Flip through the leftyblogs (or don’t; I mean, I pretty much have done it for you; you can thank me later).
Check out how many of them are chanting variations on “WaiterGate is the defining moment of the campaign” and/or “Emmer will never never evah! recover from WaiterGate!”
Huh.
Joe Bodell at Minnesota “Progressive” Project thinks he’s onto something:
Although I will take credit for “Waitergate”. Seriously, why has no one thought of that yet?
I’m nothing if not eager to answer questions.
There are two reasons, Joe:
I’m always happy to help.
When the local political listserve “E-Democracy” wanted to complete its slide into being a full-on DFL echo chamber, its management instituted a “civility rule” that, essentially, held that all criticism of liberal opinion was “uncivil”, you knew things were circling the drain.
So it’s a kick to see the news that überliberal haunt “Democratic Underground” – the Dundy, as some of us call it – is h clamping down on criticism of Obama or Democrats:
“Forget about criticizing Obama,” warned PJ Gladnick, Examiner Opinion Zone blogger and operator of a blog called “DUmmie FUnnies” which pokes fun at Democratic Underground members.
So, if you suggest “that a particular point of view is required in order to be a Democrat, liberal, or progressive,” call someone a conservative, make a comment that’s “too rhetorically hot, too divisive, too extreme, or too inflammatory,” prepare to be booted
Here are some more samples of the ludicrous list of rules violations:
“Telling someone to ‘shut up,’ ‘screw you,’ ‘go away,’ ‘f–k off,’ or the like;” “belittling someone for being new or having a low post count; “negatively ‘calling out’ someone who is not participating in the discussion.”
That is just the beginning…
Insensitivity, which includes “weight or other physical characteristics” and “use of insensitive terminology.”
“Over-the-top assertions of bad faith” in Obama, or “advocating voting against Democrats, or in favor of third-party or GOP candidates; broad-brush smears against Democrats generally; broad expressions of contempt toward Democrats generally.”
“A sustained or organized effort to demean, belittle, bully, or ostracize another person; digging up or posting personal information about any private individual, on DU or elsewhere; stalking someone across discussion threads or forums.”
he final tally of new rules: 60. Whew.
The net effect of these overstated policies is to decrease discussion, Gladnick said.
He said it’s pretty easy to tell what’s been posted before and after the policies went into affect — before, there was a lot of criticism of the president, especially regarding the oil spill. Now, you can barely find comments implying a misdeed.
“Right now, you really see it about the Gulf,” he said. “Whereas before the rules, DU was rife with criticism of how Obama has handled the oil spill, now, such complaints have ceased.”
Of course, that’s the goal of campaign finance reform, the “internet kill switch” and the Fairness Doctrine.
So maybe the Dundy isn’t so far off track after all.
Say that a news reporter, hypothetically, writes an article in which he both selectively omits crucial facts about a story in order to present a picture of a candidate to present a technically-accurate but in fact misleading picture of that candidate to the public, and plagiarizes another journalist.to get some of that material.
Which of these infractions will get the reporter’s editors, managers, ombudspeople and colleagues the most exercised?
The plagiarism, naturally; the story will generate abashed corrections, a firing, in-depth-analyses and apologies, and endless discussions and not a few news stories about the reporter’s offenses against the craft.
The selective reporting? Despite the fact that it presented an ultimately misleading impression of an important story, journalists will largely wash their hands of it. The editors will nod their heads and say “everything in the story was factual, and things were left out because of space constraints”. The ombudsmen will write a piece on how perhaps more care is required in sourcing, but the story was ultimately factual, and thus fair. Other journalists will shrug their shoulders and say “sh*t happens”.
And for the candidate, it just did.
The most interesting thing about the Washington Post/David Weigel case isn’t so much the incident itself – Weigel’s participation in a hush-hush liberal list-server with many of the nation’s “elite” left-leaning journalists, his off-the-record slurs against conservatives, or the fact that a fellow “elite” lefty journalist decided to dump a bunch of the offending emails.
Although that seems to be the part that the WaPo thinks is most important. The Post’s ombudsman, Andrew Alexander, took a whack at writing the WaPo’s nostra culpa (or perhaps Weigel culpa) yesterday, hitting all the important points – if you’re a left-leaning journalist:
Weigel bears responsibility for sarcastic and scornful comments he made in e-mails leaked from a supposedly private listserv called “Journolist,” started in 2007 by fellow Post blogger and friend Ezra Klein. Weigel’s e-mails showed strikingly poor judgment and revealed a bias that only underscored existing complaints from conservatives that he couldn’t impartially cover them.
I read this, and I thought “liberal journalist sniffing down his nose about conservatives when he thinks he’s in private? That’s not even a “dog bites man” story. That’s a “dog pees in grass” story”.
But his departure also raises questions about whether The Post has adequately defined the role of bloggers like Weigel. Are they neutral reporters or ideologues?
This is a question that can only come from Planet Beltway.
Here’s a better question: a newspaper which is widely believed to have a left-of-center editorial slant hires a reporter from the liberal propaganda-blog Washington Independent (a corporate cousin of the Minnesota “Independent”, both run by the ironically-named “Center for Independent Media”, all of which were founded by liberals with deep pockets to spread propaganda for the Democratic Party), to essentially serve as a journalistic anthropologist, a Jane Goodall-like figure to translate the mysterious ways of all those inscrutable enigmas between the Hudson and the Sierra Madre.
So why should the half of the American people and news consumers who identify as conservatives not see that as overt, institutionalized condescension? As one of the most powerful media organs in the country telling its readership “we will have one of our specialists translate all this vaguely-scary, wingnutty, teabaggy stuff into acceptable, non-accented English”?
Weigel did an interview last winter on NPR’s “Fresh Air” with Terry Gross (full transcript here) where talking to a elite-media-club member in good standing Terri Gross, he lets his guard down.
Mr. WEIGEL: He was elected in 1984 and he left on his own volition in 2002. I mean he was in no danger of being defeated. He just retired to become, like a lot of former congressmen, a lobbyist with some political interests.
GROSS: Okay. So what are his interests in funding the Tea Party movement?Mr. WEIGEL: One thing Armey would say is that he doesnt fund the Tea Party movement. He loves to contrast what they see as union thugs and ACORN putting Democratic rallies together with Tea Party people gassing up their cars and driving to Washington for his rallies. There’s some dishonesty there.
(Soundbite of laughter)
Mr. WEIGEL: I mean Freedom Works is always on the scene. It helps set these things up. It’s got full-time activists who help get permits. And I mean I’ve been to a couple of events at Freedom Works’ office where theyll have huge, you know, nice buffet spreads and things like that for Tea Party activists and conservative bloggers to meet and strategize.Mr. WEIGEL: He was elected in 1984 and he left on his own volition in 2002. I mean he was in no danger of being defeated. He just retired to become, like a lot of former congressmen, a lobbyist with some political interests.
GROSS: Okay. So what are his interests in funding the Tea Party movement?
Mr. WEIGEL: One thing Armey would say is that he doesnt fund the Tea Party movement. He loves to contrast what they see as union thugs and ACORN putting Democratic rallies together with Tea Party people gassing up their cars and driving to Washington for his rallies. There’s some dishonesty there.
(Soundbite of laughter)
Mr. WEIGEL: I mean Freedom Works is always on the scene. It helps set these things up. It’s got full-time activists who help get permits. And I mean I’ve been to a couple of events at Freedom Works’ office where theyll have huge, you know, nice buffet spreads and things like that for Tea Party activists and conservative bloggers to meet and strategize
Not that Weigel was systematically unfair – although he strains to connect the John Birch Society to Glenn Beck. Read the transcript for yourself; you be the judge.
The WaPo’s Alexander asks:
And, given the disdainful comments in his e-mails, there is the separate question of whether he was miscast from the outset when he was hired earlier this year.
The bigger question is “how could anyone who was paying attention “miscast” Weigel as anything but a left-leaning writer who would treat conservatism with the same giggly, hipster post-irony of an Ira Glass or a Robert Sagel?” Weigel’s history is pretty well-known, Even I could have told them; Weigel spent some time years ago (ten years ago at least) covering a Minnesota electronic-democracy group; while Weigel seemed to be a fair enough guy, there was no mistaking his political sympathies.
But the problem isn’ t that a liberal paper sent a liberal to cover, and translate, conservatism. It isn’t even that that reporter turned out to say naughty things about conservatives when he thought he was off the record. Most conservatives accept that as the norm.
So the WaPo’s editors miss the point when they say…:
“I don’t think you need to be a conservative to cover the conservative movement,” [editor] Narisetti told me late today. “But you do need to be impartial… in your views.”
He said that when Weigel was hired, he was vetted in the same way that other prospective Post journalists are screened. He interviewed with a variety of top editors, his writings were reviewed and his references were checked, Narisetti said.
“But we’re living in an era when maybe we need to add a level” of inquiry, he said. “It may be in our interests to ask potential reporters: ‘In private… have you expressed any opinions that would make it difficult for you to do your job.”
…because the real point is not that reporters can be “impartial”, any more than I can. They need merely to be honest about their biases – because there is no such thing as a neutral reporter. Objectivity is a myth – and the idea that the WaPo thought they could pass off a secret club-member like Weigel as “objective” isn’t nearly as insulting as the fact that whole “conservatives in the mist” exercise entirely about a sense of preening cultural superiority.
Alas, it took only one listserv participant to bundle up Weigel’s archived comments and start leaking them outside the group. The result is that Weigel lost his job. But the bigger loss is The Post’s standing among conservatives.
There, Mr. Alexander needn’t worry; the Post never had much to lose.
The other question that actually matters relates to “Journolist”, the hush-hush email discussion group where “elite” left-leaning journalists swapped ideas and mapped out approaches to big stories. Journolist was founded by Ezra Klein, formerly of the ultraleftyblog Pandagon, with whom I went ’round and ’round back when blogging was mostly done for the love of the game.
And Klein, like Alexander, is mostly concerned about the damage this flap does to his craft-within-a-craft, the pseudo-journalistic institutional blog:
In a column about Stanley McChrystal today, David Brooks talks about the union of electronic text, unheralded transparency, 24/7 media and a culture that has not yet settled on new rules for what is, and isn’t, private, and what is, and isn’t, newsworthy. “The exposure ethos, with its relentless emphasis on destroying privacy and exposing impurities, has chased good people from public life, undermined public faith in institutions and elevated the trivial over the important,” he writes.
There’s a lot of faux-intimacy on the Web. Readers like that intimacy, or at least some of them do. But it’s dangerous. A newspaper column is public, and writers treat it as such. So too is a blog. But Twitter? It’s public, but it feels, somehow, looser, safer. Facebook is less public than Twitter, and feels even more intimate. A private e-mail list is not public, but it is electronically archived text, and it is protected only by a password field and the good will of the members. It’s easy to talk as if it’s private without considering the possibility, unlikely as it is, that it will one day become public, and that some ambitious gossip reporters will dig through it for an exposure story…
Well, yeah. Klein’s right here; I study how people and computers interact for a living, and faux intimacy and lowered inhibitions are why online discussions quickly degenerate into name calling, why online dating is an intense whirlwind, and why online commerce, with its instant gratification, is so popular.
But the real story in this flap – and the real damage it does to “journalism” – has little to do with the formalities of the journalistic craft, or the pathologies of online communication.
Klein:
A newspaper reporter opposing the Afghanistan war in a news story is doing something improper. A newspaper reporter telling his wife he opposes the war is being perfectly proper. If someone had been surreptitiously taping that reporter’s conversations with his wife, there’d be no doubt that was a violation of privacy, and the gathered remarks and observations were illegitimate.
Right. So let’s continue the analogy.
Dozens of newspaper reporters who oppose the Afghanistan war gather online, in a “secure” undisclosed virtual location they share with other journalists and plenty of hard-left pundits, to discuss how they can affect the coverage, to shade it to a desired political end.
Ethical or not?
What do you think the Washington Post’s ombudsman would say?
The fact that the Washington Post felt it needed to report on conservatism as a matter of cultural anthropology is insulting, but just dumb; a waste of resources, and of credibility to the conservative community even before the Weigel flap.
The fact that “journalists” are discussing how to politically shade their coverage to achieve desired political ends – as some of Weigel’s emails showed – is the real issue here.
I’d love to see an editor, an ombudsman and a journalist address that. All the other questions are just side issues.
Need month-old debunked out-of-context defmatory news?
The DFL website is your one stop shop.
Does anything about this “story” sound familiar to you?
Tom Emmer recently came under fire for his ties to the organization You Can Run But You Can’t Hide International, and its leader Bradlee Dean who has equated homosexuals with pedophiles and encouraged his followers to stand up and “enforce God’s laws” on their own.
Why yes – if you read Shot In The Dark for the truth about current events, you have.
When asked to address his relationship with Dean and his organization, Emmer simply said “these are good people.”
Now, if you are smart you know everything that the DFL say about Tom Emmer is a filthy, rotting lie, and if it’s in the Minnesoros “Independent” or any other leftyblog you need to distrust but verify.
Yes, I said “filthy rotting lie”. From the categorical debunking of Andy Birkey’s out-of-context hit piece earlier this month:
The “ties”, according to Birkey, are:
An almost-two-year-old “donation” of $250, in the form of buying seats at a You Can Run benefit dinner in November of 2008. This, by the way, was long before YCR was on the regional media radar – although Birkey continues to refer to this “donation” with context and time frame carefully buried.
Tom Emmer stopping by and getting photographed at the YCR booth at the Minnesota State GOP Convention (as he had stopped by every single gathering of conservatives anywhere in Minnnesota for the past year).
An appearance on “Sons Of Liberty”. By that token, RT Rybak, a former NARN guest, must be a conservative sympathizer.
Tom Emmer calling Bradlee Dean and his associates “nice people“. It’s perhaps an inconvenient truth to Andy Birkey that Bradlee Dean and Jake MacMillan are nice people. They may have different beliefs than Andy Birkey and, also, me. And perhaps it’s easier to believe people who disagree with you are foul people with horns growing out their heads. But Dean and MacMillan and their wives and associates are a genial bunch.
And that’s it. That, according to Birkey, is the extent of Tom Emmer’s “link” to YCR.
There is no involvement. To say otherwise is a lie.
But this is the DFL we’re talking about:
“Is Tom Emmer kidding? Good people indeed,” said DFL spokesperson Donald McFarland. “Tom Emmer stood up for a man who called members of the GLBT community predators, who has encouraged violence against homosexuals and would like to impose his narrow-minded beliefs on the whole of America.
OK, Donald McFarland, here’s your choice:
We’ll be in touch.
Back during Desert Storm, Saturday Night Live – which still had Phil Hartmann, Dennis Miller, Jan Hooks and Dana Carvey, and was hence still funny at the time – parodied one of the military press conferences that were such a staple of the coverage of that war, way back when.
In it, a stoic military officer (played, if I remember correctly, by Kevin Nealon) stood, trying to remain unruffled, as “journalists” asked a series of increasingly absurd questions:
REPORTER: “Tell us, Colonel: what will be the targets, strike times and units involved in any air raids today?”
OFFICER: “Um, I am afraid I can’t, er, discuss that…”
ANOTHER REPORTER: “Colonel, when exactly will the ground attack take place, and where?”
OFFICER: “Um…”
The media’s coverage of Tom Emmer’s gubernatorial campaign reminds me of that skit.
I noticed this bit in Erik Black’s piece in the MinnPost that I covered yesterday (and that Black’s old colleague John Tevlin, in true “Circle The Wagons!” style, also covers today, in nearly identical thoughts if not words):
[Emmer] owes the voters of Minnesota some straighter talk, not about what he could do, but what he would do to balance the budget. (Not to say that all the other guv candidates have been clear abut how they would do it. They haven’t.)
I asked yesterday – Emmer “owes” the people “straight talk”, while the DFLers merely get a mild joshing nod?
Still, I’ve heard this from a few people; “If Emmer’s so great, and if he’s going to rebuild government, then where is his master plan on how he’s going to do the whole thing?”
I gotta confess sometimes, I”m curious myself.
But it doesn’t take a political consultant or an especially curious journalist to see that…:
So with that in mind, tell me – what sense would it make for Tom Emmer to release “the master plan” for his administration, two months before there is an alternative to compare it to? All that would do is give the DFL and the media (that is, let’s be honest, largely on the DFL’s side) time to define, frame, and re-spin it, long before the Dems ever have a candidate, much less a “plan” to “scrutinize”. Which I put in scare quotes, since I’m not willing to take it on faith that anyone in the Twin Cities’ establishment media will “scrutinize” the DFL’s “plan” so much as run cover for it; that’ll be, as usual, the job of the conservative alternative media.
What’s Emmer’s plan? I dunno. His rhetoric is certainly building up expectations; if he’s not swinging for the fence, he’s at least aiming for the outfield. He’s be nuts not to, in my humble opinion; this is a year when people want to see results, and are showing everyone who cares how sick they are of arrogant, rapacious, thud-witted goverment and the bills it leaves us.
But is he wrong to sit on that plan until it matters? Even if , horror of horrors, it leaves the state’s chattering classes and the designers of the DFL’s Chanting Points less material for the time being?
I’ll give you my answer when I see Mark Dayton’s plan.
I could make Scarlett Johannson the happiest woman in the world.
Let’s see if Tom Scheck and Erick Black start staking out Ms. Johannson’s house.
It might be easier than answering the questions about their coverage of the Emmer campaign.
———-
Tom Emmer launched “Emmertruth” – a site dedicated to countering the media’s context-mangling DFL-agenda-m0ngering – yesterday. And right in the nick of time.
This past April, Emmer appeared on Gary Eichten’s mid-day show on MPR. Eichten asked Emmer a hypothetical question about how he’d hypothetically handle Minnesota’s budget.
Now, as someone who talks on the air live for two hours a week with no more “editing” than a dump button in case Ed starts cursing again, I’ll tell you – every so often you say something on the first try that isn’t quite right. So you take another pass at it. This happens even if you’re very good at speaking off the cuff – which, by the way, Tom Emmer is.
Most print news people – like Erik Black, formerly of the Strib and currently of the MinnPost – have a hard time with this; they can go their entire career without a “rough draft” going out to the public. And MPR’s Tom Scheck perhaps is the wrong person to ask about it, since MPR is about as spontaneous and unedited as the Catholic Mass.
Anyway – according to Emmertruth, this is what happened, with emphasis added by me:
Emmer did initially say the overall budget should be around $40 billion, down from the current level of $60 billion. But seconds later he clarified with the definitive statement that we “can reduce government easily by 20% in the next four years.” When Scheck chose to use the $20 billion figure instead of the more definitive final word on the question, he made a critical and material journalistic mistake.
Here – in Tom Scheck’s piece on the subject, which extensively quotes state bureaucrats on why Tom Emmer should not cut state bureaucracy – is the quote in question:
In late April, he suggested he could eliminate a third of overall state spending, roughly $20 billion.
You be the judge – but from where I sit, Scheck is wrong, or misleading, when he uses the $20 billion number. Emmer said – in the definitive take on the hypothetical question – he’s cut 20% over 4 years. Not that he’d immediately slash $60 to $40 billion.
It’s not rocket surgery to expect that the local mainstream media will circle its wagons to defend the rest of the media. And some of the regional media, including Erik Black’s former bosses in the Strib editorial board, are pretty transparently working to see a DFLer gets elected governor this fall, as usual. And while I’m the last person in the world to impugn the integrity of MPR News – whose standards I’ve repeatedly praised in the past – their coverage of Emmer bears watching, since Emmer has spoken of cutting the state’s subsidy of MPR.
Black continues:
he has launched a feature called “EmmerTruth,” in which he will set the record straight about distortions of his record, position and statements.The first couple of entries, though, are pretty weak. In one, he complains that MPR reporter Tom Scheck said that Emmer would cut $20 billion in state spending. But Emmer says he never said he would cut $20 billion, only that he could.
And then…what?
He went on to clarify the whole thing!
So why did Scheck choose to go with the initial – and, via Emmertruth, admittedly bobbled – take on the hypothetical, when the clarification is, with a nod to Regis Philbin, “the final answer?”
And why did Black ignore this? Do the facts matter, or is it all about playing “gotcha” with off-the-cuff answers to hypothetical questions?
Black concludes:
I’ve about convinced myself that Emmer owes Scheck an apology.
I’m dying to figure out why.
And he owes the voters of Minnesota some straighter talk, not about what he could do, but what he would do to balance the budget. (Not to say that all the other guv candidates have been clear abut how they would do it. They haven’t.)
Let me get this straight: the DFL candidates have been “unclear”, but Emmer “owes” everyone an explanation now – so the DFL and its friends in the media can bag on it at their leisure until the DFL picks a candidate?
Why does the MinnPost hold Republicans to a different standard than the DFL?
DISCLOSURE: I recently signed on to have occasional posts from this blog re-posted on MinnPost. We’ll see how that works out now, won’t we?
UPDATE: Gary Gross at Let Freedom Ring and True North covers this as well.
CORRECTIONS: In the original take on this story, I’d forgotten that there is, technically, a GOP primary. That’s right, Leslie Davis and Ole Savior get their moment in the electoral sun. Als0, I had the wrong date for the original broadcast on the Eichten show that spawned this “controversy”.
I checked out the big headline on Twin Cities überleftyblog MNPublius this morning, and I started to worry:
Horner campaign gaining support of influential Republicans
…and read the lede…
Tom Horner is becoming a serious problem for Tom Emmer and the Republican party.
“Wow”, I thought. “This could be serious business. What “influential Republicans” have lined up behind the big-tax, big-spend, big-government Horner?
I read on, drum roll playing in my head:
To which I responded “Huh” and “Huh”?
Two press guys? One for a Congressman who ran too far to the center and got beaten in 2006, and another that’s been out of the governor’s office for years?
Two guys who’ve never won an election?
Two guys who may have never even changed a single person in their lives to switch a vote?
One guy I’ve never, ever heard of, and another that I dealt with oh-so-briefly back during, if memory serves, George W. Bush’s first term? Both of whom I suspect are known only to wonks and media people, are utterly unknown to anyone who doesn’t eat, drink and live politics?
It’s ludicrous, and I suspect even Jeff Rosenberg knows it.
Here’s what’s happening: faced with Emmer’s two-month head-start and very anti-establishment message, and knowing that at the end of that they’ll have to sell Minnesota either a national laughingstock or a woman whose entire platform is summed up “spend money like a crack whore with a stolen Platinum card”, the entire regional Sorosphere (paid or not) is trying to repeat a couple of transparently bogus lines so many times that people start to believe them:
I’ll say this in their defense; if I was looking forward to having to support someone like Mark Dayton or Margaret Anderson Kelliher against a Tom Emmer, I’d stick with repeating big lies in the hopes that gullible voters will believe it, too. After all, it worked 18 months ago.
Blogging hits the ballot in California.
On Tuesday, voters in the Golden State will chose nominees for the state’s U.S. Senate general election. And while most of the media oxygen for the race (already fighting for air against the uber-expensive GOP gubernatorial primary) has been sucked up by the Republican electoral 3-way, Democrats must thin their herd as well. Only two Democrats are saying “no ma’am” to another term for incumbent Barbara Boxer: a disheveled, quixotic blogger and a vainglorious Hollywood “producer” whose campaign seems to be an excuse to post pictures of him with famous people.
Guess which of the three scored a profile by the New York Times:
No, this is not your typical Senate campaign command center; but then again, [Mickey] Kaus is not your typical Senate hopeful. His lair speaks more to his career of the last 10 years — prolific blogger and professional curmudgeon — than the one he’s currently aspiring to. As the one-man show behind Kausfiles on Slate, Mr. Kaus was one of the first political bloggers, after a print career that included stops at publications like Newsweek and Harper’s…
“If you’d asked me is he ever going to run for Senate, I’d say, ‘Are you crazy?’ ” says Michael Kinsley, editor at large of The Atlantic Wire and a longtime friend. “He seems like a classic blogger — someone who is happier in front of his computer than he is out kissing babies.”
But Mr. Kaus has thrown himself into his quixotic campaign with surprising earnestness, undeterred by his prospects (grim) and general diagnosis (insane). He is the first person to admit that he has absolutely no chance of becoming California’s next Senator, but contends that this is not really the point. He says he is running as a protest candidate in order to draw attention to his pet issues.
California has often been viewed as political laboratory – from recall elections and an ever-expanding list of constitutional propositions – even if most of their creations have taken on a Frankensteinesque quality in recent decades. So it might as well be that the strengthes and limitations of the first fully blog-based candidate be demonstrated on a West Coast ballot.
Much like the blog, Kaus Files, that launched him into prominence within the punditry, Mickey Kaus’ candidacy has been rife with political paradoxes. Instead of focusing on areas where he agrees with the Democratic base, Kaus is solidly running to Boxer’s right on unions and immigration. Attacked as a closet Republican, Kaus invokes Paul Wellstone is his campaign’s sole TV advertisement. Treating his campaign as a Dave Barry/Gore Vidal joke candidacy one minute, the next Kaus is writing serious political manifestos.
Yet it’s hard to escape the feeling that had Kaus taken himself – or his campaign – more seriously, his spoiler candidacy might have done more than simply garner a few memorable press clippings for his scrapebook.
If the mood of the electorate is hostile across the country, California voters appear ready to find the nearest Bastille. Every single major party candidate has their approval/disapproval numbers upside-down, including Boxer at 37/46 – and that’s relatively healthy compared to most of the other statewide candidates. And whether California Democrats wish to acknowledge it or not, Kaus’ pet issues of unions and immigration are two big parts of the mosaic of problems that have painted the state forever in the red.
When even the LA Times refuses to endorse the incumbent, you know the political climate has turned stormy. But the limitations of Kaus’ own personality precluded him turning the non-endorsement to his advantage. Or as the paper put it: “But we can’t endorse him, because he gives no indication that he would step up to the job and away from his Democratic-gadfly persona.”
Blogging has certainly give Kaus an leg-up otherwise undeserved by his campaign. What other forum would allow a candidate with a $36,000 budget, no visible support and with such blunt honesty about his chances that he was deined a speaking slot at the Democratic convention, as much media fanfare as Kaus has enjoyed?
But persuading an electorate is world’s away from simply unleasing opinions into the ether of the internet. Even recognized as one of the Founding Fathers of internet journalism and blogging, the height of Kaus’ popularity was 40,000 unique visitors each day – a tremendous audience in blog terms but a pittance in political value.
“The Kaus blog speaks to a very smart and important influential niche, but it’s still just a niche,” says the conservative blogger Jonah Goldberg, who has supported Mr. Kaus’s campaign in the National Review Online. “The universe of bloggers is a hell of a lot smaller than a lot of bloggers like to think.”
UPDATE: So much for the New York Times. Kaus was demolished, as expected, but surprisingly finished in 3rd – 55,000 votes behind Hollywoodd hanger-on Brian Quintana for 5.2%.
For the benefit of those who mistake “chanting the chanting points on cue” for “reporting”:
Apologia
ap·o·lo·gi·a
/ˌæpəˈloʊdʒiə/ Show Spelled[ap-uh-loh-jee-uh]
–noun
1. an apology, as in defense or justification of a belief, idea, etc.
2. Literature . a work written as an explanation or justification of one’s motives, convictions, or acts.Antonym: This piece, which doesn’t “apologize” for anything, but merely demands that a “journalist” substantiate his conclusion with in-context, accurate information, or drop it.
Glad we could clear that up.
(PS: Saying “Suuuuure, he didn’t” isn’t the most convincing argument).
In the 1930’s, New York Times correspondent Walter Duranty earned himself a place in literary infamy by whitewashing Stalin’s forced famine of Ukraine.
Ezra Klein and Matt Yglesias can at least take comfort in the fact that their junketeering whitewash of China’s authoritarian assaults on human rights has historical precedent, but will probably not lead to a Pulitzer that gets contested fifty years after their deaths:
Klein and Yglesias’ group was taken to tour a spanking-new village built on the outskirts of the northern city of Dalian. As Yglesias describes it, “back in 2006 the former “village” of rudimentary structures was razed and the government constructed a large and extremely nice park (it’s in a very scenic area), reforested the hillsides, and constructed a series of apartment complexes. The former villagers now live in modest but up-to-date structures.” But don’t worry about the forcibly displaced, Yglesias admonishes us, because, “[w]e spoke to one retired couple who was given four apartments—they live in one and rent out the other three to families who’ve either moved out to Cha’an from the central city or else moved to the area from less prosperous regions of China. The town’s current party boss said he was given five apartments.” Klein’s coverage on the website of the Washington Post was equally credulous. He informed his audience, “A conversation with some residents revealed that they didn’t just get one free apartment in the new building. They got four free apartments, three of which they were now renting out. And medical coverage. And money for furnishings. And a food stipend. And — I’m not kidding, by the way — birthday cakes on their birthdays. Sweet deal.”
The problem is, it’s not a “sweet deal” for most of the millions of Chinese displaced by development projects every years. China has no real concept of private property; every hovel is considered state property, for the state to destroy as needed for any reason.
Big hydroelectric dam? Millions relocated (with no documentary evidence of “sweet deals”). Beijing holds the Olympics? Over a million relocated.
Sweet.
Yglesias and Klein are on a junket managed and staged by a public relations firm based in Hong Kong called the China-United States Exchange Foundation. While the firm claims on its website it is a “non-government” organization, it would be impossible for it to operate without strictures imposed by the Chinese government. China has no concept of freedom of the press, and there is simply no way that the Beijing government would tolerate a group of American journalists traveling around the country with impunity. In other words, Yglesias, Klein, and their “fellow travelers” are being shown precisely what the Beijing government wants them to see. It is a non-governmental tour in name only. The fact that Klein and Yglesias report back on such obviously staged scenes without a hint of doubt raises serious doubts about their journalistic competence. The “sweet deal” that Klein alluded to above is obviously too – in fact, sickly – sweet. It is plainly obvious to anyone who knows a whit about China that they were visiting a stage-managed potemkin village.
The “Potemkin Village” – named after a Czarist minister who built a fake village to show Western visitors how well the Russian serfs were being treated (they were treated like slaves elsewhere in Russia) – is a great totalitarian tradition; dictators build a really, really nice demonstration of something controversial, to show how benign, even wonderful, it is. Hitler even built a “Potemkin” concentration camp, Theresienstadt, to show visiting human rights dignitaries and, one presumes, the 1940’s anscestors of Klein and Yglesias, how good concentration camp inmates had it.
Sad to say, they bought it back then, too.
Leftyblogs: Speaking “sweet deal” to power.
You are a leftyblogger.
You write a post that is so chock-full of long-debunked shrieking points that there’s no room for any information of value that you might, improbably, know.
In and among the mindless uncritical droogs who support you with more of the same, a small group of pro-civil liberties people with actual facts on the issue at hand set you straight.
What do you do?
You delete their substantive and fact-clogged comments about the time they start to make you look like the un-informed naif you are; when even that doesn‘t work, you declare those who disagree with you “propagandists”, and take your toys and run away.
Not that anyone should expect better.
The leftyblog community is turning cartwheels because James O’Keefe pled guilty to his phone shenanigans in Mary Landrieu’s office.
But as with pretty much everything you read on leftyblogs, the facts are wrong:
The U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of Louisiana has filed a court document admitting that James O’Keefe did not intend to tamper with the phones at Mary Landrieu’s office, or commit any other felony.
Oh — and the good folks at the Department of Justice don’t particularly want you to know that. This post reveals that, at O’Keefe’s hearing, the Assistant U.S. Attorney tried not to read that part of the document in court. What’s more, the U.S. Attorney pointedly omitted this critical information from their press release.
And the part that the press carries is, of course, the only reality the lefty smear machine cares about.
his Twitter feed.
Over the years, we’ve become used to the Minnesota Independent’s sloppy, agenda-driven “reporting” on issues.
Yesterday, Andy Birkey at the Mindy topped himself in a piece about a “donation” from the Tom Emmer campaign to “You Can Run International” (YCR(, an Annandale-based ministry.
YCR is a fundamentalist group that started as a metal-rap music ministry that started doing assemblies in schools, and have branched out into multimedia, including a weekly radio program, “Sons Of Liberty” on WWTC-AM, where my “Northern Alliance Radio Network” also broadcasts. Disclosure: I know Bradlee Dean via the station; we talk radio quite a bit; I disagree with him on not a few things, theologically and politically, and he and his ministry say a few things I don’t personally endorse. But we’re on the same team (and I’m waiting to see which leftyblog is the first to copy and paste “we’re on the same team” while omitting the previous couple of sentences).
Birkey:
The Minnesota House campaign of Rep. Tom Emmer donated to the ministry of You Can Run But You Cannot Hide Intl., Inc., according to the press secretary for Emmer’s gubernatorial campaign. Emmer is one of several Republican leaders involved with the ministry of Bradlee Dean, who leads a hard rock band that brings its message of Jesus Christ into public schools and recently affirmed the practice of Muslim countries executing gays and lesbians.
First, the “donation”.
According to a source very close to the Emmer campaign, “the “contribution” was nothing more than buying seats at a dinner”, a teen outreach event. It was not a direct cash donation to YCR, as Birkey’s article implies.
Tomayto Tomahto? Not really – accuracy and context count.
But Birkey goes farther into the weeds.
According to campaign finance reports, Emmer’s campaign gave You Can Run $250 in late 2008 (pdf).
In the last few months, Emmer has appeared on Bradlee Dean’s radio show — the same show on which Dean said, “Muslims are calling for the executions of homosexuals in America. This just shows you they themselves are upholding the laws that are even in the Bible of the Judeo-Christian God, but they seem to be more moral than even the American Christians do, because these people are livid about enforcing their laws. They know homosexuality is an abomination.”
Well, no. Emmer did not appear on “the same show” where Dean gave the quote above. He appeared on a completely separate episode of the program. And they talked about politics. Not Islam and Christianity’s views on gays. Birkey’s wording is incredibly misleading; the subtext – that appearing on a radio show implies agreement rather than trying to engage an audience – is even worse.
And if Birkey wants to believe appearance equals agreement, he might want to have a word with NARN guest R.T. Rybak.
And Dean was talking about traditional biblical and quranic theology, not advocating actions by a civil government. Fundamentalist Christianity and Islam are both rather harsh on the subject of homosexuality, and Dean is nothing if not a fundamentalist. But it’s crazy to take Dean’s quote – about an outrage on the part of Muslim governments – and spin it as sympathy for lynching gays (see “UPDATE”, below).
So to summarize, Andy Birkey wants you to believe that seats “donated” at an outreach dinner in November 2008 for a group whose radio program didn’t go on the air until August 2009 implies…what? That Tom Emmer harbors some sympathy for putatively outrageous views on gays?
Seem a little stretchy to anyone?
Emmer also posed for a picture with leaders of You Can Run,
As he did with pretty much everyone who attended any Republican function in the past year or so, myself included. Heck, if Andy Birkey had shown up, he’d probably have gotten a picture with Emmer too.
Emmer, by the way, responds pretty definitively to the issue to MPR’s Tom Scheck.
UPDATE AND CORRECTION: I talked with Bradlee Dean – that’s how I roll, reporting-wise.
First the correction: Dean interviewed Emmer on their old KKMS program, before he started on WWTC. KKMS is Salem’s religious station, while WWTC covers politics.
Now, the update. I asked Dean “Do you advocate or approve of the government executing homosexuals for being homosexual?”
He laughed a long, deep bellylaugh. That’d be “no”.
“Would it be fair to say”, I continued, “that the context of the quote Andy Birkey ran was discussing biblical and quranic theology, rather than advocating or tolerating actions by a civil goverment, and that neither Bradkee Dean nor You Can Run International advocate the murder of gays?”
“Absolutely”, Dean replied.
I don’t know about you, but that was not the impression I got from Birkey’s quote.
The battle for the Second Amendment, in my lifetime, has turned nearly 180 degrees. When I was a kid (and a liberal), things were looking pretty bleak; US V. Miller was broadly (and mistakenly) accepted as a precedent; the media and big government culture largely regarded firearms as a social illness that needed to be controlled and then eradicated.
But in one of the greatest grass-roots political movements in American history, millions of law-abiding citizens have turned the tide, for now – vote by vote, state by state, and finally, even turning much of this nation’s bobbleheaded “legal elite” around, to the point where the forces of good prevailed in the Supreme Court two years ago, in the Heller decision. And with any luck, sometime in the next month or so, the McDonald case will incorporate Heller to all fifty states, causing the “individual rights” interpretation of the Second Amendment to become binding on all lower levels of government.
This is good.
One thing one can not say is that the human rights and civil liberties interpretation of the Second Amendment won because the broad sweep of the extreme “progressive” movement got especially better informed on the subject.
Because if this post at Mahablog is any indication, we have a long, long way to go.
Not content with merely supporting an individual right to own firearms, the National Rifle Association is hellbent on eliminating all restrictions on any citizens carrying guns anywhere he or she wants, including churches, workplaces, and now bars and restaurants. This is in spite of the fact that even in the most 2nd-amendment lovin’ red states a large majority of people think it’s a real bad idea for a bunch of drunken yahoos to be packing heat.
So many responses.
For starters: the term “packing heat” should be a signal that whomever is writing really knows nothing about the topic. I know – it’s a correlation that doesn’t equal causation, but there is an extremely high correlation between people who use the phrase (which has been otherwise absent from American English since the 1930s, except in old gangster movies) and abject ignorance on the subject.
Next – “Maha” claims that “big majorities” oppose the rights of legal permit-holders to carry in churches, bars and restaurants. I’m not sure where she gets this – I’d love to see a cite – but it reminds me of the polls the “progressives tossed about from the seventies through the nineties that claimed a huge majority supported gun control. The devil was in the details; the vast majority approve of some controls. Keeping guns away from criminals and convicted felons is “gun control”, and I favor it; I’d be part of that putative “vast majority”. It’s fodder for giggly statistical games, but it’s not really honest.
Because the only numbers that really matter are these; a law-abiding citizen with a carry permit (which proves, in 40 states, that he or she has no criminal record, no documented drug or alcohol problems, and in many of them has passed a skills course) is vastly less likely to harm you or anyone else than the general public – as in “two orders of magnitude” less.
Yes, the new Tennessee law that lifts all restrictions on where a citizen can carry a concealed weapon, including into bars, provides that the carrier must abstain from drinking.
I have to wonder – do these people either read, or talk with each other?
Because it was two years ago that this blog humiliated the Minnesoros “Independent” on this exact question. It’s been legal,l in überliberal Minnesota, to carry permitted guns in bars since 2005, provided one’s blood alcohol level is below .04 – half the level allowed to drive a car. This is true in many other “shall issue” states.
You don’t have to look very hard to find stories of people shooting people in bars. But you have to look long and hard to find any involving legal carry permit-holders.
The NRA pushed hard for the new Tennessee law:
The NRA’s argument is that while the militia may be “well-regulated,” any restriction on an individual citizen’s ability to carry a firearm amounts to an “abridgment” of the 2nd Amendment right to keep and bear arms. This assumes that all such rights are absolute and untouchable by law under all circumstances, but we certainly have never treated any other right that way.
And we don’t treat the Second Amendment that way.
“Maha” writes imprecisely – which is as good as most “progressives” can do on the subject, to be fair. The NRA is pretty absolutist about the rights of law-abiding individual citizens. The NRA has also led the way on laws to punish gun possession and use by criminals.
The rub, of course, is that “progressives” never, ever distinguish between the law-abiding and criminals when the topic is guns (or, for that matter, quite a few other topics as well) – which we see in the following clip:
Freedom of speech doesn’t include a right to publish and distribute hard-core pornography, for example. Freedom of religion doesn’t rubber stamp human sacrifice.
That “Maha” thinks my right as someone with a clean criminal record is on par with human sacrifice is almost as telling as the fact she thinks that there are any restrictions on hard-core porn.
The NRA is using bullying tactics to impose its will on lawmakers, even when a whopping majority of constituents (and probably the lawmakers’ consciences, if they have any) disagree with the NRA’s position. There are some cities and states in which a big majority would prefer some level of legal gun control, for safety’s sake.
If decades of statistic don’t show you that controlling the rights of the law-abiding in the interest of “safety” isnt’ a canard, the example of Chicago is probably lost on you.
Anyway – the issue is at a bit of a head, with the nomination of Elena Kagan to the SCOTUS, and with the high court’s upcoming McDonald decision.
“Maha”:
Now the wingnuts are screaming that Elena Kagan is opposed to gun rights because –
Elena Kagan said as a U.S. Supreme Court law clerk in 1987 that she was “not sympathetic” toward a man who contended that his constitutional rights were violated when he was convicted for carrying an unlicensed pistol.
Note the “unlicensed” part.
We do. That’s the point; it is impossible, in DC, Chicago and other cities, for the law-abiding citizen to get the “license”. In other cities – New York is a great example, as was Minnesota until 2003 – it was entirely a matter of the applicant’s political clout and connections.
More recently she has said,
“There is no question, after Heller, that the Second Amendment guarantees individuals the right to keep and bear arms and that this right, like others in the Constitution, provides strong although not unlimited protection against governmental regulation,” she said.
Right.
And it’s the “…although not unlimited…” bit that we are watching closely.
A conservative’s idea of a “reasonable limit” is “keeping guns out of the hands of criminals”; a “progressive” thinks that putting a gun into anyone’s hands at all makes them suspect.
I don’t read Mahablog much. But I noticed she’d linked to me:
But that’s not good enough for the gun nuts, who predictably compared Heller to Third Reich Nazis.
Which is a rather “un-nuanced” view of what I actually wrote. Read it yourself; I criticize those who defend Kagan’s 1987 comments on the Second Amendment by saying “it reflects what the “elite bar” thought at the time”.
The “elite bar” once thought that a black man was worth 2/3 of a white man, and defended slavery with carefully-written, legally-scrupulous opinions – that were morally utterly vacant, since they abridged basic human liberties.
The “Nuremberg Laws” were perfectly acceptable law under German jurisprudence, too. The German “legal elite” said so.
There’s no comparing the results of the two; Slavery and the Holocaust were evil, while gun control is merely stupid and racist.
But my point wasn’t comparison; it was simply that a stupid opinion isn’t made correct because “the elites believed it was correct”.
The crazy part of this is that the basic position of the gun lobby — that the 2nd amendment protects an individual right to own firearms — is settled law at this point. And the issue of gun control isn’t even on the progressivist back burner any more, compared to, say, 15 years ago. It’s not even in the bleeping kitchen.
And how do you think it got that way?
Because millions of us schlumpfy, un-hip guys and gals in flyoverland – the ones that Bill Maher giggles at – made it that way, one vote and one state and, finally, one justice at a time.
And, by “Maha’s” leave, we’re going to make sure it stays that way.
About the only way gun rights are going to be seriously challenged in the foreseeable future is if there is a huge swing of public opinion in the direction of more gun control. A few shoot-outs in Tennessee roadhouses might do it.
Keep waiting.
And if you look at the statistics, you might wanna bring a water bottle. You’ll be waiting a long, long time.
Side note: Let’s see if Barbara “Maha” O’Brien is any better at allowing dissenting comments than she used to be.
UPDATE: Nope, she’s not. I’m told that several comments critical of her “position” have been removed.
Why are some liberal bloggers so utterly gutless?
As the Minnesota GOP congratulates Tom Emmer for his victory at the convention over the weekend, I thought it’d be fun to take a trip in the wayback machine to visit the keen-eyed analysis visited upon the GOP race by those keen-eyed monitors of the conservative psyche at MNPublius a week ago today (with emphasis added):
Immediately after Margaret Anderson Kelliher’s endorsement by the DFL, the Republican party and Marty Seifert’s campaign engaged in the time-honored ritual of issuing boilerplate press releases attacking her. Neither press release was particularly notable, as is always the case. What was notable, though, was that Tom Emmer’s campaign didn’t bother. The exercise probably took the Seifert campaign all of two minutes. It makes me wonder: Is the Emmer campaign giving up on the gubernatorial race?
Emmer, who has long been the underdog in the Republican race, has been the target of several nasty attacks from the Seifert campaign. Have they shaken his will to continue in this race to the point that his campaign won’t spend two minutes to put together a boilerplate statement on MAK’s endorsement? It would be a shame if Seifert was able to push Emmer out of the race by resorting to personal attacks.
Good call, Jeff Rosenberg!
Can’t wait to see your call on the general!
No, I’m going to speculate that there were two reasons for this:
Back to MNPublius:
Or perhaps I’m reading this all wrong, and they just haven’t gotten to it yet. Looking at their press release page, Emmer’s campaign has never released a single press release on a weekend. Maybe their campaign only works from 9 to 5 on weekdays, and they’ll get to it today. If that’s the case, then they don’t really deserve to win.
Which says more about the lefty alt-media’s addiction to “West Wing”-style drama than the merits of the Emmer campaign. And may be a bit about Emmer’s priorities; after the Unity Breakfast Saturday morning, when many candidates would be hitting the road to start the grind, and as DFL policy-wonk wannabees were sitting in Hell’s Kitchen trying to get a better deal on placard-printing on a Saturday? Emmer was at his kid’s first communion.
Maybe MNPublius will interpret that as a sign of resignation, I dunno. I think it shows who’s in control at this point.
I got a rumor from someone connected with the press that The Uptake – the controversial left-leaning “citizen journalism” outfit that has spent the past few months striving for respectability with the Capital Press Corps – has been denied credentials to cover the MNGOP Convention this weekend.
A liberal commenter might response “aw, that’s just because they’re afraid of left-leaning media!”
Well, no. In addition to the Strib, PiPress, WCCO, KSTP, MPR and KARE, the MNGOP has given press credentials to…
…KFAI, the obstreporously “progressive” Pacifica affiliate. I used to work at KFAI; the place makes no bones about its’ sympathies. But apparently its news department has spent some time in recent years trying to develop a reputation for fairness, at least, in its news coverage.
Again – it’s all rumor.
So far.
Wednesday, Andy Birkey at the Minnesoros “independent” wrote about an episode involving an angry caller leaving a profane, uncivil message at a local AFSCME office.
Birkey:
[AFSCME’s flak] forwarded audio of the call along with the identity of a person she says the calls were tracked to. That individual, a local business owner, she says “claims to be an organizer of the Tea Party protest at the State Capitol tomorrow.”
Birkey ran the “organizer” claim uncritically, without any fact-checking; apparently AFSCME flaks are considered unimpeachable sources.
But since I was on the stage with every single one of the Twin Cities’ Tea Party’s “organization” last night, I asked around if anyone had heard of the alleged caller, “Ed Motch”. Was he an organizer? Was he even prominent enough among the Twin Cities’ small community of non-major-party tax activists that anyone even knew the guy’s name?
Nobody had ever heard of the guy. A casual google of “Ed Motch” shows that most of the references to him come from…the Mindy.
To be fair to the Mindy, the rest of the Twin Cities media – Fox9, WCCO and MPR – repeated AFSCME’s claim that this…:
“Hey you [expletive] piece of [expletive]. Your days are [expletive] numbered sucking at the public tit. This [expletive] is over. I saw that [expletive] ‘Tax the Rich’ ad again. We don’t you come and visit tomorrow at the [expletive] little party we’re going to have on the 15th at the capitol. Why don’t you show up there with your [expletive] union signs. That’d be just [expletive] wonderful. Come you you gutless [expletive] wonders, show up!”
…was a “threat”. An uncivil. profane tirade, certainly, and not an invitation in good faith to the event, but “threat?
Apparently it is, if AFSCME, like Steny Hoyer, Rep. Cleaver, Rep. Lewis and Nancy Pelosi, say so.
A new lefty group blog (pardon the redundancy; I don’t know that there’s ever been a lefty soloblog), MN Political Roundtable, rolled out last week. The blog more or less apes the True North model – like TN, it claims to be based on ideology (if not principles) rather than allegiance to the DFL:
Welcome! Our goal is to respectfully further progressivism and air the moderate to liberal viewpoint. We are not a “Democratic Party” or “DFL” blog, although most (but not all) of us are Democrats.
Now, whenever a leftyblog rolls out, you have to ask yourself – is it going to be:
Well, there’s a little promise; among the writers are my old friend Erik Hare, the usually excellent if sometimes excessively victorian-vapour-prone Eric Austin, and the always-wrong-but-frequently-thought-provoking-and-usually-unembarassing Dave Mindeman.
On the other hand, their first “guest blog” post – chock full of preening condescension and “artistic” talent somewhere between Ken Weiner and Swiftee – says “chromosomal garage sale”.
Time’ll tell.
While Democrats have become very quick to try to hide their own failings behind purported Republican/conservative baseness (remember when Hillary Clinton blamed Rush Limbaugh for the Oklahoma City Bombing?), it’s interesting to notice how selective they are about the subject.
Evan Coyne Maloney on-again, off-again tolerance for violent imagery in activism:
The Obama Administration’s confrontational tone included some violent imagery last August, when one White House official encouraged Obama supporters to “punch back twice as hard” against opponents.
Later that day, at an anti-ObamaCare rally in St. Louis, a black man named Kenneth Gladney was handing out “Don’t Tread on Me” flags when he was approached by pro-ObamaCare SEIU union members. One of the men asked Gladney, “What kind of n*%%er are you to be giving out this kind of stuff?”
…
Obama’s supporters got the message. They were getting in people’s faces, and they were punching. And kicking. Repeatedly.
Yet despite the fact that the Kenneth Gladney beating occurred the same day that the Obama Administration recommended supporters “punch back twice as hard,” there was no hyperventilating in the media about political violence or the veiled threats that encouraged it.
Real statements. Real violence.
Now, unlike Steny Hoyer and Ed Schultz, I’m not going to babble about how these actions – this preponderance of actions – reflects on every liberal. That’d be stupid.
But in Modern Times, Paul Johnson notes that “the end justifies the means” is a theme connecting all statists, from Mussolini to Alinski.
Is the Uptake – the left-leaning but ostensibly higher-aiming “citizen news” outlet – on the outs with the Capitol Press Corps?
Sarah Janecek at PIM writes:
At least two media organizations currently renting space in the Capitol press room are objecting to The Uptake also renting space in the basement of the Capitol. The Uptake is a Minnesota-based citizen journalist organization operating on a low budget and perhaps best known for its live streaming of the various proceedings attendant to the 2008 U.S. Senate recount.
We’ve written about the Uptake before. Since basically anyone can contribute to the Uptake, their efforts can be all right, and they can be pretty stupid, and in any case they depend on the restraint and “journalistic ethics” of the people involved.
And while I’ve broadly supported the Uptake, there’ve been some real veers into partisanship.
So have they, again?
Mike Dougherty, the local news editor for the Rochester Post-Bulletin, sent an email to Commissioner of Administration Sheila Reger (Admin is in charge of leasing the space), objecting to The Uptake’s presence. Wrote Dougherty:
“My concern is that they [The Uptake] are not a nonpartisan news site, which compromises the efforts of all the media in that complex that have built their reputations over time. Including The Uptake in this area with access to information about what many of the news organizations are working on with no guarantee someone else’s work won’t appear on their site or be Tweeted via Twitter … the media we represent are very different than The Uptake and we hope you will address our concerns by not allowing them to lease space in our current office or within the current press corps complex. We believe our concerns are shared by other news media organizations.”
TPT’s political reporter and “Almanac at the Capitol” host Mary LaHammer confirms that TPT also has concerns about The Uptake’s presence in the press room, noting that TPT is “zealous” about anyone or any organization using any TPT resources for partisan purposes, because of the public television company’s nonprofit status.
So what’s the problem?
Several people have said there have been some highly partisan tweets from some Uptake staff. We’ve checked the official Uptake Twitter account, and can’t find any specific, objectionable tweets other than the overriding liberal bent that is The Uptake.
We’re told the most partisan tweets are coming from Erin Maye, who is an Uptake intern. Specifically, Maye was tweeting from a House Speaker Margaret Anderson Kelliher (DFL-Minneapolis) press conference while covering it for The Uptake. Maye allegedly tweeted that Kelliher would be a great governor. A check of Maye’s tweets doesn’t show that happened. So either the tweets were deleted or they didn’t happen.
The smart money would go with “deleted”. We carried one of them last winter:
…in reference to a story where she was alleged to have done some fairly dodgy editing based, it might be surmised, on political bias:
UPDATE: The years have played hob with some of my graphics. The quote I refer to comes from Erin Maye, then an editor at the Uptake: ““I’m Editing. I feel important because I can make people say things they may not have said. Muhahaha”. “
– MBerg 10/1/2016
And Luke Hellier at MDE has another, the one from the presser above:
Both are from “Erin Maye”, an “intern” whose bio notes that she’s a “progressive” and was a “peace studies” major.
The Tweets are pretty much par for the course – if you’re a political blogger whose biases are part of your entire identity. But if you’re trying to present yourself as a genuine news organization that’s “detached” from its staff’s individual partisanship, this is a real blot on the Uptake.
If you read through the PIM report’s comments, Mike Mcintee of the Uptake claims this is a battle of old media versus new media.
I’m sure that’s in the background. But then, it’s in the background of every story where new media and old media collide.
More to the point – what do you think would happen if someone, even a dime-a-dozen intern from, say, MPR or WCCO or the PiPress would do what Maye did? Flout their biases, giggle about their ability to misrepresent and, says Hellier, go on to do it?
Do you think that “news” organization is going to get open, unfettered information from, say, the opposition party?
It’s the kind of thing “interns” and cub reporters and newbies get fired for doing at “real” news outlets (although it could be argued there’s a statute of limitations on that standard).
So there are several explanations for this:
I’ll be looking for comments from some of the principals in this story.
UPDATE: Welcome PIM readers!
UPDATE 2: In the comments below, Margaret Martin notes that there’s another explanation:
If you’ve ever seen where the media resides down at the capitol, it’s a tiny space in the basement. I imagine there is no privacy down there at all for individual reporters and they rely on a sort of code of personal decency (among themselves) and a highly developed sense of personally assured mutual destruction if somebody should blab about something overheard from another member of the press about a source, or an impolitic opinion let loose in an unguarded moment that would shatter the illusion of non-partisan media.
I never learned the secret handshake among Capitol newsies, although I’ve known quite a few of them over the years (going back to Cathy Wurzer in 1986). For people from such a range of fiercely-competitive companies to get along in such a small space, there must be some kind of rule, written or not. Or so I’d suspect.
The uptake intern with her gossipy, gushy twittering is a menace to them all. No wonder they want to give her the boot. I have a little sympathy for them, but not much. Most of them are unsparing about politicians and would not hesitate to publish something unflattering about a politician they don’t like. Especially Republicans, and no matter how how the info came to them.
Yep. It’s absurd to think that journalists don’t have political biases of their own; the crushing majority vote DFL; a staggering number of them go on to work for the DFL, for left-leaning think tanks, or for one government bureaucracy or another when they leave the news business.
But if you’re, say, Laura Brod or Dave Hann, and you have a “journalist” asking you for the straight conservative scoop on some issue or another, are you truly going to talk straight with someone that you more-or-less trust to detach their feelings, or one that you know is looking for the partisan angle?
It’s bad for business.
I take occasional issue with my fellow AM1280 host Bradlee Dean on some questions political and theological, even as I support his program, “Sons of Liberty”. “Sons…” does for politics what his late, long-running show on AM980 The Believer did for religion; take it back to its original fundamentals; going back to Thomas Jefferson and James Madison on The Patriot more or less like referring to Luke and Saint Paul on The Believer.
Neither program is/was for the faint of heart or the mushy of belief. Like I said – I disagree with Dean on some things as strenuously as I agree with him on others.
But knowing Bradlee as I do – he’s a great guy, and I’ve had a lot of fun watching his kids grow up over the years during our mutual Saturday time slots – I got a kick out of Andy Birkey’s odd little swat at Dean in the Mindy yesterday (emphasis added):
You Can Run But You Cannot Hide, the front group for the punk rock ministry of Bradlee Dean…
“Front group?”
Now, perhaps Birkey was writing imprecisely. But a “Front” usually implies some level of deception – like the Mob using a laundry as a front for a drug operation, for example, or someone setting up a potemkin news organization to serve as a campaign propaganda outlet. That kind of thing.
Just between you (pl) and me, whatever Bradlee Dean is, he’s not especially reticent about who he is or what he or “You Can Run…” represents.
Back to Birkey:
… took his brand of fundamentalist Christianity to a DFL gubernatorial meet-and-greet several weeks ago…
Several weeks ago?
Then why cover it on a “news” site?
Did Birkey just hear about it? Or was it a slow news day at the Mindy?
Or did John Marty need to place a story showing how he was duking it out with all those teabagging fundies to make his gubernatorial campaign seem like less a relic from the nineties?
There was some other stuff, but I lost interest. Sorry.
…I gotta cop to the fact that I’ve sorta let my leftyblog reading lapse a bit.
I mean, wouldn’t you?
But after one of my periodic sashays through the regional leftybloggery, I have to add that while he’s been wrong about pretty much every political question in eight years, I look forward to many more years of shaking my head and fisking a living, healthy Jeff Fecke, and wish him the best of luck in his treatment.
The dumbest rationalization? “O’Keefe didn’t wear his [fanciful and exaggerated] pimp outfit into the actual neighborhoods where the ACORN offices were located”. Gosh, d’ya think? I’m told that Steven Colbert isn’t a real blowhard conservative pundit, either. And it’s just possible that “Gunga” Dan Rather didn’t do a great job of passing as a Muj, either:
Slightly less dumb: “O’Keefe edited his footage”. Well, doy. Everyone edits their footage. Charlie Gibson and Katie Couric edited their interviews with Sarah Palin – allegedly to present her in the least flattering light possible (we won’t know until ABC and CBS release the raw footage of their interviews – which, of course, they will not, although they’ve rarely been shy about doing so to buttress whatever credibility they may actually have). Did O’Keefe’s edits mislead anyone? Well, ACORN seemed confident enough in the credibility of the footage, edited or not, to fire pretty much everyone busted in the sting.
A little dumber: “O’Keefe’s footage only showed the ones that got caught!” Well, again, doyy. The media doesn’t care about “dog bites man” stories; its when the man bites the dog that ears perk up. How many ACORN officials fell for the sting? Half a dozen? If half a dozen GOP state chairpeople agreed with a cretinous proposal to spend taxpayer money on, say, polo ponies, do you think the mainstream media would dowse up a “climate of corruption” story or two?
The jury is still out on this next bit; is O’Keefe’s sting better or worse than this bit here, where Luke Hellier at Minnesota Democrats Exposed busted an Uptake “reporter” not only deliberately editing footage from the Capitol to create a story where none existed, actively misleading the public about the nature of an exchage between Rep. Mack and ..:
Click to view full size
…but giggled about her ability to do it on Twitter?
Now, I’ve gone around a bit with the Uptake. On the one hand, most of the people involved in leading the group strive to present a clear and accurate, if not unbiased, representation of the news. On the other hand, they are committed to a “citizen journalism” model where virtually anyone can contribute, leading to some fairly ethically decrepit “reporting” (which the Uptake management, to their credit, have endeavored to fix).
The rationalization came from Charlie Quimby, who on the one hand writes/wrote for one lefty think tank or another and thus gets/has gotten some liveihood out of rationalizing the left’s behavior, but on the other hand is usually a fairly rational guy:
Kid needs supervision, like some other young videographers I could name
Now, I am not a news reporter – but I tried my hand at it, and never (allow me to brag a bit) lost a gig for breaching whatever passes for “ethics” in the business. Someone tell me again – did O’Keefe’s editing actually put words in peoples’ mouths they did not say? Did it imbue them with thoughts they did not think? Did it present a misleading impression of the ACORN employees’ malfeasance (that would have made firing them, as ACORN did, a mistake?)
Because it’d seem Ms. Maye did.
Where’s the equivalence?
And if the Uptake hires people (Ms. May was, according to Hellier’s copy and paste of Uptake’s posting on Ms. May, at the capitol more or less full-time), has the Uptake’s commitment to covering the news fairly and honestly passed its “sell by” date?
When I read Max Blumenthal’s smear piece on James O’Keefe yesterday, something about it didn’t pass the stink test. Part of it is that it was, well, written by Max Blumenthal, son of Sid “Dirty Liar” Blumenthal, who is one of the Dems’ big smear merchants. Part of it, as I noted yesterday, is that a lot of the piece looked like assumptions based on assumed guilt by association.
I was, od course, right. David Weigel writes for the Washington “Independent”, a site that’s under the same “Center for Independent Media” umbrella as the Minnesoros “Independent”. But while Weigel is a pretty committed lefty, he’s also a reporter with enough integrity that I usually pay attention when he writes.
And he’s un-thrilled by some things in Blumenthal’s piece, and the blog post that led to it.
Read the whole thing – which takes down, point by point, pretty much everything in the Blumenthal piece, from the left. on a pure fact-checking basis. The guilt-by-association that Blumenthal laboriously-yet-lazily declared, based on second-hand sourcing that putatively traced back to Weigel, would seem to be largely debunked.
One of many samples:
In my original post, I wrote that “O’Keefe’s position at the Leadership Institute gave him some ownership of the event, but in general the crowd consisted of conservatives and libertarians who wanted to see some controversy.” What I meant was that unlike the reporters in the room or the college students watching the spectacle, O’Keefe was Epstein’s co-worker. He didn’t wander in off the street — he knew his colleague was planning an event, knew it was so controversial it was moved out of the building, and he tagged along. But to some readers, that sentence suggested that O’Keefe was, indeed, a planner of the event. He absolutely wasn’t.
There’s some sloppy reporting on the left:
I’m really not used to being part of a story like this. In one week, James O’Keefe — who I’ve been writing about for months — has been linked to an organization that gave me a fellowship (the Collegiate Network) and an event I happened to be at in 2006. So I apologize for giving the impression that I confirmed all the details of the OPP and Salon stories, and I’m glad that The Village Voice has clarified its own reporting using my research.
Which isn’t to say that Weigel’s not going to close ranks with the rest of his crowd…:
As for my original point that there’s a conservative subculture that indulges in extremist politics with the expectation that no one will find out and care — well, I stand by that, and I think this episode has gone some way toward changing that.
…because he’s right; in and among the ranks of conservatives, there are some nutcases. It’s in my interest as a mainstream center-rigtht conservative to note that it’s a vanishingly tiny minority (which is the truth, although it never quite vanishes; they get slavish drive-by coverage whenever there’s a Tea Party, for example); it’s in the left’s to create the impression that it’s the majority.
Which is why Blumenthal wrote the piece, omitting all exculpatory context and torturing Weigel’s statements out of all resemblence to reality to begin with.
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