I've always thought that Senator Norm Coleman (R-MN) was just too slick looking. But I'm not sure I really wanted to know how he got that "healthy, confident, naturally beautiful smile." His dentist tells all, here.
Tags:
smile senate slick normcoleman
Today's must-read: John Powers in the LA Weekly. Highlights:
....Whether it’s rewriting the tax code or privatizing Social Security to solve an imaginary "crisis," the right has become the agent of change. In contrast, the left has become — there’s no other word for it — reactionary.
Still unable to accept that the right has dominated our national life for the last quarter-century, the left hasn’t done the hard, slow work of thinking through what it means to be progressive during an era of ultraglobalized capitalism in which the only successful Democratic president in the last 35 years, Bill Clinton, followed policies that even he compared to Dwight Eisenhower’s. Far from proposing bold new ideas that might seize the popular imagination, the left now plays the kind of small-ball that Dubya disdains. Even worse, it’s become the side that’s forever saying "No."
....What the left lacks is not a galvanizing messenger but a positive message, a set of energizing ideas and values. It’s not enough to oppose the invasion of Iraq or Bush’s plans for Social Security. That’s merely to react against someone else’s agenda. We must reverse the great (and startling) historical flip-flop in our political iconography. Forty years ago, the left represented the future — it crackled with pleasurable possibility — while the right symbolized the repressive past, clinging to dead traditions like shards of a wrecked ship....These days, all that has been stood on its head: In the wake of September 11, the right claims it wants to free oppressed people — why, democracy is on the march! — while the left is too often caught saying "I told you so" about the mess in Iraq, even as that country speeds toward an election that any decent human being should hope goes well. In 1968, who would have believed it possible that the left would be home to the dreary old "realists" while the right would be full of utopians? [My emphases.]
Indeed.
Tags:
politics Democrats progressives reactionaries
I'm going to be speaking this Friday on a panel with Duncan Black a.k.a. Atrios, Chris Rabb a.k.a. Afro-Netizen, Zephyr Teachout aka Zonkette, and a DNC representative to be named later. The topic is "The Grassroots, the Netroots and the DNC." It's in New York City, at the Tank, a great hangout for progressives at 432 West 42nd Street (between 9th and 10th), 5:30-7:15pm, followed by happy hour. Go here for reservations. Admission $3.
Tags: politics dnc nyc
Christopher Locke replies! (and I respond below):
Dear Micah,
What a cordial note after my taking you so dreadfully to task. Thank you. You know, I figured it was a copy editor looking out the window at some passing lass. Or laddie. But I leaned on the point because Cluetrain was always careful not to lend itself to political issues, or religious, or pick-yer-elipsis. And believe me, we were asked by every stripe of ideology and idolatry for endorsement of each's particular pet thing. We all felt that such alliances would weaken our core argument. Which, as some Amazon reviewers helpfully pointed out, we repeated about 6,000 times. So much time has passed since then, I forget now precisely what it was.
Anyway: Ich bin unpolitisch. Sort of. If pressed, I guess I'd say I'm more for casting Molotov cocktails than votes -- but only because it's a halfway decent line and I take my poetic license seriously. (Perhaps because getting my learner's permit was such a bitch.)
I feel worst about my slur on your use of "paradigm shift." A low blow, I admit. However, where I come from, that's an actionable offense. And I don't mean "actionable" the way CEOs say that. "We need an actionable business plan." Looks like ever since Enron, they've been getting their wish.
But dude, even T.S. Kuhn stopped saying "paradigm shift" -- and he invented the phrase. Sorry, but you owe me 50 bucks. Lucky for you it's a first infraction. Far as I know...
More seriously, I think it worth pushing back on the Negropontean notion that being "wired" makes us some sort of privileged elite. Well... actually, it makes too many of us suspect we are just that; and that's the problem. Having cable or DSL or whatever fat bandwidth and however killer Javascript skilz, makes us no different from 10,000 pornographers and Gooogle only knows how many Aryan Nation sites. I know I'll be reviled for saying this, yea verily, but I dunno... I think I'd rather take my chances with a barroom full of Aryan Brothers than with a standards-committee style of governance enforced by The Dotters of the American Slash. (I'm keeping this in secret code to cut down on the flame mail.)
So now we are *all* online, or soon will be, and the only solution I can see is the unthinkable. We are going to have to talk, not just among ourselves, but to each other.
Politics, if I may offer an observation, and if the past lends any clue, is the art of doing everything *but* that.
Worse (in an ongoing series of unfortunate realities), before we can talk, we're going to need something to say. And somehow, affirming our hardcore digitalness doesn't strike me as the optimal opener. "Hello," on the other hand, might be a good start.
I make these remarks, which I hope you will post along with your friendly letter, in an equally friendly spirit of universal surrealism. That is to say: this --> | <-- is not a pipe.
very best
chris
Dear Chris--
I think we're probably closer in spirit than perhaps first appeared to you, on reading that one article. I have two views of politics. One, that it:
encompasses everything that we can and must do together. It includes how we educate our children, design our communities and neighborhoods, feed ourselves and dispose of our wastes, how we care for the sick and elderly and the poor, how we relate to the natural world, how we entertain and enlighten ourselves, how we defend ourselves and what values we seek to defend, what roles are chosen for us by virtue of our identity and what roles we create for ourselves. Politics also means being able to ask--as a community, not just as isolated individuals--fundamental questions about where we're going as a country, what the future should be for the generations that follow. We need to be able to ask those questions and deliberate those solutions, loud and long.
(That's me, unmodestly quoting myself, from the last paragraph of my book on third parties in America.)
My second view of politics is that it is broken, perhaps irreparably, though I haven't given up on the chances of fixing it. I'm not sure I'm for casting Molotov cocktails, though I am for figuratively blowing up the existing power structure (Big Government, Bigfoot Media, Big Corporations, etc). A long time ago, I wrote a piece calling for a binding "None of the Above" option on all ballots, and I still believe that would be a good idea. I spend a good deal of my day exposing the corruption and inequity of big money in politics, and I do see some modest progress being made in freeing elected officials from their direct dependence on wealthy special interest donors.
I agree with you that there's nothing inherently progressive about "being digital" (and boy do I remember reading Negroponte and most of the other early Wired writers and thinking what pompous asses they were--a new self-styled elite if there ever was one). Is there anything inherently progressive about having a telephone? It's what we do with the web that matters, not the cool tools or toys in and of themselves.
It may be that all the new capacities we're discovering--the ability of anyone with a compelling message to reach hundreds, thousands, even millions of likeminded souls, at a speed far greater and cost far lower than anytime before--will ripen and clash in such a fashion that nothing new is produced save more "necessary cacophony and confusion [allowing] deep-pocketed oligarchs to run things out of view," in your felicitous phrase.
That may be. To which I say, first, when was it otherwise? I doubt you're going to tell me you think things were better before the web came along. And second, I think the Net-impact on politics isn't even at the toddler stage of development yet. Here in the US, we've gone through just one election cycle where a critical mass of engaged, self-directed citizens got a taste or two of their nascent power. Yes, people are going to have to talk with each other (and not just amongst themselves) and figure out how to have a conversation about all those things I listed as politics. But, in fits and starts, that's what the idea of democracy has been from the beginning.
So, despite the fact that it's going to cost me another $50, I'm going to stand by my use of the phrase "paradigm shift." A bottom-line fundamental rule of American politics (at least) since the popularization of broadcast media is no longer operative. You don't need to be a Big Politician, Bigfoot Journalist, Big Corporation or just plain Big Rich Guy to reach a salient number of your fellow citizens anymore--you can also be someone with a compelling message who connects with other likeminded (or not) folks who are networked in the greatest word-of-mouth machine yet to be built.
No, the old habits of deferring to vested authorities, worshipping at the cult of media celebrity and imagining that self-expression (as opposed to community organizing) equals real power haven't died. Yet. It probably will take a generation before they do, and those of us in the driver's seat now grew up under the old assumptions and think it will ever be thus. I could be wrong, but I think the young will surprise us, and maybe even delight us. God knows we've done enough to disappoint them.
Dear Christopher Locke:
Always a thrill to hear from an author you admire. I would have posted this as a comment on your blog, but I don't see a way to post comments. A few corrections are in order:
You are right, the quote of you from Cluetrain stops at the line "...And it hasn't been coming from corporations." I added the next sentence, "Nor has it been coming from politicians, not until recently." When The Nation published my article, back in November, they created the error and never corrected it. I noticed it when I read it print, but forgot to tell them. My bad.
Now Alternet.org has reprinted the piece, and repeated the error. Just so you know, I didn't post the piece on Alternet--I had no idea they were going to reprint it. Had I known, I could have asked them to fix the attribution. Now that you've re-brought this to my attention, I'm going to ask them, and the Nation, to at least fix the mistake on their websites. Maybe I can get the Nation to run a correction in their print edition too. I don't know. I don't work there (just in case there's any confusion--I haven't worked there since 1997).
As for the larger argument you make, that "being digital" isn't going to change anything, well, maybe not, maybe so. These things are just tools--it still comes down to human agency and what we decide to do with the tools at hand. I do think something fundamental in how we get to participate in the decisions that affect our lives (aka politics) is changing, which is why I wrote the Personal Democracy Forum's manifesto. And it's why I'm spending a good deal of my time on that project now.
Cheers,
Micah
I have a new piece up on The Nation's website, titled "The Inaugural on $250,000 a Day." It's all about an interesting conversation I had with Brad Freeman, close Friend of Bush, fundraiser extraordinaire and one of the three co-chairs of Bush's $40 million inaugural extravanganza.
Cleaning out the virtual attic, and came across this "transcript" of an email interview that Adam Penenberg of Wired.com did with me back in October (he emailed me the questions and I wrote back my answers--kind of brilliant of him because it meant I was self-transcribing our interview!). He was originally planning a column on bloggers as journalists, I think, but then swerved into writing a column about the press's overuse of polls. Thinking about the current debate online over blogging, journalism, and credibility, I thought it wouldn't hurt--in the interests of self-disclosure, partly--to post this. I haven't changed anything of what I wrote back then, apart from fixing a few typoes.
1. First, give me your background. How did you get into writing your blog and books?
From 1983-1997, I worked at The Nation magazine, starting as an intern, dabbling on the publishing side (mainly PR and fundraising) and then focusing on the editorial side—rising from overseeing factchecking to assistant editor to associate editor. I came in with a deep interest and background in Middle East politics, which led to my first book, The Gulf War Reader anthology (co-edited with Christopher Cerf) in 1991. That abiding interest (and a certain Administration’s obsessions) led to a sequel, The Iraq War Reader (also with Cerf) in 2002.
But around that time (early 90s) I was getting more interested in domestic politics and started writing a lot about political reform issues (an early NYTimes oped called for making “None of the Above” a binding option on ballots, for ex.). Perot really caught my attention, and in early 1993 I launched a little quarterly newsletter called The Perot Periodical to track him and his movement (while still doing my Nation editing work during the day). You might call it a journalistic success in that we broke a few stories that were picked up by the mainstream media; it wasn’t a financial success and I eventually folded it, though I kept reporting on the third party scene, including Perot’s wing of it and especially the strong dissident movement among his own base. This was all pre-Web, though there was a lot of stuff on Usenet and some really interesting early uses of email-based organizing that these folks were doing. The Wayback Machine actually has some of the Perot Periodical if you’re interested, by the way. I have a stack of old issues in the basement that I ought to put up on eBay.
In 1997, I left the Nation to take a consulting job for Public Campaign, a nonprofit focused on campaign finance reform, doing a lot of advocacy writing for them. And at the same time I continued to freelance. I got a individual writer’s fellowship from Open Society Institute in 1998, and took some time off to flesh out all my third party research, which led to my first real book, Spoiling for a Fight: Third-Party Politics in America in 2002. That’s when my brother Dave really started suggesting that I start a blog, which in retrospect was terrific advice. {I’ve resolved to always take his advice from now on!} I didn’t, however, fearing how much time a blog would take. But when the Iraq War Reader came out, I was more convinced that I wanted to blog and prepared for the time it would involve.
My latest book, Is That a Politician in Your Pocket? Washington on $2 Million a Day (co-authored with Nancy Watzman), is the outgrowth of six years of our publishing an email bulletin called “OUCH! How Money in Politics Hurts You.” We have about 10,000 subscribers, ranging from campaign finance reform activists to journalists to just plain interested folks.
It’s partially because of that new book that I recently decided to stop blogging at Iraqwarreader.com and start up micah.sifry.com. I’m planning on shifting all the old blogs posts over, as soon as I can clean out all the comment spam.
2. In your opinion, what is wrong with the way the mainstream media has been covering the presidential campaign? Do you have any egregious examples where print publications, online news orgs or cable TV news shows have just completely blown it?
Too much horserace coverage, basically. Too much reliance on polls, which have so many inherent problems it’s amazing how seriously we take them. Too much reporting on the theatrics of campaigning, as if they’re a bunch of Broadway critics reviewing a show. (“Well, Cokie, I thought Goebbels’ use of the cute blond girl in the National Socialist’s latest campaign ad was an obviously aimed at shoring up Hitler’s support among women, who may be put off by his other ad harshly attacking his opponent’s patriotism by noting his support from Hungarian expatriate George Soros,” is how they would have covered an election in early 30s Germany.) A lot of “pack” behavior, where one small story comes to dominate coverage for days or weeks at a time. And a largely hermetic sense of their own expertise and entitlement. I love Jay Rosen’s work on this subject, and totally endorse his call to blow up “Spin Alley.” Why even stand in a room that is formally labeled “Spin Alley,” when spin is an open euphemism for lying? For the elite bigfoot journalists who travel with the presidential campaigns or get to pontificate during their coverage of the conventions and debates, this is a huge validation of their high status, more than anything else. How many of them are going to ask challenging questions of the candidates or their surrogates if it might cost them their seat on the plane? (Note, by the way, that neither Tim Russert nor Chris Matthews, two exceptions to that rule, are quite as worried about access in the same way.)
As for stories that they’ve completely blown, I have something to say about how they’ve overblown the 527 issue somewhat, and misreported the way that money shapes the process. See below. I think they’ve also really misunderstood the way their own profession is being transformed by the blogging phenomenon. And I think they’ve mostly forgotten the deep change underway in how individuals participate politically, which was news when it was seeming to power Howard Dean to frontrunner status, but now has mostly dropped from sight.
3. Are TV journalists lazy? If not, then why do so many of them seem reluctant to posit the most basic follow up question when interviewing people obsessed with their own talking points?
Can you use the word journalist next to the word TV? Actually, that’s not totally fair. Some of them are real reporters. Brian Ross at ABC is a dogged investigative reporter, for example, and he’s done some great stories this year on the presidential election process. But if you’re talking about the cable desk-jockeys who do most of the interviewing, I think it’s fair to ask that question. A telegenic appearance and a breezy ability to keep the conversation going seems to matter more than the ability to think on your feet and get an interview subject off their talking points. You have to ask whether TV news coverage is actually about delivering news to viewers. Personally, I think it would be fine if somehow the networks and cable channels decided to stop calling what they do “news” since it’s not. Yes, if what you want is a report on the latest event, be it a bombing or a hurricane or a speech, but it’s not a venue for discussion of issues or ideas; nor is it conducive to any kind of reflection. From talking to close friends who have worked in network news divisions, as well as my own experiences occasionally pitching stories to TV news people, I know that most real political coverage has disappeared from television news programs. As my pal Marc Cooper likes to say, and I think he’s channeling Neil Postman here, the only thing watching TV teaches you is how to watch TV.
4. Do you think that journalism suffers from an attempt to be too objective? By trying to offer a balanced viewpoint they often give short shrift to a well-reasoned argument and equal billing to idiocy. Do you have any specific examples of this of note? (Or am I just biased?)
I think mainstream journalism suffers from not admitting that there is no thing as objectivity. If you don’t think a New York Times reporter has a bias, spend some time scanning the last graf of their articles and read the quotes they use from someone else, giving them the last word. More often than not, you’ll discover a coded pointer to the reporter’s own view. Objectivity, especially when you’re covering politics, is impossible, beyond certain basic things like the actual text of speeches, bills, donation amounts, etc. The rest is inevitably all interpretation. I think one big reason so many of us trust the big media less and less is this obsession with hiding biases behind impossible claims of objectivity, and the resulting blandness of so much of what they do. What was objective about the American media’s wholesale embrace of the Iraq War, the open cheerleading, and so on? Far better for reporters to admit their biases and let readers judge for themselves whether their reporting is trustworthy or not.
5. Is Bush wearing a teflon-coated flight suit? How else to explain how his administration isn't synonymous with the word scandal like Clinton's was. For ex., in today's paper, the GAO found that the Bush administration illegally withheld data about the cost of the Medicare plan. When Cheney was CEO of Halliburton the company dramatically understated its earnings one year. And let's not forget the Energy panel that Cheney chose to keep secret. Yet Clinton was mired in scandal after scandal for transgressions like Whitewater and the so-called TravelGate that pale in comparison. Why the double standard? Has the press contributed to this situation?
Well, I think there are two big differences. First, with Clinton, you had a very effective alternative media system that helped generate and sustain attention to his Administration’s foibles. Which is not to say that Clinton wasn’t ethically challenged; for all his intelligence, his Achilles heel has always been that he thought he was smarter, that he could get away with trimming. And the mainstream media, not just the rightwing echo chamber, rightly raised lots of questions. I still think Whitewater was a scandal, mainly because it was a ripoff of old working class people (see my blog for details). I don’t believe Hillary Clinton made $100K on hog futures, or whatever it was, simply because she was a shrewd investor. The Clintons cut many corners on their rapid rise to power, and it is the job of a free press to hold the powerful to account.
The second big difference? Apart from the fact that now that same alternative media system has been focused on buttressing the regime in power, rather than undermining it? I'd have to say 9/11 and how it’s been abused by the Administration, to keep our heads down. Some secrecy in government is warranted, but these guys are completely abusing their power. And the press has been really cowed. It’s amazing to me that with all the corporate scandals of recent years, Bush and crew have not been hauled over the coals. Of course, you have to remember who is in charge of the investigative bodies in Congress, too.
6. You are expert on the financial connections and wheeling and dealing that corrupts government. Is the press doing enough to expose this? If not, why not? Is corporate ownership of media partially to blame?? Do you have any specific examples?
Actually, I think as a whole that the press is doing a relatively good job, certainly better than, say, 10 years ago. You’ll frequently see references to the interest groups or industries donating to politicians when legislation in their interest is moving through Congress. But we still don’t get sustained attention. In part, that is due to the mainstream media’s odd definition of “news.” The fact that major industries invest heavily in the committee chairmen who ostensibly oversee legislation and regulatory bodies that affect them is not deemed “news.” Reformers like to say "the real scandal is what’s legal," but often for the press the very normalization of systemic corruption—that a tiny unrepresentative elite of political donors prescreens most political candidates and decides who is viable, who is not, and by extension what issues will get high or low priority, is simply beyond the mainstream definition of “news.” Also, when one reporter breaks new ground, you also have the problem of other reporters/institutions not being willing to simply tell their readers or viewers what a competitor has reported. If they can’t advance the story, they often don’t even mention it.
Corporate ownership of the media isn’t new, so I assume you mean the concentration of media ownership in fewer hands and the engulfment of newspapers and news divisions into the hands of larger conglomerates that have no institutional mission related to public service or even news gathering. Obviously, yes, that trend has made the situation worse.
Also, add in the rising status and professionalization of the mainstream media. It used to be that reporters came from working class backgrounds. Now they all have college degrees in communications. They communicate less, but they make more. It was telling when Kerry noted that there were likely only three rich guys on the stage of the second, town-hall style debate, him, Bush and Charlie Gibson of ABC. And yet, by the rules imposed by the candidates and accepted by the so-called Commission on Presidential Debates, no real people were allowed to ask Bush or Kerry any follow-up questions. Only the TV personality, who—for all his earnestness and sincerity—is almost as isolated from the real world as the candidates he is supposedly questioning.
When it comes to covering the role of money in politics in this cycle, I think the media has chased the 527 story a bit more than it deserves. Yes, millionaires and billionaires spending large sums to influence the election is a big story, and they should cover it. But put it in perspective too. Is this the same thing as the old soft money system? Not quite. A large donor doesn’t have the same assurance that his check is going to grease the skids on a piece of legislation the way it did when he was handing that check directly to Mitch McConnell or Terry McAuliffe. And the amounts given to 527s may actually turn out to be somewhat less than the $500 million total given in soft money in 2000, or they may be more. We don’t know yet. Meanwhile, what about the other $3 billion or so in hard money that both parties and their candidates are still raising, mostly from a tiny unrepresentative group of rich donors? Finally, what about the states of Maine and Arizona, where this system has been completely overturned? Why aren’t we hearing more about them?
7. Do you have any predictions as to who will win in November?
Until the debates, I was gloomily expecting Bush to win. Now I don’t know. My prediction is for a train wreck, actually. Picture Florida 2000 several times over, only this time the Ds won’t sit on their hands and their base the way Gore did. I’m actually hoping that one of these guys wins in a clear landslide, just to spare us that experience. But with all the existing problems, plus the new ones created by the Help America Vote Act, I’m expecting a very crazy couple of weeks.
8. Feel free to add anything you like to the topic of how the media has been covering the presidential campaign.
I’d rather just let you know about my latest endeavor, the Personal Democracy Forum, which started as a conference in the spring, and is now re-launching as a web zine/blog, along with a conference next spring (May 16 in NYC). To me, these are really exciting times, because technology is changing some of the underlying rules of politics. In particular, it’s becoming a lot easier for individuals to be fuller participants in all aspects of the process. The old top-down capital-intensive system isn’t going away (yet) but something else is rising alongside it, destabilizing it, and opening up room for all kinds of new voices and groups. Along with my partner Andrew Rasiej, we envision PDF as a place where the conversation about these changes can happen and maybe be nurtured, and the way we’re going to do that is by covering the emerging industry—the people, companies and tools that are changing how we do politics.
[Adam Penenberg threw in two additional questions after the first round...]
1. Online media: Has online media covered the election differently (better? worse? the same?) as mainstream media offline?
I don’t think the manner in which you distribute your information to readers has any inherent effects on coverage, per se. In some cases, a great editor deploying sharp writers doing the old-fashioned top-down journalism can produce terrific coverage. I think both Slate and the LA Weekly have done excellent stuff on the election; one is a pure online magazine and the other is primarily still print.
One problem with your question is the assumption that there’s a clear distinction between online and offline media. The Center for Responsive Politics and the Center for Public Integrity have generated terrific reports that have gotten a fair amount of attention, and a lot of what they do is disseminated online. Does that make them online media? Yes, they’re nonprofits, which makes them different from most of the press, but some magazines, like Mother Jones, are nonprofits too. Also, all the big mainstream outlets also have huge online operations now. So, the lines are really blurring.
Certain things can only be done by big media institutions, because they’re expensive to do. (Maybe bloggers will begin to figure out how to do distributed research in a more ambitious fashion than we’re now seeing with the instant factchecking of the debates, but right now that’s still the reality.) And at the same time those institutions are being driven more and more by bottom-line financial values than their public service mission.
I think the main problem with the mainstream media, offline or online, is its fear of being seen as crusading for anything. They do feel bound by that false myth of objectivity to present two sides on every issue. Thus the big stories of 2004 are buried. Have they done as good a job as they could have explaining how the voting problems of 2000 haven’t been fixed in time for 2004? I don’t think so. Have they pulled together all the pieces showing how President Bush, more than any other president, has systematically handed over domestic and economic policy to his big campaign contributors? Nope. Have they explained how the rules of Congress are being fundamentally strong-armed in a radically dangerous way to eliminate two-party consultation? (See Robert Kuttner’s seminal piece in the American Prospect from the spring for details.) No they haven’t. Are they explaining how Bush’s foreign policy of preventive war represents a radical break from past international practice? Not at all. The mainstream media is poorly equipped to deal with rapid change, because one of its fundamental assumptions is that the system is working.
2. What impact have blogs had on the election coverage (if any?)
Well, number one, we now have the ability to talk back AND to talk to each other, in ways that can magnify the salience of a story or issue. Until this election, you needed large piles of capital to have that kind of impact on the process. And we’re just living in the beginning of this new era.
Some bloggers and community sites have focused energies on delivering feedback to mainstream journalists, and that’s cool. Though most of those reporters appear to view this as an irritation, instead of adopting Dan Gillmor’s axiom that your readers are collectively smarter than you, and you ought to engage them in dialogue.
I think even more important is the fact that the blogosphere is drawing attention away from the mainstream media. Whether and how it will adapt is an open question. The fact that Talkingpointsmemo gets as much monthly traffic as the entire American Prospect website (where Josh Marshall used to be its Washington editor until he left and started blogging) is of huge importance. The age of opinion magazine or editorial page as cathedral-handing-down-wisdom-to-the-masses is ending. For Kos to get 500,000 to 600,000 readers each night of the presidential debates is huge.
That said, I thought the actual coverage done by the bloggers credentialed to cover the Democratic and Republican conventions was mostly disappointing. It’s understandable, though. Most of the people credentialed were partisans, and in many cases totally new to the experience. So you got a lot of gushing about the sheer excitement of being in the hall, bumping into famous people, etc. Too much of the surface that the parties wanted presented; not enough digging. People are human—give someone a little access, a little fame and a little schwag and it often goes to their head.
Journalists who blog, by comparison, have done really well with this new tool. I’m proud to have played a small part in convincing writer friends like Marc Cooper, David Corn and Doug Ireland to start blogging. In every case, they’ve taken advantage of the instant and independent platform to publish provocative and timely articles, and they each tell me that they are learning a lot from reading the comments they get from readers.
Collectively, the blogosphere has provided a far richer kind of coverage, to be sure, but it's really varied.
Tags: blogging politics journalism campaignfinance scandal thirdparties georgewbush billclinton hillaryclinton micahsifry davidsifry dangillmor jayrosen dailykos joshmarshall marccooper davidcorn dougirelandI'm mulling the whole debate over political blogging, journalism, and the ethics of engagement, and am hoping to write something more declarative in the next few days over at Personal Democracy Forum. This isn't a new subject for me, as it was always very much in the air when I worked at The Nation (the country's oldest journal of opinion) and we wrestled with such things as taking advertising from people we disagreed with and commissioned articles from people involved in the causes they were writing about. This post is more in the category of thinking out loud...
I've always told writers to "show, not tell," but there's an additional truth to be considered in this aphorism that I stumbled on via Tim Porter's blog.
Tell me and I forget. Show me and I remember. Involve me and I understand.
[His emphasis, which I endorse.]
I think any smart politician or political organizer would be wise to follow this advice too, by the way. But how do we do it? Involvement, or engagement, by definition means being subjective. Passionate about something. Will you trust someone who if they are trying to involve you in something, more than just showing you and letting you make up your own mind?
Mainstream journalism is dying in part because it has insisted on an impossible thing: objectivity. In the process, it killed the human voice (and all too often has replaced it with the paid voice, the corporate shill, the ideological hack.) Now, real human voices are back via blogging and other online communications platforms, and we are gravitating toward that "strange attractor" (as the Cluetrain put it) of real human conversations over the web.
But hidden interests--be they money or passion or ideology--can still interfere with fostering the kind of trust that produces what we call "credibility." Our elected leaders aren't credible to us, for example, in part because they're beholden to big money. That why it makes sense to a) insist that they disclose clearly who is buying them, and b) figure out how to free them from dependence on big money so they are able to represent all their constituents without regard to the size of their wallets.
Same with big-foot journalists who, for all intents and purposes, have become part of the establishment they are in theory watchdogging for the public. Google the words "buckraking" and "journalist" and you'll see what I mean.
Political blogging, which is filling a vacuum and serving many people hungry for passionate smart voices and conversations, now faces many of these same issues, as some bloggers have become as, or more, influential than the media outlets or political figures they're talking about.
While I don't want to see a "code of blogger ethics" evolve that tries to re-create in new form the old myth of objectivity and disinterestedness (that leads Len Downie, the Washington Post's managing editor, to not even exercise his right to vote), repressing the human impulse to "get involved" in whatever you care about, clearly the need to earn the trust of your readers and maintain that trust will engender some sensible forms of personal disclosure wherever money is changing hands.
Tags: Blogging PoliticsI haven't been blogging here much of late because most of my blogging energy is currently concentrated over at the Personal Democracy Forum, a site that I am editor of in my "spare time." We're covering everything from emergent democracy to citizens media to online political advertising over there.
My latest blog post is an open call for help finding state and local political bloggers. Here's what I wrote:
If 2004 was the Year of the Big Nationally-Influential Political Blogs, could 2005 be the year that blogs that focus on state and local politics come into their own? And I mean blogs written by passionate amateurs, not the "Politics1[stateabbreviation].com" sites that are useful aggregators of local political news, but not gathering places for conversation and debate influencing the local political and journalistic scene.
That's my hunch. Take Sound Politics, a Republican-leaning site in Washington State that is still banging hard on the disputed gubernatorial election there. Or Portland Communique, a Democratic-leaning site that closely tracks municipal politics.
Are you a state or local political blogger? Do you read any? If so, chime in and we'll build a directory...