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An editor! An editor! My kingdom for an editor!

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My computer meltdown meant I wasn’t able to post in a timely fashion on the Gregg Easterbrook/anti-semitism dustup, and I’m not going to launch into a lengthy dissertation at this late date. Here’s a short one instead.

Easterbrook has always struck me as a facile writer with some interesting ideas and a penchant for contrarianism even when it carries him into ridiculous waters (as with his ludicrous and contrafactual defenses of the Bush environmental record). But it seems pretty obvious to me that he is not an anti-semite. There’s no way he could have maintained a long association with the New Republic, that bastion of the Israel lobby, if he were an actual hater of Jews.

He posted something stupid on his blog; he apologized; I’m not sure there’d be any more of a story here, except that he is plugged into the New Republic/Slate Axis of Kinsley, has friends in the media falling over themselves asserting his innocence of prejudice, and his ugly words resounded through the echo chamber of the Beltway intelligentsia like a particularly loud bodily eruption that no one could ignore. Should he have been fired from ESPN? I don’t think so. (Read King Kaufman on this for more.)

It is clear that Easterbrook will now go down in the books as object lesson A on the subject of why journalists who are used to working with editors should think twice before giving up that safety net. Any editor with half a brain would have read Easterbrook’s paragraph singling out the bosses of Disney and Miramax as Jews who “worship money,” pulled the writer over and said, “Uh, you don’t want to say this this way.” Without the advantage of a second reader, post-first-think-later writers like Easterbrook will be free to hang themselves. Which is fine for many or most bloggers out there; indeed, the spectacle is part of the fun of this new media form. But those — like Easterbrook — whose livelihoods depend on their reputation as writers may sensibly retreat to the safety of editors.

See no evil, hear no evil, report no evil?

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Scanning the blogs this morning I came across an interesting dustup between Glenn Reynolds and Josh Marshall. Since I’m sharing a panel with them at Bloggercon next week this naturally caught my eye.

Josh came across a column in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution by Democratic congressman Jim Marshall suggesting that negative media coverage might be “killing our troops” in Iraq, and wrote, “It really doesn’t get much lower than that.” Glenn disagreed with Josh Marshall and agreed with Jim Marshall — and his response is worth parsing closely.

Reynolds is too smart to simply suggest that the U.S. media should suppress all negative stories from Iraq. So he couches his complaint more subtly, maintaining that “It’s not the reporting of criticisms or bad things that’s the issue… It’s the lazy Vietnam-templating, the ‘of course America must be losing’ spin, the implicit and sometimes explicit sneer, and the relentless bringing to the fore of every convenient negative fact while suppressing the positive ones that’s the issue. It’s what the terrorists are counting on, and it’s what too many in the media are happy to deliver, because they think it’ll hurt Bush.”

Notice that an argument that, at bottom, is about demanding that the U.S. media suppress bad news from Iraq has been inverted into an argument that the problem is really with the suppression of positive news (no examples provided). A neat trick.

Let’s take it phrase by phrase: “Lazy Vietnam-templating” is not a charge I would level against, say, Max Cleland, who is the most forceful recent applier of the Vietnam analogy and who is far more qualified than I or most other commentators to apply it. If an observer feels that the U.S. is making the same mistakes in Iraq that it made in Vietnam, surely his duty is to speak loudly and try to get the U.S. to change its policies before we lose this war the way we lost Vietnam, and before too many more American servicepeople pay the price of our mistakes. This isn’t “lazy … templating,” it’s fair debate. So pace Reynolds, arguing that we should not oppose policies that we think will lose the war doesn’t help the terrorists, it helps our democracy.

Then there’s the reference to “‘of course America must be losing’ spin.” Notice how the entire issue of whether the U.S. is winning or losing is bypassed, and the possibility that some of us actually feel the U.S., following the current botched Bush policies, is losing is reduced to a matter of “spin.” But what if it’s not spin? What if you’re a journalist on the scene in Iraq and what your eyes and ears tell you is that the U.S. is losing? According to the Jim Marshall/Glenn Reynolds argument, are you supposed to just shut up?

Reynolds doesn’t like “sneers,” either, but he doesn’t offer any examples, so there isn’t much to argue with here, beyond the fact that people are saying things he disagrees with in a tone of voice that he doesn’t like. It’s always nicer when those we disagree with are cordial; Reynolds himself is always a gentleman, and I don’t like sneers either. But a sneer never killed anyone, and sneering is not killing American troops in Iraq.

Finally, Reynolds complains about “relentless bringing to the fore of every convenient negative fact while suppressing the positive ones.” It’s strange to hear this line from a journalist/blogger; usually such reasoning is heard from the mouths of politicians who are unhappy that the media are focused on some scandal while failing to publish their own upbeat press releases.

We have all lived long enough to understand that government spin is ubiquitous and inevitable. The government spin from Iraq is that “everything is fine, these things take time”; and journalists’ job is to brush that spin aside and tell the world what they are actually seeing. If what they are actually seeing is a country in chaos, and American troops dying every day, and a nation turning against its “liberators,” then reporting that is their duty. In trying to “shush” opposition by playing the “aiding and abetting our enemies” card, the “blame the media” argument aims to choke the open democratic debate that, after all, is the basis of what makes our system better than the one we overthrew in Baghdad. What this argument really boils down to is, “Stand by our boys! Don’t report that they’re dying!”

Personally, I wish the news from Iraq were better. I wish the killing would stop, and Iraq would quickly become a beacon of light and democracy to the Middle East, as the cakewalk-neocons promised us. But that isn’t what’s happening. And since it’s clear President Bush is not going to change his policies in order to win the international cooperation that this nation-building project was always going to require, a patriotic American who believes we are on the wrong path has no choice but to say, “Bush is the problem.” If he can’t figure out that his policy is a disaster and we need to change course, the only way to get the U.S. — and Iraq — back on track is to change presidents.

Reynolds suggests that people like me are focusing on the bad news from Iraq in order to “hurt Bush.” That’s backwards. I want to “hurt Bush” (note to FBI: I mean politically “hurt” — “hurt” meaning see him lose elections) in order to improve the news from Iraq.

Journalism construction set

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When I wrote about Jay Rosen’s Columbia Journalism Review piece below, I failed to mention that Rosen is keeping a good blog going himself. Then, in one of those wonderful circular link trails, I was reading, on Geoff Cohen’s consistently stimulating blog, about metaphors for programming and is computer science a science?, when I stumbled on Cohen’s link to this fine piece on Jay’s blog, about “Master Narratives in Journalism.” Worth reading for its insight into the rarely acknowledged role journalists play in not only “covering” the political story but in “constructing” it. Rosen writes about this concept from postmodernist literary theory in an entirely approachable way; far from drowning in the jargon, he extracts useful meaning from it.

Grass-root of all evil

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As I plunge into my mid-40s there are times I think nothing can surprise me. And then I read a piece like today’s New York Times interview with FCC Chairman Michael Powell and, well, I’m amazed I’m so amazed.

Powell orchestrated the FCC’s new rules allowing greater concentration of media ownership in an era when big corporate media expansion, symbolized by the death-grip Clear Channel Communications holds over the nation’s airwaves, has people of all political stripes worried. Congress recently voted to override the FCC’s new rules. Powell is shocked.

What’s amazing is how he talks about his shock. Professing the airy, disinterested role of a policymaker sofar above the fray he can’t make out the ant-like little people swarming in the muck and mire of the political world, he describes the opposition to his regulations as follows: “Basically, people ran an outside political campaign against the commission,” he said. “I’ve never seen that in six years.” It seems Powell is “frustrated and surprised” that people who felt his big-media-friendly rules moved in the wrong direction actually organized some opposition to them. How dare they? What do they think this is — a democracy?

Stephen Labaton’s article continues:

  Asked about accusations by some that he had failed to build enough public support for the rules before adopting them, Mr. Powell replied: “I’ve heard that represented as my failure. I’ll take that as my responsibility. But there was a concerted grass-roots effort to attack the commission from the outside in.”

Here we have it: a “concerted grass-roots effort”! What a horrible thing! I think this is the first time in my life I have heard the term “grass-roots” used in a negative way. To most of us, “grass-roots” symbolizes healthy organizing of the citizenry beyond the corrupting influence of big business lobbying and entrenched interests. It is our democracy at its best. To Powell, somehow, it has become a term of opprobrium.

It couldn’t possibly be that his policy was so absurdly wrong for today’s United States that it managed to unite the liberals at Moveon.org and the NRA against it. Nah. It must be a grass-roots conspiracy! Like so many others in the Bush administration, Powell seems to feel that his ideology is beyond public accountability. With Bush’s poll numbers sinking week by week, these public servants may eventually learn just how wrong they are.

The micropayments debate

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For as long as the Web has been around people have talked about the possibility of a “micropayments” system to support small-time creators of content. Clay Shirky wrote a persuasive essay a couple of years ago laying out why such schemes have generally failed. More recently, Scott “Understanding Comics” McCloud put a new comic online and charged users 25 cents to read it using a new system called BitPass (I wrote in July about my experience with this, which was positive).

Shirky updated his critique in a new article, and now McCloud has fired back with this detailed and thoughtful defense of the BitPass approach.

Both of these guys are smart; I thought I agreed with Shirky while I was reading his analysis, but then McCloud won me over. I think he’s right to feel that it’s way too early to be certain that micropayments are a dead end; we have only begun to experiment. (Salon’s “DayPass” system of offering one-day access to premium content after users view a fancy ad could be thought of as an alternative micropayment approach.) Both pieces are worth your time if you’re at all interested in the subject.

Jay Rosen’s CJR piece

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People who hung out in Table Talk in its early days remember the presence of Jay Rosen, who encouraged us to think about tightening the relationship between the journalism we were doing in Salon magazine and the discussions that were taking place on our boards. For various reasons we never really got there. Rosen moved on to other things too (he’s chairman of NYU’s Journalism Dept.). But he recently sent me a link to an article he wrote for Columbia Journalism Review that continues the discussion and is well worth reading.

Rosen is interested in how the online medium continues to break down the lines of authority in traditional journalism, using the two examples of the recent New York Times meltdown and Chris Allbritton’s reader-sponsored reporting from Iraq. The one thing I’d say is that these examples are at extreme ends of a spectrum, and though such outliers make the most dramatic contrast, they rarely point the way to the future. Only a handful of journalistic institutions have the Times’ reputation, and only a handful of bloggers (I believe) are ever going to be commissioned by their readers the way Allbritton was. What will be more interesting, I think, is to see how the rise of expert bloggers begins to eat away at the edges of trade journalism (as it already has), and local journalism, and other areas where the pros, today, often fall down on the job — or the institutional structures that should support professional journalism no longer bear weight.

Foul and Unbalanced

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We too are now “Fair and Balanced.”

Excerpts from the Fox/Franken suit are on Salon here. And Tom Tomorrow linked to this incredible Bill O’Reilly transcript which really must represent a high-water mark of pot-kettle-black-ness:

  The main point here is that trying to hurt a business or a person because you disagree with what they say is simply unacceptable in America. And that message has been sent by FOX. There’s a principle in play. Vigorous debate is embraced by us, but smear campaigns will be confronted. It is simply a joke for The New York Times to editorialize that fabricated personal attacks are acceptable under the banner of satire.

So, fabricated personal attacks, I guess, are acceptable to O’Reilly under the banner of “fair & balanced.” But Fox owns that banner, and no one else can use it. And as for the banner of satire — one that has long had its own special niche under First Amendment law for the obvious reason that it is one of the most effective ways to “speak truth to power” — well, O’Reilly obviously lacks a sense of humor, so I suppose he wouldn’t miss it if it got furled up and sent off to Guantanamo to grow mold.

Wired’s big push

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In its heyday, Wired magazine gave the entire technology and Internet press a steady stream of wacky, outrageous material to react to. On the blog he has created to accompany his new history of Wired, “Wired: A Romance” (Andrew Leonard’s Salon review is here), Gary Wolf is posting some reminiscences and other Wired miscellany.

I have to agree with his judgment that Wired’s worst story ever was the “Push” cover story he was credited as co-author of. Wolf’s recollections of how that absurd piece of puffery came into existence is illuminating and worth reading; Wired, it seems, was even more seat-of-the-pants in its editorial process than those of us on the outside could tell. I’ll stand by my assessment of February, 1997, that the story wounded the publication’s credibility. But reading Wolf’s account, you can’t help feeling a little more charitable toward the people responsible for the open-ended, improvisatory provocation that was the Wired game. Viewed as a moment rather than a movement, it all seems a little funnier and less heinous. After all, the next three years would see far vaster corporate scams unfold — and ones with far less style.

Also, don’t miss Wolf’s riff on the hapless San Francisco Chronicle, whose book reviewer made a big fuss about Wolf’s single misspelling of a single name — only to wind up with his own review sitting under a misspelled headline.

“I think your public lacks focus, and needs a snappier lead”

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The New York Times has released its internal report and review of the Jayson Blair affair and related issues that recently rocked 43rd St. and toppled Howell Raines. It’s 92 pages long and I haven’t read it all yet. The big news seems to be that the paper is finally appointing an ombudsman. But perhaps in an effort to show some deference to the paper’s many statements over the years that it didn’t need an ombudsman, didn’t want an ombudsman, and indeed sneered all over the concept of an ombudsman — that’s only for weenie papers! — it will label this new position “public editor.”

Which just leaves me thinking, public editor? Wouldn’t that be someone who edits the public? If this person is the public editor, does that mean all the other editors at the Times are “private” editors? Couldn’t the entire collective editorial brain of the Times come up with a better title?

Perfidious Canada!

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So now when a reporter does something the White House doesn’t like — such as accurately report the dissatisfaction of American troops in Iraq who feel they have been misled by secretary of defense Rumsfeld — we can expect the Bush team to start leaking ostensible dirt about the reporter to the likes of Matt Drudge. Only the best the clowns now running the White House press office could come up with about ABC reporter Jeffrey Kofman is that he is (a) gay and (b) Canadian.

Shock! Horror! Surely we cannot trust the news as reported by these limpwristed Canucks! Surely if those servicemen had only known that they were dealing with a perfidious Molson-swiller of suspect sexual leanings, they would never have talked to him!

It’s getting positively Nixonian out there.

Pay no attention to that president behind the curtain, says Weinberger
Meanwhile, speaking of Nixonian, Caspar Weinberger showed up on the Wall Street Journal op-ed page today, arguing that the Niger yellowcake scandal is no big deal. After recycling the “British have learned” literalist defense one more time, he goes on to say, “The real unanswered questions are these: Did anyone seriously believe we went to war because we had a British report that Iraq was trying to buy uranium from Niger?”

Well, no, Cap. A lot of us didn’t believe that at the time: We believed that the President and Dick Cheney had already made up their minds to launch a war for a bunch of other reasons. But it was the president who got up in front of the nation and told us all that the Niger connection was one of the key pieces of evidence driving us to invade Iraq.

So I guess what you’re saying, Mr. former Secretary of Defense and former chief of Bechtel, is that we were right to distrust the president, we should never have taken the president seriously, and those who did so are fools worthy only of contempt. Thanks for clearing that up.