The New York Times is exploring a new business model for online traffic today. Canadian readers of NYTimes.com start facing a 'metering' scheme today which erects a pay wall after a user makes more than 20 page views in a month on the Times website. Links that lead to NYTimes content will not count towards the metered pageviews. American and global visitors will wait until the 28th of March before facing the same metered traffic and paywall scheme.
Clever devotees of the Times would do well to start linking to articles on the Times site and seeking out other bloggers who do the same to avoid the metering. One pageview to the NYtims front page would yield dozens of links to articles. A blogger can provide links to readers, in essence creating free portals to the Times website. Twitter, tumblr, and blogs will provide links to free articles, making it easier for friends and connected media to share the information that a person wants friends to see. A failure to provide links to friends freezes the connected people out from content for which they might have to pay $15-$35 per month.
Looking at Memeorandum today, it looks like Conservatives got everything they wanted. Most of the day's blog discussion seems to be about the serial felon James O'Keefe's (probably doctored) attack of already-outgoing NPR executive Ron Schiller. The focus is on a traditional Right Wing enemy (non-corporate media), not the unbelievably unpopular Republican agenda in Wisconsin, Tennessee, and Ohio of stripping workers of their bargaining rights. Nor is the discussion focused the possible economic plunge that the proposed Republican cuts to jobs would cause.
It seems clear looking at the broader media picture that the rest of the media are not biting on this story. CBS News and ABC News has the story on the front pages of their websites, but buried with other links. On MSNBC, the link doesn't even show up in the splash window; you have to scroll down to find it. The story won't be out front on the broadcasts. NYTimes is dutifully covering the story, as are other traditional media outlet blogs. The Washington Times presents a very odd anti-NPR angle on the whole affair.
My editorial judgment is that the story simply has no pull with a normal viewer/reader/voter.
When Governor Wisconsin Scott Walker pushed his bill stripping public sector unions of collective bargaining rights, he was unprepared for the political response. 14 Senators fled the state to prevent the state Senate from passing the bill over strong minority objections, supported by a mass demonstration around the Capital building in Madison. Protestors staged sit-ins in the Capital, staying for days on end.
On Monday, Walker ordered state troopers to close off the capital building in an attempt to starve out the protestors. Sadly for Walker, his actions alsolocked out one of Walker's supporters with the protestors.Dozens of protesters, some shouting "Shame! Shame! Shame," chased Sen. Glenn Grothman, R-West Bend, around the Capitol Tuesday evening as he banged in vain on closed windows and locked entrances trying to get in.
Opponents of a bill demonstrated their disapproval to one of the bill's supporters who was put in a bad position by the tactics of the Governor he supports. The biggest news story here is that Walker's tactics are causing problems for governance in Wisconsin, and possibly that the protestors have forced the government to insulate itself, becoming less effective in conspiring against the unions.
Right wing blogs, on the other hand, are pushing this story as some sort of terrorist attack on Sen. Grothman.
Charles Krauthammer is a fascinating commentator. Usually he's at his best when he proclaims that nuclear war is just around the corner if American military hegemony isn't preserved. These paranoid parades of terribles are at least entertaining and at best offer high school debaters excellent human extinction impacts. His typical content is also why no one takes him seriously except for the neo-conservative class. His column today, "Rubicon is a river in Wisconsin" is a rare example of real insight on the politics of union-busting Republicans:Led by famously progressive Wisconsin - Scott Walker at the state level and Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan at the congressional level - a new generation of Republicans has looked at the debt and is crossing the Rubicon. Recklessly principled, they are putting the question to the nation: Are we a serious people?
The comparison to Julius Caesar is striking. When General Caesar decided to take his army into the fields outside of Rome, he was breaking a long tradition of democratic (if oligarchic) rule. The threat of force against his political opponents was clear and disturbing. No other general had ever passed south of the Rubicon with an army under his control. Julius Caesar's move effectively ended democracy in Rome, establishing the Roman empire.
I personally would not have made the argument that taking away bargaining rights for workers would be such a cathartic break from American democracy. Yet this is exactly the hope that Krauthammer espouses.
It's a good thing that I never attempted to set limits on topics that I would touch on this blog, because this post will violate any reasonable standard of what is a worthwhile to blog about.
There's a lot of interesting fall-out in the media from the Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear. Most of the commentary is incredibly shallow or plays up the same high noise-to-signal ratio which is my complaint about the modern media landscape. Take the HuffPo noting Keith Olbermann attacks Jon Stewart for "Jumping the Shark" article for example. Keith Olbermann tweeted that Jon Stewart was espousing "naiveté" in suggesting that "everybody on Thr cable is the same," which is a valid position: If Jon Stewart wants to criticize the rhetorical arms race in establishing competing echo chambers/noise machines, the players in the noise game should point out that they are in a dilemma. Hegemonic discourse is probably worse than splintered discourse for the country, even if the tone of the splintered discourse is vitriolic. Olbermann reacts to the criticism of the media environment by pointing out that liberals are forced to engage in this game. I think that Olbermann's and MSNBC's tactics are not optimal in responding to the GOP/Koch Brothers Media/Fox News complex, but that's what they're hired to do. Essentially, the "hate the game not the player" principle applies. That's Stewart's point, and he provides a viable alternative (after all, 200K+ came out to hear a critique of the media which was based on an hour of comedy each night).
And this is precisely the discussion that the Huffington Post could explore by calling a few sources, getting some sides of the story, and writing a thoughtful piece. They could do some basic journalism. Instead, they focus on the non-substantive lead-in to Olbermann's comments, "It wasn't a big shark but Jon Stewart jumped one just now...". That's a pretty annoying example of the media failing to reach the substantive level, deciding to amplify the pointless bickering when in fact Olbermann was trying to get a point across. There's simply no room to get an argument into the media, even for a media start like Olbermann. It seems that in today's media environment, as soon as a message gets outside of your immediate control, you lose all ability to transmit information.
I guess that's why I started a blog- to allow other people's arguments to retain some meaning, as well as provide my viewpoint. It's just too bad that your popular journalism today doesn't attempt to transmit other people's messages. The HuffPo is trying to get hits, and like the Drudge Report, you do that by putting in big simple headlines that seem provocative regardless of the substance of the story. I don't think I should have to produce my own media to avoid this type of avoidance of journalistic responsibility.
An interesting dynamic is evolving in the wake of the Rally to Restore Sanity And/Or Fear over the weekend. The media is striking back, claiming that the nonpartisan nature of the rally forced Stewart, Colbert to attack media instead of the real originators of the partisan warfare which has crippled Washington. I kind of agree with the New York Times here, and wish that the rally focused a little more on the obstinate party, but honestly what good would come of that?
In going after the media exclusively, Stewart and Colbert at least forced this article in which the New York Times is decrying the lack of confrontation and real questioning of the failure of the political system in the modern Congress. Of course, the media (the Times included) have facilitated the decline of the political process, so getting them to pen a piece complaining that the rally didn't focus on the structural failures of rhetoric and serious democratic discussion is a massive accomplishment in Jiu-Jitsu.His barrage against the news media Saturday stemmed from the fact that, on this day, attacking the message would have been bad manners, so he stuck with the messengers.
Of course, the general critique of the media is exactly the same- that the news reporters are too polite. The thrust of last Monday's Daily Show segment with Wyatt Cenac cozying up to lobbyists and noting the incestuousness of the Washington media-political scene struck exactly this chord. The New York Times has been doing too little "afflicting the comfortable." The media, if you listen to anybody outside of it (or inside of it attempting to claim a populist mantle), is complacent. Now they're charging that the Comedy Central News Hour is as complacent. And that's the big story from today's media coverage of the event: journalists are publicly calling politeness a vice.
Depending on how cynical you are, this either bodes well for a burgeoning media self-awareness and reform or is emblematic of the psychoanalytic concept of projection. Of course, companies don't maintain psychologies, but the principle is the same- a component (journalist) of the psyche (corporation) sees a problem, but a supervisory node (editorial norms) attributes the problem to an external actor in order to save face (job security). I'm not holding out much hope that media executives will have the realization that their companies should be filling the void of serious criticism and digestion of politicians' behavior and talking points, but blaming the Daily Show host for not doing so evinces a real unease that journalists aren't doing it.
