More on Journalism and Blogging: Murdoch and Huffington

Arianna Huffington had an excellent post the other day discussing the Internet and its relationship to a revolution in news. I'll get to that in a moment.

One of the reasons many of us took to the Internet beginning with the 2000 election was the failure of the big newspapers and networks to keep up with the news and actually report it.

Of course it continues even today. Chris Matthews after Obama's speech showed clearly that he misunderstood Obama when the President said, "...we are not as young—and perhaps not as innocent—as we were when Roosevelt...." Matthews during his 'analysis' exploded that he personally didn't feel guilty about anything. Uh, poor Chris didn't seem to get that Obama was not talking about innocence and guilt, he was talking about the greater naivete, inexperience and idealism we as a nation once had.

Now I would rather have Chris Matthews around than not—not even counting Fox News, there are worse journalists out there—but a lot of us need more perspective, more voices and at times we need to locate the reporter in the room who actually has the facts rather than an opinion (Chris Matthews also blundered by calling West Point the enemy camp. It was such a stupid comment that he's apologized).

But besides inadequate analysis, there's also a sea of noise out there. Steve Vockrodt of True/Slant has a great headline that doesn't require reading much further: "WHICH WINS WEDSNESDAY NEWS BATTLE: TIGER WOODS ADMISSION OR OBAMA AFGHANISTAN POLICY?"

The other ridiculous news story of the week, which has received far more news than it's worth, is the story of the publicity seeking White House gate crashers. There are, unfortunately, news sites who want me to pay for reading such silliness.

Look at these headlines for December 3 2009 that I found on the Internet:

"Somalia Graduation Day Suicide Attack"

"Putin Drops Hint About Run for Russian Presidency"

"Gates: Afghanistan Surge Could Require More Than 30,000 Troops"

"Blast Hits Iranian Pilgrims' Bus in Syria"

"Rabbi Urges More Tolerance for Muslims in Europe"

"US Envoy to Visit Pyongyang on Asia-Russia Tour"

"Bhopal: 25 Years of Poison"

There are more headlines out there but how many of just these stories will appear in local newspapers or on the late news? Not many. In fact my local paper has gotten so thin that my wife and I decided to subscribe to The New York Times three days a week. Keep that in mind when Arianna Huffington is talking about Rupert Murdoch's parochial thinking about the Internet. Here's an excerpt from Arianna's post but it's worth reading the whole thing:

In his speech this morning, Rupert Murdoch confused aggregation with wholesale misappropriation. Wholesale misappropriation is against the law -- and he has legal redress against that already. Aggregation, on the other hand, within the fair use exceptions to copyright law is part of the web's DNA. Period.

At HuffPost, aggregation goes along with a tremendous amount of original content including original reporting and over 250 original blog posts a day. And we love it when someone links to one of our posts, or excerpts a small amount and links back to us.

Most sites understand the value of this and the way the link economy operates. It's why HuffPost gets hundreds of requests from news outlets asking us to feature their material and link back to their site. They understand that the web is not a zero-sum game and that consumers love the freedom to be able to follow where their interests -- and the offshoots of a story -- take them.

I suspect Rupert Murdoch is more motivated by wealth and power than he is by good journalism. Yes, he's a conservative but there are conservative news outlets out there that don't pursue nonsense with such glee. I once saw Rupert Murdoch in New York surrounded by his sycophants trying to get his ear. It was apparent he was thriving on the arrangement. He's partially responsible for the tabloid journalism we've seen for some years now and it's good the Internet provides a way to push back while also getting informed.

I'll add one last point: I find it exhausting to read everything that's on The Huffington Post. That's okay because I don't have to. I take a quick look at it in the morning—that's how I found today's post—and move on to my other favorites. If I missed something hot, somebody somewhere will have a post on some must-see offering on HuffPost. That's the new paradigm.

Republican Fiasco Only Deepens

It's been stated before but let's state it again: today's Republican Party is controlled by right wing conservatives who are bereft of ideas; the radical agenda of Newt Gingrich, Bill Frist, Bill Kristol, Richard Perle, Tom DeLay, Dick Cheney and George W. Bush is a disaster for the overwhelming majority of Americans. Unless you're an oil executive or someone in the defense industry or sitting on a huge family fortune, Bush and his friends have done nothing for most Americans in the last six years.

In the spring of 2004, when our finances were in better shape, my wife and I donated $50 to the Kerry campaign. Since then, we've been flooded with mailers from various Democratic groups. I have friends who get uptight when they get such mailers but I consider the mailers a minor price of democracy and don't mind all that much, except on one point. We've gotten so many mailers that the cost of sending those mailers probably now exceeds what we sent in the first place. Still, I read about half the mailers to see how well people are making their sales pitch. I got a mailer yesterday from the Bill Richardson campaign and I admit I very much like the ad on the outside of the envelope:

The war in Iraq is not the disease.
Iraq is a symptom.

The disease is arrogance.

That puts it about as accurately as anything I've seen.

These are bad times and it's worth taking care of ourselves now and then. I'm grateful that most of the time about all I need to do on some days is go out and look at the moon hanging over the hills or over the valley depending on the time of night and the phase of the moon. After a few minutes, it clears my head. Sometimes, needing more, I just need to listen to some music for a half hour or read a book about as far away from these times as possible. All of us need to renew ourselves from time to time. This is going to be a long fight and there will be harder days ahead as we attempt to repair our democracy.

I've noticed a problem on progressive blogs over the last few weeks but I'm not sure what to do about it since my own feelings aren't much different. The disgust with both Washington politicians and the inability of the media to understand what a disaster we're in on a wide range of issues is taking a toll on all of us. Here's Juan Cole of Informed Comment; I simply can't fault what he says though it's harsher than what he would have said two years ago:

The Karl Rove doctrine that when you dig yourself into a ditch, the best strategy is to dig deeper, has finally met the test of reality-based politics. It isn't going to be pretty.

These guys got away with these hawkish fantasies because they bamboozled the poor evangelicals into believing they would support public morality, and bamboozled poor conservatives into thinking they would uphold small government. Instead, they are hitching their wagons to a multi-trillion dollar quagmire abroad and don't give a rat's ass about evangelical values.

I've been reading about the Republican presidential candidates and it's hard not to cringe. They're not any better than Bush and they can't make up their minds whether to defend Bush or distance themselves from him. McCain, of course, is impossible to take seriously anymore and his poll numbers make that clear. But the other frontrunners, Romney and Giuliani, aren't any better.

Romney, of course, has been all over the map and doesn't seem to be trying at all to be reasonably honest. Kevin Drum of the Washington Monthly takes issues with Romney fictional version of the months leading up to Bush's war in Iraq where Romney seems to say that the UN inspectors did not go to Iraq when in fact they did just that and didn't find anything:

WTF? Does this kind of stuff run in the family? (Yes, I know I've already made that joke once before.)

Question: does Romney genuinely not know that both the IAEA and Hans Blix's team had hundreds of inspectors in Iraq prior to the war? And that those inspectors found nothing?

Or does he know it perfectly well and has simply calculated that no one in the media cares enough about this stuff to make a big deal out of a howler like this? In any sane world, this kind of thing would be enough to disqualify a candidate from running for dogcatcher, let alone president of the United States.

And on and on it goes.

One of the first victims of a failing democracy is the truth. Juan Cole and Kevin Drum speak the truth but, like the rest of us, their disgust is growing over what they see. If we are to preserve our democracy, progressive bloggers and others are going to have to continue holding their noses and keep pushing for that truth. The reality of those who control the Republican Party is that they care far more about power than they do about their fellow Americans. They know they can't win on the issues that concern most Americans and everything we see follows from that simply observation. A political operative like Karl Rove knows this and it explains his many methods and his complete lack of conscience.

We have no choice but to push on.

This Is a Long Battle, Folks

One of themes I've been pushing on Donkey Path is that we're in a generational battle to reform Washington and to undo the increasingly reactionary politics in America that have been taking place over the last thirty years. We need reform and we need a government ready to take on the problems of the 21st century. Most Republicans in Washington and a small number of Democrats have been hiding from those problems. Even a majority of Democrats are only now catching up on a number of issues; and yet, across the spectrum, the Democrats are generally far more informed these days that their opposites across the aisle—that's important to remember.

I have no illusions about the Democratic election last November. It was great victory but a victory mitigated by the damage of the last thirty years and by the fact that the Democratic majority is rather slim in the House and almost nonexistent in the Senate and exists there because of two independents, one of them Joe Lieberman. The good news is that a number of strong moderates and progressives were elected last November but over the last thirty years, even the Democrats saw their party tilting more rightward than usual. Not all Democrats are ready to take on the 21st century. But there's a good chance that Democrats may be able to increase their majority in 2008 with good people and there's a good chance that those Republicans who embrace their radical right wing agenda may find their numbers diminishing as Americans recognize the damage many of them are doing to our nation and our future.

I'm not happy about some of the compromises Democrats have made recently and I worry that there isn't as much progress as I hoped there would be by now, but there is progress and I expect more to come. So, on the one hand, I understand some of the grousing I'm reading on different blogs but a lot of it simply isn't realistic. As I said, this is a long battle, and a handful of votes in Congress doesn't mean much. I'm committed to building on the progress that's been made and I know too much about what coming down the road to waste much time on cynicism and despairing rhetoric.

Here's a very fine post from Mahablog with a useful take on all this, including the different votes that were taken as the Democratic leadership looked for a majority:

The Feingold and McGovern amendments both provided that a troop redeployment out of Iraq begin within a set number of days after the passage of the bill. These were tougher than the timetable bill, in other words. In the Senate, 29 out of 51 Democratic senators voted yes. In the House, 169 out of 233 Democrats voted yes. A glorious total of two Republicans in the entire Congress voted yes.

Yet some twit commenting on Think Progress wrote We can’t even get Democrats to vote for timetables. Unfortunately, I think this notion is common among a large lump of people who passionately hate the war but aren’t paying close attention to what’s actually happening in Washington to end it.

Further, the concept of overriding a veto seems to elude some people. Bush has just said he wants a South Korea style presence - superbases and fifty years. What makes anyone think he’ll listen to 25 Republicans? If 25 Senate Republicans voted with the Dems, that would be more than enough to override Bush’s veto in the Senate. By law, Bush would have to comply if Congress overrode a veto. If he didn’t — well, that’s never happened before. It could get interesting.

I agree there’s plenty of reason to criticize the Dems, but it worries me when large numbers of “progressives” develop knee-jerk antipathy toward the Dems. This is not helpful.

There’s a middle way between mindless boosterism and mindlessly assuming the worst. This middle way has two steps: First, be informed. Second, think. [See the original.]

Readers may have noticed a number of blogs that talk about being members of the 'reality-based community.' There's a reason for it and even a number of progressives could do a better job of being reality-based. The stakes are high as we approach the second decade of the 21st century with little progress in Washington. But there is movement. And I believe reform is coming. And there are many, many people with their eyes open.



***Personal Note*** I'm determined to keep Donkey Path going and I will post as often as I can. I'm sure regular readers have noticed fewer posts lately. That's life. I have bills to pay, a body that doesn't always cooperate, and not many working years left. It's too bad blogs provide income for only a few. But I deeply appreciate the readers who keep dropping by from Swisher, Iowa to Orange County to the area around Rome, Georgia, to several readers in Ohio and to a frequent reader from Ludington, Michigan (or thereabouts) and to many other readers elsewhere I recognize. At least ten percent of my readers come from other countries and that's been an eye opener for me. Blogs truly are an international affair and it's important for bloggers, readers and commenters to keep that in mind. The world is watching all of us and wondering how things will turn out. I hope for the best.

Hungering for News and Perspective

I stopped reading Joe Klein years ago. It was nothing personal. I simply got to the point where I knew what he was going to say and I noticed that he didn't add much to the knowledge that I already had about things. The same is true about Time and Newsweek, though I should add that as both magazines drifted to the right, I found them less and less reliable in their general understanding of the issues facing our nation. Ironically, I found US News and World Report more reliable because it made no pretense that it was anything other than a conservative magazine.

But let me go further on Time and Newsweek. Decades ago, when both magazines had a reputation of being more moderate or even mildly liberal at times, I read them closely during the Vietnam War just as I read the Los Angeles Times and watched the nightly news. I can still remember some of the details of a number of the battles, bombing raids and the byzantine merry-go-round that passed for politics in Saigon (and how much more Iraqi politicians are resembling them these days!). After some years, I noticed nothing much new was being added to my knowledge and I cut back my reading on Vietnam and, feeling I needed some perspective, I started reading about World War I and World War II. I encountered a lot of material that started to affect how I saw Vietnam, largely because the material gave me a fresh perspective. After the Vietnam War, I was like a lot of Americans; I got busy and forgot about Vietnam for a bit, but not all that long. I started reading books on Vietnam that I should have read years earlier but, reading them, I found I had a whole different perspective that came from my reading of other wars. I mention these tedious details to point out that some of us evolve, our positions begin to change, we begin to see things very differently over time. Some of us even take the trouble to deepen our knowledge. My problem with a lot of Washington media is that not much changes in the period of two or three or four years except career-oriented herd movements. And my discomfort is not entirely about Republicans or Democrats. I'm frankly tired of listening to Richard Carville though I still like the guy.

Let me turn to something Glenn Greenwald wrote on Friday about Joe Klein:

Time Magazine's Joe Klein at a May 5 Annapolis Book Festival, broadcast on C-SPAN (h/t reader CG):

I am really getting sick and tired of people bashing the press all the time.

It used to be that people like me would get bashed from the right, and now there is the whole blogosphere bashing us as well.

Look, at this point, we're pretty well battered. We're losing advertising revenue.

And unless we can actually have the revenue to go out there and the credibility to report these issues, all of these right-wing talk show hosts like Rush Limbaugh, and the left-wing bloggers who are parasites on our reporting, are going to have nothing to do but sit home and twiddle their thumbs and opine about things they have no data for.

Apparently, things were fine -- and the Joe Kleins were perfectly content -- when they were getting viciously attacked and mauled every day by Rush Limbaugh and the right. But matters became intolerable once left-wing bloggers started criticizing the press. That is when things just went too far.

I'm almost too dumbfounded by Klein's remarks to know what to say. It takes an enormous ego to consider himself that self-important. I started searching the internet because I wasn't finding news. I started posting on message boards like thousands of others because there was real fundamental bullshit going on in 2002 and 2003 and most of the media was completely missing the story, 'news' I think they call it. The Guardian, the BBC, some Canadian papers, the Knight-Ridder Washington Bureau were on the trail of numerous stories that were ignored by America's mainstream media. Thousands of us were sending these stories to one another by way of message boards and then, later, by way of blogs.

Now back then, even The Washington Post and The New York Times on occassion had stories in their back pages that I thought somebody, anybody would talk about on the nightly news, or cable shows, or PBS. All too often there was nothing. There was silence. There was no followup, though there turned out to be reams of material that would eventually be written and that proved accurate and that many big-name journalists completely missed. This wasn't my first experience of this nonsense. In the 1980s, I heard from people that there was trouble in El Salvador, that there were death squads roaming the rural areas. I'm nobody but I'm generally skeptical by nature and I was struck by the feeling that at least two people I was talking two were reliable. But I didn't see any verification of their stories in the media. Then I learned later that doctors who worked for Doctors without Borders had tried to contact The New York Times and one of the Times' reporters had called the State Department and was told there was no truth to the stories. But it was Reagan's State Department, and some of Reagan's people were up to their eyeballs in Iran/Contra and other nonsense in Central America. As we now know, the death squads were quite real.

Joe Klein is upset that his magazine is losing money. Ouch. Most bloggers blog for free or a few dollars a month. I think I get paid about two cents an hour. I have many things I really would rather be doing with my time. Where Joe Klein sees a loss of revenue dollars, I see a growing crisis across a spectrum of issues in my country that I need to write about. Apparently, George W. Bush is not the only one living in a bubble these days.

Jon Chait on Netroots and Blogging

There's been some amount of discussion of Jon Chait's piece in The New Republic on blogs. Big Tent Democrat of Talk Left has a good summary of some of the discussion:

The varied reactions to Jon Chait's Netroots piece brings to mind "Rashomon." My initial reaction is here. Other reactions I would group as reacting to Chait's take on the political activism component, see Bowers, the Right/Left blogwars component, Atrios, the New Left purity reaction, see Booman, and the semi-pundit reactions, featured here by TNR, of Matt Yglesias and Eric Alterman.

Of the folks who were or might be defined as Netroots, Bowers for instance, I think he took personal affront to the idea that he was a propagandist and not someone who is more married to the truth than to his desired political outcome. I understand his reaction but he doth protest too much. There can be no doubt that the Netroots, Bowers, included, pay attention to the stories that are favorable for his desired outcomes while overlooking those that are not. We ALL do that. Certainly propagandist is not right, but the idea that he is not engaged in at the least, advocacy journalism that is not truly interested in telling the whole objective story, is rather silly. Chris admits as much in his wrapup sentence on the subject:

Chait's standard for what counts as propaganda is absurdly broad. Basically, he seems to imply that anyone who is interested in making any impact on politics is engaging in propaganda, because that person is no longer engaging in a purely disinterested pursuit of ideas.

Correct.

We are not propagandists, but we are advocacy bloggers. And advocates argue a side. And that means NOT being fair. The judge is fair. The lawyer is not....

I'm not sure I even agree with this definition though I accept it as a way of looking at blogging from a certain angle. Now I'm not a netroot though I can't pretend I know the exact definition of a netroot except I sort of know it when I see it: fundraising, advocating for specific candidates, essentially acting a little like a political campaign, a political consultant, etc.

I do know why I've been so heavily involved in commenting on politics and foreign policy for more than four years now: I was tired of being lied to by my government. You can't complain about being lied to and give up credibility, at least not in my book. Credibility and objectivity, however, are not the same thing. I make no pretense of being objective. I'm clearly a writer and a political activist who's very interested in where our country and the world are going. Yes, I do advocate various positions—after I do my homework. Frankly, I'm suspicious of the whole argument. I'm not a reporter. I don't exactly consider myself a journalist though a loose definition might apply.

One of the things that bothers me about criticism of blogging is how often it seems directed to blogs left of center, as if there are no blogs on the right with serious numbers. I don't mind saying that far too many blogs on the right, particularly the far right, often suffer from a lack of credibility and are hard for anyone but the most ardent right wingers to take seriously (and how does one take seriously right wing blogs that repeat the transparent, easily researchable lies of our government?). Personally, I think there's a conventional wisdom out there trying very hard to remain relevant and one way to protect their turf is to attack blogs while ignoring their failures over the last twenty years and particularly the last six.

Again, I don't claim to be objective (and there are very few media outlets that can comfortably wear that tag in any case). When I quote from articles, I sometimes leave things out of my posts because the things I leave out are too often part of a conventional wisdom I reject. If I read a story about a Republican stealing three million dollars from the taxpayers and the 'reporter' (or pundit) lets us know that a Democrat also stole money, I refuse to accept the equivalence if, let's say, the Democrat illegally used a campaign fund to pay a five hundred dollar bill. I refuse to play that game. I fully expect Democrats to be prosecuted like anyone else when they break the law but when we have a party as corrupt as Republicans currently are—and so few of them going to jail or losing their jobs—I have little patience for a phony fair-and-balanced reporting that makes mush of the story. The conventional wisdom is out there and doesn't need help from me but I would argue that some of my posts (and the posts of a number of others more prolific that myself) have been considerably more credible and relevant than the mush published or broadcast in the major media.

Readers too have to do their homework. That's what the links are for. When I read other people's posts, I find myself digging into the story and using Google to answer questions I have and occassionally chasing down information at the library. That's how I got to posting on message boards, making comments on blogs and finally doing my own blog. If what I'm doing is propaganda, then a very broad interpetation is at work. By that definition, Thomas Paine's Common Sense was propaganda. That would be good company. But when a president endlessly repeats the phrase, '9/11,' as a way of excusing or justifying his deceptions and avoiding accountability, we're talking about a kind of propaganda that is truly offensive. We've seen far too much of that kind of propaganda.

Talking Points Memo in the News

It's been weird hearing Talking Points Memo or "TPMMuckraker"mentioned in the news the last few days as the guys who noticed the US Attorney story early on, stuck with it, and largely blew it open. But part of the reason they stuck with it is because they were familiar with some of the US Attorneys from earlier stories, particularly Carol Lam who had pursued the Duke Cunningham case. It's good old fashioned journalism that employs the modern tools of blogs, reader tips and the internet.

Josh Marshall and Talking Points Memo are featured in a Los Angeles Times story by Terry McDermott:

IN a third-floor Flower District walkup with bare wooden floors, plain white walls and an excitable toy poodle named Simon, six guys dressed mainly in T-shirts and jeans sit all day in front of computer screens at desks arranged around the oblong room's perimeter, pecking away at their keyboards and, bit by bit, at the media establishment.

The world headquarters of TPM Media is pretty much like any small newsroom, anywhere, except for the shirts. And the dog. And the quiet. Most newsrooms are notably noisy places, full of shrill phones and quacking reporters. Here there is mainly quiet, except for the clacking keyboards.

It's 20 or so blocks up town to the heart of the media establishment, the Midtown towers that house the big newspaper, magazine and book publishers. And yet it was here in a neighborhood of bodegas and floral wholesalers that, over the last two months, one of the biggest news stories in the country — the Bush administration's firing of a group of U.S. attorneys — was pieced together by the reporters of the blog Talking Points Memo.

Read the whole story. You can begin to understand why some powerful Republicans dislike blogs. A good blog like Talking Points Memo can restore journalism's ability to shine a bright shining light on government shennigans (though keep in mind that Josh Marshall and his team are often doing real journalism, such as making phone calls and chasing down information, etc.).

The Shifting Nature of Blogs

Update 5P.M. 2/7: Welcome to Luskin readers. The original post was simply about blogging but I feel compelled to add this update. I'm glad Luskin 'trawls' liberal blogs though I should point out that I don't 'hate' Bush, I just don't respect the president's incompetence and recklessness. Lushkin obviously doesn't like Krugman but here's a link to Krugman's February 2004 article and a quick excerpt:

Let's start with the case of the missing W.M.D. Do you remember when the C.I.A. was reviled by hawks because its analysts were reluctant to present a sufficiently alarming picture of the Iraqi threat? Your memories are no longer operative. On or about last Saturday, history was revised: see, it's the C.I.A.'s fault that the threat was overstated. Given its warnings, the administration had no choice but to invade.

A tip from Joshua Marshall, of www.talkingpointsmemo.com, led me to a stark reminder of how different the story line used to be. Last year Laurie Mylroie published a book titled "Bush vs. the Beltway: How the C.I.A. and the State Department Tried to Stop the War on Terror." Ms. Mylroie's book came with an encomium from Richard Perle; she's known to be close to Paul Wolfowitz and to Dick Cheney's chief of staff. According to the jacket copy, "Mylroie describes how the C.I.A. and the State Department have systematically discredited critical intelligence about Saddam's regime, including indisputable evidence of its possession of weapons of mass destruction."

To verify the 'tip' only required a copy of Mylroie's book or a good memory.

The original post now follows:

I notice the audience for some of the big blogs is beginning to level off and I notice it's getting increasingly difficult to find a niche for oneself. I suspect it's simply in the nature of these things. Here's what Chris Bowers of MyDD has to say:

... here is Feldman's comment:

I think what you're describing is the transition from an open to a competitive market dynamic. Price of entry is now high enough that solo bloggers are not quite making it in, and established bloggers are innovating to retain their share.

I think this is exactly right. When the progressive, political blogosphere began, it was structured in pretty much the same fashion as the conservative political blogosphere. Almost every single major progressive blog was founded and operated by a single individual. However, starting in late 2003 with the introduction of a scoop platform to Dailykos, a process began where highly trafficked, highly linked progressive blogs continued to innovate far beyond the structure of a single blogger sole, mainly punditry oriented, content provider. Virtually everyone supplemented their writing staffs with guest bloggers, or even new, full-time bloggers. Virtually everyone started moderating their comments or requiring registration in order to post. Many blogs became community sites, with greatly enhanced user-generated content. Video, radio and other forms of multimedia became the norm. Many websites enhanced their political capability by starting Act Blue pages, founding PACs, or starting nationwide activist campaigns. Investigative journalism and live, on the ground reports from important events became commonplace. People scored interviews with, or even blog posts by, major figures in the progressive ecosystem and Democratic leadership. Bloggers themselves started appearing in a variety of high visibility media locations, including hosting radio programs, television interviews, meeting with former Presidents, and speaking before major conferences. Revenue streams were added, from Blogads, to Feedburner, to fundraisers, to consulting gigs, to sponsorships. Many are even publishing books. Now, more than three years later, it has come to the point where the early structure of the progressive political blogosphere has been almost entirely done away with. The days of the major, solo content generator, pundit blogger are all but over.

From 2000 to early 2004, I wasn't even aware of blogs and spent a lot of time on message boards, particularly on the AOL political message boards (that was a political education in itself). I became aware of blogs like many other people when Paul Krugman of The New York Times did a column on Josh Marshall's Talking Points Memo in early 2004.

Krugman's column interested me because at that time the Bush Administration was claiming that the CIA had overhyped the war when in fact six to eight months earlier a book, How the CIA and the State Department Tried to Stop the War on Terror, by Laurie Mylroie made almost the opposite complaint that the CIA had been slow to admit some of the WMD claims that Cheney and the neocons had been promoting. Well, the CIA was right to discredit some of the claims though much of this was happening quietly in the back pages of different newspapers. But Mylroie's book jacket had plaudits by various prominent neocons so it was clear the book was a big deal and that they too thought the CIA had refused to accept viable evidence of WMDs.

At the time, in the spring and early summer of 2003, of course, we were failing to find any significant WMDs and Mylroie's book was a bit of a gamble that we would find those WMDs; it was also a bit of Bush propaganda. I wrote about this on AOL in the message boards under a pseudonym called Fishhawk (given the hysteria of the time, it was unwise to use real names on AOL).

About three days later, I was surprised to see my 'story' in Paul Krugman's column except that he had seen it on Talking Points Memo where a reader had passed the information on to Josh Marshall (TPM, of course, is known for its great readers and their attentiveness to good tidbits to pass on). My version was first. Some extra details were added by Marshall and Krugman but what the reader passed on to Marshall was very much what I wrote. I honestly didn't mind because I became a steady reader of Talking Points Memo and about two dozen other blogs and left the growing chaos and frustration of the AOL message boards behind.

I watched the numbers for blog readership explode. In June of 2004, I started a blog, then realized I didn't have the time to devote to it at that point. As everyone knows who writes them, it's a lot of work. For the next eighteen months, blog readership continued to explode and I then finally committed to doing one in late 2005; I was never built to be a workaholic but I quickly noticed it was getting harder to build up the numbers like others had done. I was a little late to jump in and I confess I'm not much interested in spending my time adding bells and whistles, though I admit I had aspirations of finding a niche for myself. . I'll keep writing but I have no illusions about how big an audience I'm likely to have though my numbers keep climbing at modest levels.

I enjoy writing and I find the issues I'm writing about compelling. As I said, I wasn't built to be high energy, so I also enjoy being sly at times and letting other people do the hard work of following up a story or pursuing a possible angle or thinking about an issue in a different way, though admittedly much of my slyness occurs when I comment on other sites or write e-mails. Blogging is an adventure and I've had many adventures in my life and there will come a time to move on to do other things. To be honest, despite my interest in politics, I really would rather be talking about literature and philosophy. In a year or two or three, a small new blog may appear somewhere in the blogosphere. Maybe I'll talk about the disastrous ethical dimensions of George W. Bush's notion of free will.

Pew Survey: Politics and the Internet

The Pew Internet Survey has a report out on the 2006 election and the use of the internet by voters. Micah L.Sifry of Personal Democracy Forum has a summary and analysis of some of the results:

* More than 60 million people (31% of all Americans online) say they were online during the 2006 campaign to get information about candidates and/or exchange views via email. They call this growing group "campaign internet users." This group trends young (duh); wealthy; well-educated; and somewhat more white than of color (33% of white Americans vs 23% of blacks and Hispanics).

(snip)

* By far the most interesting discovery from their survey: 23% of campaign internet users has either posted their own political commentary to the web via a blog, site or newsgroup (8%); forwarded or posted someone else's commentary (13%); created political audio or video (1%); forwarded someone else's audio or video (8%). "That translates into about 14 million people who were using the 'read-write Web' to contribute to political discussion and activity," the study's authors Lee Rainie and John Horrigan write.

* This group, which Pew labels "online political activists," is disproportionately liberal. "Some 15% of internet users who describe themselves as liberals are such online activists, compared with 9% of online conservatives," Rainie and Horrigan note.

(snip)

* The most common use of the net is to find out candidate positions on issues or voting records, followed by efforts to check the accuracy of claims made by them or about them.

* While campaign internet users and the more intensely engaged subgroup of online political activists tend to go often to sites that share their point of view, that behavior is by no means dominant. Between a fifth and a quarter of those groups say they also use sites that "challenge my point of view."

(snip)

...I must say that I am not surprised by the size of the "online political activist" pool. Seasoned web organizers like Zack Exley have tried to estimate the size of the Democratic-left online base using cumulative email list totals from various sources and come up with numbers like eight to ten million, if memory serves. I'd say the Republican online base is probably as big on paper, but given the GOP's tendency to append email addresses to its lists, rather than grow them organically, the active online rightwing is probably not as big as the left. Fourteen million adults seems like a reasonable estimate.

Sifry does an excellent job. I have one problem with the analysis though. I'm a liberal but I wish Sifry had written more about moderates who are becoming the real power in politics these days, and clearly make the difference in election results.

Of those who are politically active and use the internet, the Pew survey had this breakdown:

Liberals 19%
Conservatives 39%
Moderates 42%

I haven't done a survey but it seems to me the number of blogs by moderates has grown in the last couple of years. The internet gives moderates the chance to stake out some territory. On the other hand, there's been a lot of healthy collaboration between liberals and moderates of late. And there are rational conservatives like John Dean who adds very useful insights about the powers of the presidency and other issues.

The good thing is that right wing conservatives and their money machine no longer are getting the traction that they have had for over twenty-five years. But there are many issues to be worked out over the next few election cycles. The old bipartisanship that we saw in earlier decades has somewhat broken down, at least for now, but the media may be missing the big story that there may be a bipartisan dialogue going on in the background that could be shaping where politics goes in the coming years.

Ways Democrats Can Continue Gains in 2008

The Republican Party is out of ideas but it is still a potent force. One election will not undo the damage that six years of Bush and a Republican Congress have done together. The Democrats need to build on their numbers. We still need a two-party system but the Republican survivors of the last election who still hold their seats in Congress are as right-wing as they come and out of touch with most Americans. Democrats are going to have to keep winning to get our country back on a sensible course.

Mike Bock of Alone on the Limb has some thoughts about how local Democrats can move their party forward:

I was recently appointed to chair the “Grass Roots Committee” for The Montgomery County Democratic Party. Montgomery County has 540 precincts, over 300,000 voters and over 35,000 registered Democrats -- so there are a lot of “grass roots” to consider. I set the goal for myself to write a blog about what goals this “Grass Roots Committee” should seek to accomplish, and what plan of action the committee should recommend to the Executive Committee. I decided that I would write the blog as a letter to the chair of The Montgomery County Democratic Party -- and send this letter to the chair as a means to start a conversation with him and the rest of the Executive Committee about ideas for possible implementation.

Mike goes on to make concrete suggestions for his local county but I like the idea of just picking up a pen and getting things going. John Edwards has recently said something similar and he's right—we can't just wait for the 'politicians' to do something two years from now.

What I liked about Mike's post is that it got a worthwhile discussion going in the comments section. Here's part of what S.W. Anderson had to say (you'll have to click on the comments):

I'm going to toss in a thought about how to summon leadership and inspire others, not just committed Democrats, to join in. And, maybe having joined in, meeting and working with Democrats on something worthwhile, some uncommitted folks might become committed Democrats.

Meanwhile, good people in the community get some help, and Democrats get some publicity as being genuinely, personally willing to help others – not just bleeding hearts who want to drain the treasury to "buy" votes from the poor and unsophisticated. Which is how right wingers like to portray Democrats.

Later, here's what Terrell added to the discussion:

Yes, Mike, I agree grass roots organization is the key to political success, as the other guys have proven over the years. I also like SWs idea of engaging the party directly in sponsorship of community action. I find that very often I see my Democratic friends involved in environmental action like our local Coosa River Basin Initiative, our effort in the 1980s to save the National Forests, etc. It would be great to have the party officially involved and even leading some of those efforts.

There are many things Americans can do instead of waiting for the politicians. I'll try to keep my eyes open for these kind of things and if others hear of different efforts, drop a note or leave a link. There's plenty of work to be done.

Merry Christmas!

The many events of the world don't stop for Christmas but the news has been slow. On the other hand, my wife is one of the lucky ones who has to work on Christmas day (she's cooking for 85 people!).

I sometimes have wondered what it's like to shake one of those bells for The Salvation Army and while wandering through a number of blogs, there was Benjamin Dueholm of The Private Intellectual:

I'm in Madison again for the end of Advent, and as I did last year I signed up to ring bells for the Salvation Army. I have plenty of theological disagreements with the Sal Army, but they do critical work that no one else does. I was ringing this morning at a supermarket on the west side and the response was very good. Probably half or more of the patrons dropped at least something into the bucket, even while I was sitting there doing the Isthmus crossword. I'm not one for the hard sell, even when it comes to charity. ...

Dueholm goes on to mention what does work and he's right. I suppose there's been too much hard sell in the last six years. On Saturday, I was buying a printer for $89 and I couldn't believe they tried to sell me an extended warranty. Enough already.

Many of us who write political blogs are passionate about the issues and most of us who consider ourselves part of the reality-based community try to get the facts right (even if our opinions sometimes race ahead of the available facts) but it's not always easy to remember that part of what is useful about blogging is creating dialogue, not just hammering some point home.

For me, blogging is still an experiment. I wish I understood a great deal more than I do. I started writing many years ago and one of the reasons I became a writer was that there were things I wasn't reading and I discovered that sometimes you have write those things yourself, even if it isn't easy, even if you struggle with it and have to learn what it is that you don't know, even if it takes years, even if all you do is scratch the surface. Life is an adventure and we sometimes forget that too easily.

A lot of politics is actually easy to write about once you get your hands on some of the details and use a little common sense. The hard part is staying focused on what's important and finding ways to talk about those things and stopping long enough to hear what other people have to say—creating a dialogue in other words. That's hard in any kind of writing, though Donkey Path has some excellent commenters and I've been lucky to find a range of very good blogs, all of whom I learn from (and we sometimes hear something of the same from other bloggers).

I have a strong respect for passion but I sometimes catch myself writing too much out of anger; now anger is sometimes necessary but it can feel too much at times like a hard sell; sometimes we need to talk simply because it is important to do so. When the stakes are high, finding the human level isn't always easy to do. Sometimes it's important to take a deep breath and just try again. That's all any of us can do. For me, after a year of blogging, it remains a challenge and an adventure.

Let's hope the holidays a year from now see a little more peace in the world. And a little more thoughtfulness.

Donkey Path's One Year Anniversary

Donkey Path is now a year old. But in various ways I've been dealing with Bush's strange foreign policy since June of 2002 when he first started talking about unilateralism, preemptive strikes and nuclear bunker busters. At first, I wrote scores of letters, then posted on message boards, then made comments on blogs and finally, since my blog comments were beginning to get long, blogging seemed a natural next step.

Here's the first post on Donkey Path on Dec. 13, 2005:

Bush and Democracy in the Middle East


To most of us, democracy, in a meaningful sense, means things like majority rule, checks and balances, protection of minorities and legal rights for those out of power, the rule of law, a vigorous free press and the freedom to live your life within that framework. Now there have been real democracy workers in Iraq talking the issues one expects if Bush were really concerned about democracy.

But the resources devoted to democracy were always poor compared to the resources devoted to the military and American contractors. While American specialists were going around Iraq giving lectures on democracy, we had things that hardly seemed to be about democracy, things such as Abu Ghraib, the destruction of Fallujah, detainees, a press that was paid to run articles by Americans, etc.

Perhaps when Bush talks about democracy, it's just a code word for American power, privatization and the needs of American business. In the end, whatever Bush is talking about, it isn't about the Iraqis.

And it's certainly not about democracy anymore.

Here's a great cartoon that summarizes the failed presidency of the 'young' George W. in December of 2006.

Onward!

Blogging Issues

I happen to be interested in blogging issues and what blogs are good for, particularly political blogs. Over the last two years, it's been interesting to watch the opinions of the mainstream media swing back and forth on its opinions of blogs in general. One of the better blogs is The Huffington Post but it was very funny in its first weeks as celebrated writers, journalists and personalities tried to figure out what they were supposed to do with this new thing (those who figured it out stayed around). John Aravois of Americablog has a few words on the subject:

If the NYT is going to do a look at blogs, then it needs to go beyond the obvious. The obvious is that there is a perception out there that bloggers are all young inexperienced angry children who work in their pajamas, and they're dangerous dangerous DANGEROUS people to be around. You could write about that perception, but then you'd be writing about a preconception that's incorrect and about something we already know.

In fact, the more interesting story, is that many of the most well-known bloggers on the left and right are lawyers (not that that's a good thing, but you know, does put you a step above some crazy kid) and have other advanced degrees and experience. Markos is a lawyer and former military. Atrios has a PhD in Economics. As for my blog, I've got a law degree and a masters in foreign service from Georgetown, worked in the Senate, the Children's Defense Fund, and the World Bank. Joe in DC has a law degree and was the political director at Handgun Control. Chris in Paris is an international high tech consultant in Europe. We're people with real world experience that kind of kicks ass. And suffice it to say, all of us have far left our 20s behind us.

John has more to say so check it out. Some of the media coverage of blogs is getting better but I'm amazed at the generalities I hear on TV. Do some of these reporters know how to find the better blogs? If you were writing about American newspapers, would you only write about the worst ones?

Once or twice, I've had the feeling that people are judging blogs based on their comments section; but we've had messsage boards for at least twenty years and those could be just as wild as what we see now in the comments on blogs. I like the comments section simply because this is where democracy can be found these days. How many Americans really feel their voice is being heard? And it isn't always the wild west on the threads. A number of comments sections are civil and carry on productive discussions. An example of a discussion at its best can often be found on some of the long threads of The Oil Drum.

A good, highly readable discussion of some aspects of blogs (though mildly academic) can be found at Bark at the Hole. I've been following Kelly's thoughts on the issue for the past six weeks. Here's a couple of paragraphs:

Journalists and academics share a prepublication peer review process for their articles. For journalists, this role falls upon the hierarchy of editors and often the publisher-owner. For academics, this role falls to colleagues, anonymous reviewers of article submissions, and editors of journals. Ideally, reviewers and editors perform a modicum of fact-checking and critique the logic of the analyses. Editors refuse to publish articles that fail to meet certain standards of fact and analysis quality. Journalists whose articles are rejected have little recourse unless they are independent contractors; academics, in contrast, may resubmit to less selective journals or settle for just a conference presentation.

Bloggers, as well as authors of books in the “Non-Fiction” aisle, have a minimal to non-existent prepublication peer review. Most blogs are single-author or collaborative affairs, deferring to no specialist whose role it is to check facts and ponder analyses prior to publication. Nonfiction book publishers, as recent events evince, similarly do not do so.

Kelly makes some good points and while I don't agree with everything, it's good material for discussion. There is definitely something to be said for editors and peer review but that system broke down during the first three years of the Bush Administration in the mainstream media. That's partly why the blogs took off in the first place. It's true that blogs can be vehicles for all kinds of false assertions, including unfounded rumors, but mass, unsourced e-mailings perfected that some time ago. But arguments and facts do matter in the blogosphere, particularly on the moderate to liberal side, and those arguments and facts are checkable; they can be confirmed which is a requirement of any rational discussion. Eriposte of The Left Coaster is a great example of someone who chases down facts; and there are many others. And already, editors are indeed appearing on blogs; Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo has become a blog editor just as much as he is an experienced journalist.

I suppose blogging as a subject is a little exotic, but blogs could help resuscitate our democracy, which is not running on all cylinders at the moment. Here's some more posts at Bark at the Hole on many legitimate issues that bloggers should be concerned about. I hope the series continues.

I think the credibility of bloggers is very important but I believe the first priority of bloggers continues to be democracy and the need for many voices to be heard. I am a little worried about groupthink and there's plenty of it on the right and left but I hope some patient voices hang around who truly do have things to say that can lead to even more useful discussions and I'm glad to say that the survey I did of blogs continues to yield pleasant surprises.

The Nature of Blogging

There's been a lot of discussion lately about the relationship between journalism and blogging. Media Works has an article by Simon Dumenco about blogging. Here's an excerpt:

...it occurred to me that there is no such thing as blogging. There is no such thing as a blogger. Blogging is just writing -- writing using a particularly efficient type of publishing technology. Even though I tend to first use Microsoft Word on the way to being published, I am not, say, a Worder or Wordder.

It’s just software, people! The underlying creative/media function remains exactly the same.

OK, you might argue, blogging is aesthetically a different beast -- it’s instantaneous media. (Well, since the dawn of the 24-hour news cycle, pretty much all media has had to learn how to be instantaneous.) It’s unpolished. (The best blogs I read are as sophisticated as anything old-school media publishes.) It’s voice-y. (The best old-school media I read tends to be voice-y.) It’s about opinion, not reporting. (The best reporting to come out of MacWorld in San Francisco last week was published on blogs.) It’s, well, often sloppy and reckless (and Judy Miller wasn’t?).

OK, then, you might further argue, the Internet itself treats blogs as structurally distinct things. Well, sure, there are blog-specific search engines (Technorati, Icerocket, blogsearch.google.com, etc.), but the lines between blog and non-blog content are rapidly dissolving.

There are things in this article I agree with and don't agree with but it is a place to start a kind of conversation. In the next week or two, I hope to do a post on what I use blogs for.

I suppose a quick word on what I do here is in order. I'm not a reporter. I simply think of myself as a writer, certainly an activist and possibly a kind of journalist if writing reasonably informed opinions qualifies.

A reporter does interviews, followups, witnesses events, has connections, data files, a knowledge of research, and chases down facts. The only thing on the list I do regularly is chase down facts; it's an annoying habit of mine but I do it well enough that occassionally a fact I uncover gets sent off to some professional journalist who finds it useful enough to put it in a story or column after confirming the fact. Some day I'll say more on this as well.

One last word on blogging though. There's a side of blogging that can be useful as an extension of journalism. But the more powerful possibility is the potential for informed citizens to have their voices heard. And that, more than anything else, is the single reason blogs have exploded on the internet into the broader world. In a democratic society, if we still are one, it is a welcome and evolving development.