Saturday, January 15, 2005
Snookered Again
News item: The Dean campaign paid $3,000 a month for services during the presidential primary season last year from a consulting firm that included Markos Moulitsas of Daily Kos and Jerome Armstrong of myDD. When Armstrong got the gig, he quit blogging entirely. Kos posted a prominent notice on his website announcing that he was working for Dean. All of this was widely known in the lefty blogosphere at this time last year. The response to the mention of it yesterday in a column in the Wall Street Journal, one of the most influential organs of the Mighty Wurlitzer of Conservative Noise? Gasping horror! Oh, the humanity! Those goddamn corrupt liberals!
The Repug media has snookered us again--by giving huge play to the story at the precise moment the Bush Administration is in trouble for paying columnist Armstrong Williams to push the No Child Left Behind Act in his newspaper column. The lobbing of this story into the weekend news hole proves to me that the Repugs understand the mind of modern journalists better than the journalists themselves. Reporters can now write about the two incidents as equivalent, thus giving their reporting the "balance" they crave like crack whores crave the pipe. And the administration's use of tax dollars for partisan propaganda is obscured by the smoke.
And there's something else to think about here. Until recently, mainstream media outlets treated the blogosphere as something worth notice only as a curiosity--the product of adolescent wankers who were sublimating their inability to get laid by obsessively following politics. At the political conventions, mainstreamers gawked at the bloggers in attendance like inner-city kids gawk at farm animals in a petting zoo. It wasn't until some right-wing bloggers helped debunk the CBS story involving forged memos about Bush's National Guard service that the journalistic capabilities of the blogosphere got any traction in the mainstream media. Never mind that lefty bloggers influenced the grassroots runup to the Democratic presidential campaign in a historically unprecedented way, or kept issues like the Niger uranium story--or for that matter, Abu Ghraib--rolling long after mainstream news sources would have preferred going back to obsessing over the Scott Peterson trial. The blogging phenomenon was just political noise until the right made a spectacular splash with it, and then suddenly, blogging was news and the right-wingers were the stars. And when the mainstreamers are looking for the someone to anoint as the preeminent expert on political blogging, who do they call? The only blogger who's written a book about it--Hugh Hewitt, who happens to be a first-degree wingnut and Fox News commentator.
There are times when the shape of what we're up against in a conservative media environment looms so large that I despair at the likelihood of overcoming it. Still, I'm not ready to give up yet. Let a thousand Josh Marshalls bloom, and anything can happen.
And a thousand Wonkettes, too, although you should know that not long ago, a right-wing blogger announced that Wonkette is not a blog, but "a production unit of Gawker Media." (The guy was apparently upset that Wonkette gets more hits per day than he does.) Whatever she is, she's plenty damn funny. A correspondent wrote yesterday suggesting better names for the inaugural balls than the ones Bush has picked. Ana Marie suggested that in addition to he Unfunded Mandate Ball and the Indefinite Detainees Ball, the Republicans should host "The Abu Ghraib Electrodes Attached to Your Ball." And in a post about Ted Kennedy calling Barack Obama "Osama" in an appearance the other day, Ana Marie says Kennedy might be onto something: "For Republicans, mangling pronunciations and being confused about the whereabouts of Osama Bin Laden wins you re-election."
News item: The Dean campaign paid $3,000 a month for services during the presidential primary season last year from a consulting firm that included Markos Moulitsas of Daily Kos and Jerome Armstrong of myDD. When Armstrong got the gig, he quit blogging entirely. Kos posted a prominent notice on his website announcing that he was working for Dean. All of this was widely known in the lefty blogosphere at this time last year. The response to the mention of it yesterday in a column in the Wall Street Journal, one of the most influential organs of the Mighty Wurlitzer of Conservative Noise? Gasping horror! Oh, the humanity! Those goddamn corrupt liberals!
The Repug media has snookered us again--by giving huge play to the story at the precise moment the Bush Administration is in trouble for paying columnist Armstrong Williams to push the No Child Left Behind Act in his newspaper column. The lobbing of this story into the weekend news hole proves to me that the Repugs understand the mind of modern journalists better than the journalists themselves. Reporters can now write about the two incidents as equivalent, thus giving their reporting the "balance" they crave like crack whores crave the pipe. And the administration's use of tax dollars for partisan propaganda is obscured by the smoke.
And there's something else to think about here. Until recently, mainstream media outlets treated the blogosphere as something worth notice only as a curiosity--the product of adolescent wankers who were sublimating their inability to get laid by obsessively following politics. At the political conventions, mainstreamers gawked at the bloggers in attendance like inner-city kids gawk at farm animals in a petting zoo. It wasn't until some right-wing bloggers helped debunk the CBS story involving forged memos about Bush's National Guard service that the journalistic capabilities of the blogosphere got any traction in the mainstream media. Never mind that lefty bloggers influenced the grassroots runup to the Democratic presidential campaign in a historically unprecedented way, or kept issues like the Niger uranium story--or for that matter, Abu Ghraib--rolling long after mainstream news sources would have preferred going back to obsessing over the Scott Peterson trial. The blogging phenomenon was just political noise until the right made a spectacular splash with it, and then suddenly, blogging was news and the right-wingers were the stars. And when the mainstreamers are looking for the someone to anoint as the preeminent expert on political blogging, who do they call? The only blogger who's written a book about it--Hugh Hewitt, who happens to be a first-degree wingnut and Fox News commentator.
There are times when the shape of what we're up against in a conservative media environment looms so large that I despair at the likelihood of overcoming it. Still, I'm not ready to give up yet. Let a thousand Josh Marshalls bloom, and anything can happen.
And a thousand Wonkettes, too, although you should know that not long ago, a right-wing blogger announced that Wonkette is not a blog, but "a production unit of Gawker Media." (The guy was apparently upset that Wonkette gets more hits per day than he does.) Whatever she is, she's plenty damn funny. A correspondent wrote yesterday suggesting better names for the inaugural balls than the ones Bush has picked. Ana Marie suggested that in addition to he Unfunded Mandate Ball and the Indefinite Detainees Ball, the Republicans should host "The Abu Ghraib Electrodes Attached to Your Ball." And in a post about Ted Kennedy calling Barack Obama "Osama" in an appearance the other day, Ana Marie says Kennedy might be onto something: "For Republicans, mangling pronunciations and being confused about the whereabouts of Osama Bin Laden wins you re-election."
