Missile defense: Didn’t work last time. Still doesn’t work. Tom Lehrer’s Werner von Braun said, “Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down,” but we can’t even get the rockets up. Can you say “folly of empire”?
A tale of two scalps
When two high-profile stories surface nearly simultaneously and share some superficial traits, the news media will lump them together. The blogosphere, it seems, shares this understandable reflex. And so we have the parallel buzzes over the resignation of CNN exec Eason Jordan and the exposure of a dubious character in the White House press room sharing mind-space as examples of the ascendant power of blogs to make and break careers, expose error and deception and generally cause a ruckus. I Am Blogger, Hear Me Roar!
But these two stories are fundamentally different, and, I’d argue, of radically different import.
Jordan, the CNN exec who quit on Friday, apparently shot his mouth off at the Davos conference, making an overly broad statement of some kind (the Davos management won’t release a video or transcript of the event so there’s no record to refer to, only hearsay) suggesting that U.S. troops had targeted journalists in Iraq. He backed off almost immediately, it seems, but his mea culpas weren’t sufficiently earnest.
Over the years at Salon I’ve been on the inside of stories like this enough times to know that, when you’re on the outside, you never have the full story, and the idea that angry bloggers alone laid Jordan low seems extraordinary unlikely to me. If you have your organization’s confidence, this sort of thing rolls off easily; if you don’t, then you’re vulnerable to the first controversy to come along.
I’m not shedding tears for the CNN executive. I’m always amazed at the stupid things CEOs, politicians, news honchos and other people who hold public responsibility will say in public (and do in private), thinking that the inherent power of their position grants them carte blanche and wraps them in Teflon. If they need to be beaten up over and over again until they really, really understand that — as the saying goes in blog-land — “off the record is dead,” fine.
Jordan joins Dan Rather and Jayson Blair and many, many other journalists now off-duty or just waiting to be disgraced someday. His story is now a routine one — that of the media pro who does not realize that the world has changed around him, that there is a new activist sphere of journalistic review and criticism happening collectively in real time, and that no gaffe, error or deception is likely to remain hidden. Until media people fully and deeply learn that they are responsible for their words and their work, and that this scrutiny is a good thing for their profession, careers will continue to fall casualty.
But this weeding-out process doesn’t take place in some sort of scientific vacuum, wherein the flaws of the profession can be precipitated out, leaving behind the pure essence of journalism. It is happening in the heart of a political storm. Jordan was a target for the right because conservatives think CNN is a liberal network. (That’s a joke, but let’s leave that partisan controversy alone for now.) And the conservative blogosphere is now claiming his scalp with a whoop.
It seems simple to equate that whoop with the glee on the left that preceded it, as bloggers unraveled the strange tale of “Jeff Gannon” — a fellow who mysteriously leaped from the obscurity of a right-wing Web site into the heart of the White House press corps, where he became a ringer for the Bush administration’s press secretary, who regularly turned to him for “questions” that hilariously echoed the Bush party line. It turned out Gannon was using a fake name, had only the most dubious claim to press credentials, and was plainly more of a shill than a reporter; when the collective investigations of the blogosphere began to turn up personal details that were embarrassing for an avowed conservative, “Gannon” publicly quit his job at “Talon News.”
So the score is tied, right? But this isn’t a game, or a battle with a body count; if the only significance here is — to borrow and twist a phrase from last decade’s partisan trench warfare — the Journalism of Personal Destruction, then it’s all pretty trivial.
Eason Jordan’s trial-by-blog is simply the latest example of the convulsive and painful but inevitable and long-brewing transformation of professional journalism from a protected sphere into a more open environment. That’s important, but it’s hadly news any more. The Gannon story, on the other hand, offers us a peek into the next chapter of the story — the one in which an opportunistic political establishment, sensing the vulnerability of the media, grabs the moment to reshape the public’s very grasp of reality.
Let’s remember that, while its press secretary is calling on the Jeff Gannons of the world for cover, the Bush administration is also offering under-the-counter payoffs to columnists and sending out video press releases in which PR people masquerade as reporters. This isn’t a simple matter of a gaffe here and there; it’s a systematic campaign to discredit the media, launched by an administration that desperately needs to keep propping up its Potemkin Village versions of reality (We’ll find weapons of mass destruction! We’ll cut the deficit! We’ll save Social Security by phasing it out! Really!). When you’re pursuing an Orwellian agenda, your first target must be anyone who has the standing to point it out. Messengers are a pain — but if you shoot enough of them (figuratively speaking!), and send out enough impostors, you can have any message you want.
Journalism, of course, has done so much on its own to discredit itself that the administration’s assault has an easy path; the timbers it’s battering are often rotten already. But while those of us who cherish the freedom, the liveliness and the free-for-all energy of the blogosphere — and I happily include myself — sit in our conferences and muse in our postings about the finer points of the transformations around us, the machinery of realpolitik is grinding away. It doesn’t care about the ethics of transparency or the abstract debate over “who is a journalist?” It simply seizes an opportunity to reduce the supply of what Ron Suskind calls “honest brokers.”
While we discuss how the “end of objectivity” means we have to find new ways to earn the public’s trust and pursue the goals of accuracy and fairness, the White House is laughing at its new opportunity to mess with the American people’s heads. While we consider the implications of an era in which everyone has access to a virtual printing press and anyone can be a reporter, the people in the White House press office are busily figuring out how they can dragoon more pseudo-reporters into the front row. While idealists post and fiddle, realists in power are burning down the house.
Accountability is a grand principle. The Eason Jordan story shows us how journalists are still having a hard time getting used to the fact that they are being asked to follow it, too. The Jeff Gannon story shows us how easy it is, once the journalistic establishment has begun its self-destructive implosion, for public officials to engineer a reality that suits their own agenda. To me, that’s the bigger story.
Astroturf journalism at the White House
President Bush has relied on a ringer in recent press conferences: This guy named Jeff Gannon from a right-wing news site called “Talon News” spouts the GOP party line and lobs softball questions at the prez that repeat his own press releases. Metafilter and Salon’s War Room have more.
This is the dark side of the “now everyone’s a journalist” blogosphere meme, a concept that for the most part I think is positive. But once anyone can set up as a journalist, public figures can summon astroturf reporters to do their bidding, and officials can “paper the house” with sympathizers the way theater producers have always done on opening night. (This reminds me of what happened in movie criticism in the ’80s and ’90s, as a variety of bozos went into the business of providing movie “reviews” to borderline media outlets with the sole purpose of giving the movie marketers a bottomless well of positive quotes.)
The only answer, I suppose, is to say to the White House press office, hey, if your bloggers and guys-with-Web-sites get to ask questions at press conferences, the other side’s should, too. Get Kos and Atrios and Tom Tomorrow in there! Mix it up! (No way, I know.)
Tripping on their own feeble arguments
The Social Security debate continues to be infuriating. Pardon me while I release some smoke from the top of my pate.
There are a number of strange arguments floating around out there as part of the desperate effort to try to get the American people to buy President Bush’s Social Security pig-in-a-fiscal-poke. Something happens when you put these arguments side by side: They undermine one another.
Consider, if you will, this comment from someone named Craig on my most recent Social Security post. As far as I can tell, Craig has cut-and-pasted big chunks of long quotes from two different Washington Times columns into his comment, one by Thomas Sowell and another by John Palffy. (I’ll write off the failure to attribute these quotes to oversight since the commenter does say “Please read the following info.”)
Sowell argues that the Social Security Trust Fund is a mere “legal and accounting fiction” because one arm of the government is putting its excess cash into the hands of another, in the form of the IOUs known as Treasury bonds. As I and others keep noting, the idea that Treasury bonds are mere fictions is one that would be news to the vast number of institutions and individuals around the world who consider them the bluest of blue chip investments. What this argument really says is that the government doesn’t have to make good on those bonds — they’re just a “fiction” — when they’re purchased with our Social Security taxes, set aside to handle the future shortfalls of the system, and held in trust for the retirements of America’s working people. The U.S. government would never default on the bonds purchased by another country’s central bank — but hey, if the American people put their retirement money in such a form, the government is sure to renege on the debt. We’re so sure it’s going to renege that we’re getting ready to ditch the most successful and beloved U.S. government program in history.
Why will the government default? Apparently, we’re to believe, because it can. “Liberals are desperate to keep Social Security as it is, because that would mean they can continue spending your money as they see fit,” Sowell writes. Funny, though; the money was fine until Bush’s conservatives started cutting taxes four years ago. “Our money” was frittered away not by “liberals” but by the current administration — on dividend tax cuts, estate tax cuts, wars of choice and other elective policies. Those policies could be reversed as easily, maybe more easily, than privatizing Social Security.
But this all gets more interesting in the second half of Craig’s post, where he moves from Sowell’s argument to Palffy’s. Palffy wants us to put aside the silly notion that privatization means our retirement funds will be at risk. How foolish to imagine that there is any reason to worry about placing Social Security money in private markets rather than in the government’s hands! But since the pesky AARP is stirring up those excitable seniors again, Palffy has a plan to soothe our graying hairs: Why, we can require that all those private (excuse me, “personal”) accounts invest their money in one safe place. That ultra-reliable investment? Inflation-protected Treasury bonds!
So much for the idea that private accounts restore free-market choice. Under this plan, Social Security pretty much remains exactly the same, except that there are little chunks of money in Treasury bonds that have our names on them instead of one big chunk of bonds with Social Security’s name on it. The government is still holding all that money for us, and if we’re to believe Sowell and his ilk, the government can’t resist getting its greedy Big Government paws on any money in sight, so there’s just as much reason under the new plan as under the existing one to expect the perfidious liberals in Congress (despite their minority status!) to default on its obligations.
This round-trip doesn’t get us very far at all, does it? The spinning is desperate, contradictory, ultimately inane. That’s what happens when your stated plans of “reform” don’t match your actual goal (eliminating Social Security). Or maybe the Washington Times’ columnists, and their advocates among the population of blog commenters, need new marching orders from the White House: They did such a good job on the “private/personal” switcheroo.
In the end, there’s one thing I can agree with the conservatives on: Social Security is only as safe as the lawmakers in Washington allow it to be. Sowell & co. say we must fear because we can’t trust the government to keep Social Security afloat. But the government he is telling us will betray Social Security isn’t in the hands of the “liberals” upon whom his finger points. It is the Bush administration that has endangered Social Security, and it is the Bush administration that now wishes to end Social Security as we know it. It may get its way. But let’s make sure the American people understand who’s responsible for the ensuing debacle.
How “private” became a dirty word
The Social Security debate has devolved into a language-police action, in which the White House desperately tries to stop anyone from calling its proposal “privatization” — even though, until recently, that was exactly what its supporters actually called it. Apparently, the “p” word didn’t poll well, since it had some vague relationship to the reality of the plan to ditch Social Security, so out it goes. And now it’s verboten not only to advocates for the plan, but also for those in the media who want to avoid being accused of taking sides.
Here’s Josh Marshall’s reprint of the transcript of a Washington Post interview with Bush, in which he complains that a questioner who used the “p” word was “editorializing.” The reporter then points out that Bush himself used the word just a couple months ago. (Here’s the full Post transcript.)
The administration is trying to play the same game with the AARP. When the senior citizens’ lobby produced a poll that showed wide opposition to Bush’s plans to begin dismantling of Social Security as we know it, the GOP complained that the poll was “skewed by politics.” Why? The poll dared to use the “p” word. (More on this from Marshall and Matthew Yglesias.)
This desperate effort to hide the truth by renaming it is as futile as it is comical: It’s a perfect instance of “Don’t think of an elephant” (or, for Fawlty Towers fans, John Cleese’s classic “Don’t mention the war!” routine). The more pressure the White House puts on Americans to stop thinking of the proposal as “privatizing,” the more opportunity they give opponents to point out that that’s exactly what it is — and to ask why the Republicans are running from an accurate description of their idea.
Any time you hear a Bush supporter protest that “No one is talking about dismantling Social Security, just reforming it!,” you can show them this quotation from a prominent advocate for the president’s plan (from Sunday’s Times Week in Review):
| “Social Security is the soft underbelly of the welfare state,” said Stephen Moore, the former president of Club for Growth, an antitax group. “If you can jab your spear through that, you can undermine the whole welfare state.” |
That doesn’t sound like “reform,” now, does it? It sounds like the violent release of 70 years of conservative Republican hatred of Social Security and resentment at its success and popularity. In this view, Social Security is not part of a “safety net,” at all; Moore wants us to associate the retirement program to which we’ve all been contributing all our working lives instead with “welfare,” a word so unpopular we banished it from the political vocabulary in the mid-’90s. If you want your Social Security, Moore’s saying, you’re a freeloader! You just want a handout! You’re a welfare queen!
Somehow I don’t think that message will be very popular. Unlike welfare, Social Security is a program that most middle-class Americans have personal experience with, either themselves or through members of their families. This is one part of the far-right agenda that even Bush and Rove may not be able to re-frame, re-label, re-brand and sell.
The original user of the “soft underbelly” metaphor, of course, was Winston Churchill, who was talking about trying to get at Hitler by invading Italy. Putting aside the Godwin’s Law implication here (Moore equating Social Security with Nazism?), it’s worth noting that the “soft underbelly of Europe” turned out to be a lot tougher to jab than the Allies imagined. Social Security may similarly prove to have a tougher hide than its enemies think.
Even Bush’s friends recoil
Worth noting: This may be the one time in the history of the universe that I agree with Peggy Noonan, who points out that Bush’s inaugural had “way too much God” in it:
“It left me with a bad feeling, and reluctant dislike… marked by deep moral seriousness and no moral modesty… [it] left this Bush supporter yearning for something she does not normally yearn for, and that is: nuance….”
“This world is not heaven. The president’s speech seemed rather heavenish. It was a God-drenched speech… The speech did not deal with specifics–9/11, terrorism, particular alliances, Iraq. It was, instead, assertively abstract….”
“Ending tyranny in the world? Well that’s an ambition, and if you’re going to have an ambition it might as well be a big one. But this declaration, which is not wrong by any means, seemed to me to land somewhere between dreamy and disturbing. Tyranny is a very bad thing and quite wicked, but one doesn’t expect we’re going to eradicate it any time soon. Again, this is not heaven, it’s earth….The most moving speeches summon us to the cause of what is actually possible. Perfection in the life of man on earth is not.”
There you have it: The Bush inaugural marked the final transition of the Bush-family ideology from old-school conservatism, with its abhorrence of abstract schemes of human perfectibility, to a messianic idealism so divorced from reality it gives even sympathizers like Noonan the willies. Bush’s vision of human perfectibility may be shaped by born-again fervor rather than socialist theory, but that difference doesn’t make its collision with reality any less dangerous.
The fire this time
I heard the start of President Bush’s inaugural today on the radio as I was driving to BART. As I pulled into the parking lot he was delivering that line about “history also has a visible direction set by liberty and the author of liberty.” There was a ton of applause. Was the crowd just giving God a hand? Or was this another bit of coded, covert language between Bush and his fundamentalist followers, alerting those in the know that the End Times are near?
I turned off the radio to catch my train, figuring that I’d only heard the introduction to the Inaugural, and would catch up on the heart of the address — you know, the part where Bush actually talked about some of the problems the nation faces and some of his plans for dealing with them — later in the day. When I looked the full presentation up online this evening, though, I saw that that was it: by the time I pushed the “off” button, Bush had rounded third and was heading home, with just a couple more paragraphs to go.
This speech wasn’t just soaring rhetoric. It was a lighter-than-air burst of helium verbiage — lofty language untethered from the perplexing world we occupy and from the messy events of the last four years, sentences floating off into an empyrean of millennial vagaries.
The world is a simple place to Bush. For him, “the moral choice between oppression, which is always wrong, and freedom, which is eternally right” is one that involves no hard calls. And since America represents freedom and freedom is eternally right, it must still be right even when it locks hundreds of people away for life without trial or it tortures prisoners in a war launched on a lie. We are the forces of freedom; we can admit no wrong because we can do no wrong.
Sounding like a bizarre cross between Hegel, Woodrow Wilson and the nihilists of “The Possessed,” Bush spoke of a “fire in the minds of men” (Dostoyevsky’s phrase, adopted by James Billington as the title of a famous book about “revolutionary faith”) that would spread freedom around the world. Freedom! Who would oppose it? But it is a word so universally embraced, even by those who flout its essence most crudely, that it means nothing when simply uttered; it has meaning only when our actions make something of it, when our deeds fill in its outline.
While Bush’s text spoke of freedom, his imagery told a different story, a tale of retribution and flame. America’s enemies set “a day of fire” on 9/11. We must respond with the “untamed fire” of freedom that America will bring to the benighted world. Fire with fire.
Bush isn’t talking about a little flame of hope in the darkness; he’s not singing “This Little Light of Mine.” He’s talking Biblical conflagration. His fire is the cathartic inferno dreamed of by people who are confounded by a world they know is out of their control — one that, incomprehensibly, is not moving in a visible direction. Burn it down and start anew, clean, fresh, free of disagreement, of doubt, of the pain of history and the sting of one’s own past mistakes.
In this yearning, George Bush eerily finds kinship with those he’d rank as the “enemies of freedom” in misfired revolutions through the ages — movements that placed their commitments to self-defined abstractions ahead of the rights and needs and lives of breathing human beings. The cause comes first. Can’t make an omelette without breaking a few eggs. Condolences, young lady, but it’s all so you can vote.
There must be people out there who find Bush’s fiery talk uplifting. I found it alternatingly depressing and horrifying. Idealism fueled by ignorance and unanchored by reality can be the savagest fire of all.
Antisocial insecurity
I’ve been fighting a sense of despair on the subject of the brewing battle over Social Security. Here, once again, as with the runup to Iraq, we have a major battle in which the Bush team is systematically bulldozing a set of facts in order to throw up a new Potemkin-village reality in which their ideological preferences make sense. They’ve got the majorities in Congress, they had their “accountability moment,” and now facts are just inconveniences to be flicked away. Social Security must be dismantled, therefore it must be in crisis. Don’t believe it? They’ll keep saying it, and much of the media will dutifully repeat it, until you ask yourself, “Am I crazy?”
So for the record, just as a matter of bearing witness to a set of facts that deserve as much air time as possible right now, here are some Social Security basics. I claim no originality; if you’ve been reading Brad DeLong or Josh Marshall, or if you tune in to the new Thereisnocrisis.com, or if you read the New York Times magazine cover story by Roger Lowenstein last week, this will be old news. Some things just bear repeating.
Social Security is supposed to be a safety net — otherwise we’d all just have IRAs. The stock market is not a safety net. Privatizing a portion of Social Security can’t be a means of saving Social Security because a private account is not Social Security, it’s something else entirely. Saying “We have to privatize Social Security in order to save it” is like saying “We have to destroy the town in order to save it.” (Oh, right, they’ve been saying that lately, too.)
Social Security taxes got a significant boost in the 1980s to help cushion the cost of paying for an increasing number of retirees due over the next couple of decades; that tax hike meant Social Security would run a surplus, and the surplus got stashed away in something called the Social Security Trust Fund. The fund takes your taxes and buys U.S. Treasury bonds. Sometime around 2018 the fund will have to start cashing in some of those bonds in order to cover the extra costs of Boomer retirement. This is part one of the “crisis” the Bush administration is warning about.
There was a federal budget surplus for a while under Bill Clinton, but George Bush decided that that money was “ours.” The Feds should have been saving for that rainy-retirement day, but instead they went on a tax-break bender (and they picked and chose which of “us” got the most back). So come 2018, the federal government won’t have the cash on hand to make good on those trust-fund bonds.
Now we hear a hypocritical chorus on the right telling us that the Trust Fund’s assets are meaningless “IOUs” (Ramesh Ponnuru of National Review) or that the government’s “promise” to pay Social Security benefits is “less and less believable” (George Melloan of the Wall Street Journal).
Note the bias here: Property rights are the foundation of capitalism — but put that property in the hands of a program conservative Republicans have ached to destroy for 70 years, and suddenly it becomes transient, elusive, unreliable. When a Treasury bond is held by a private citizen or a foreign government, it’s a financial obligation, indeed one of the most reliable and conservative investments around. But when it’s held by an arm of the government in trust for the retirements of millions of working people? Then it’s just meaningless paper. (Try using that argument on the bank that holds your mortgage or your credit card account! “Oh, yeah, I know I said I’d pay that money back, but it’s really just meaningless paper, you know, and I already used the money for other stuff that I believe in. We’ve got a crisis.” )
Conservative advocates of the Social Security pseudo-crisis like to say that the Social Security Trust Fund is an “accounting fiction” because it’s just one arm of the government owing another. Of course, it’s not an accounting fiction every April 15 when we tally up the 12 percent or so of our income that we pay into it. It’s only an accounting fiction if you’re George W. Bush and you and your Congress have raided the account and now you’ve got to come up with a good story for the American people about why you think it’s more important to keep cutting taxes than it is to meet your Social Security obligations.
Now, there’s another long-term issue with Social Security that kicks in, oh, somewhere in the 2040s or so, when — depending on whose predictions you buy — the Trust Fund itself might run out. Social Security wouldn’t just vanish, but if the worst happens, then the government could only fund 70% or so of its obligation. This scenario could be avoided by raising the retirement age, increasing taxes, removing the Social Security tax’s income cap or other tweaks. (This is what I meant last November when I wrote that “Everyone in Washington knows we need to fix Social Security,” but — as Dave Johnson rightly chided me for at the time — in the current debate such a statement is easy fodder for distortion.)
Look, I’m sorry, but nothing that happens in the 2040s is a crisis today. And our government has a lot bigger fiscal troubles looming a lot sooner than Social Security’s 40-year horizon.
By deliberately confusing the real-but-manageable long-term problems of Social Security with the non-crisis of 2018, the Bush administration is making it harder to provide a real fix for the 2040s — because its chosen solution of funding private accounts will actually cost the already cash-strapped government trillions more in the short term.
The whole thing is a fiscal and ethical train wreck. Democrats have every right — indeed, they have an obligation — to try to make it a political train wreck, too. If the Republicans really want to go ahead with Bush’s plan, let them do it alone, as Josh Marshall has been eloquently arguing, and let them pay the political price. If there’s anything Democrats can and should be proudly partisan about, it’s Social Security.
Follow the money talk
I have studiously avoided commenting on the flap over Zephyr Teachout’s post about the Dean campaign’s payments to a couple of bloggers, because the whole thing seemed like a minor inside-baseball dustup fanned by the right to try to defuse the Armstrong Williams scandal. (Tim Grieve in the War Room walks us through it all. And Teachout’s more recently posted FAQ provides needed context and defusing.) The payments to Kos and MyDD were disclosed at the time; I remember reading about them; there’s just no ethical equivalency. (Nor is there a financial equivalency: Total Dean payments to two bloggers appear to have been around $12,000, compared with $240,000 to Armstrong Williams — and who knows how many other Bush payola plants still to be outed?)
But the discussion resulting from the controversy is worth having, so let’s at it.
Jeff Jarvis talks about the need for disclosure in a post that parallels my thinking on a lot of this stuff, and asks whether we shouldn’t have metatags for people. (This is actually what Marc Canter has been talking about forever, and the digital identity people keep trying to find an approach that will stick.)
That’s all well and good. But before we even get to something as complex as machine-readable personal tagging, there are simpler and bigger problems at hand: How many times have you followed a link to a new blog and been unable to figure out who’s writing it? I’m not talking about blogs that are intentionally anonymous; I mean bloggers who just haven’t gotten around to posting a “Who am I?” page or link, or who have chosen some sort of willful semi-obscurity even as they blog openly about their coworkers and friends and projects. This is ground zero of transparency, and it seems to be beyond a significant portion of the blogosphere. “Who or what made this page, and what should I know about them?” is the first question to teach everyone about being a smart user of the Web, and it applies just as strongly to blogs as to any other type of Web site. I wish more bloggers made it easier for their readers to find the answer.
So let’s put that aside and look at the more complex question of so-called “blogola.” Starting point for this discussion should be the simple fact that everyone’s perspective is potentially influenced by their financial interests. More so than political leanings or personal relationships, financial involvements are generally understood to be the A1, top-of-the-list category of conflicts of interest. So it will be relevant, for instance, for readers of this blog to know that I earned my paycheck until recently from Salon Media Group — or that, for the moment, I’m on leave working on a book, and living on a book advance from my publisher. My readers here have a right to know that — or rather, if I choose to hide where my living comes from, my readers have a right to be suspicious, to not grant me their trust. If I have a financial entanglement with someone I’m writing more specifically about, I better reveal it — or sooner or later, someone else will, and my readers will rightly feel betrayed.
In traditional professional journalism, these questions are obviated by the interposition of the media company between the journalist and his paycheck. The media company collects cash from advertisers and readers, pools it and pays its reporters and editors. In ethical terms, you could describe the media employer here as a sort of money launderer — by the time the dollars land in the journalist’s checking account, they are supposed to have lost all the potentially compromising markings of their sources. A New York Times writer doesn’t know which of his paycheck dollars came from Macy’s and which came from the used-car classifieds, and so the provenance of his wherewithal cannot (theoretically) influence his work.
In blogging, this buffer between dollar and writer vanishes. The best bloggers, understanding this, do everything they can to disclose their financial interests; this doesn’t automatically grant them credibility — that’s earned post by post — but it is a necessary precondition. It says, “Here’s what you should know about my interests as you consider what I have to say.”
Blogs take a multitude of forms: only a small fraction are close to traditional reporting or commentary; many are personal diaries; others are platforms for companies, political campaigns, movements or organizations. And so the effort to apply the ethical yardstick of traditional media to all blogs is doomed: It mistakes the publishing technology for the published contents. It’s like saying that newspapers follow one set of ethical practices, so all entities that publish on paper — be they mailorder catalogs, government publications, free shoppers or your Uncle Joe’s annual Christmas letter — need to follow suit.
Now, if your government publication tried to pretend it was a newspaper, you’d have a right to complain. (This is precisely where the Bush administration has played fast and loose, with its “Karen Ryan” video press releases masquerading as independent press reports.) When categories get blurred and things enter a fast cycle of change, as has happened in today’s publishing world, the central ethical principle — the only ethical principle that you can be sure will apply in all cases as the ground shifts under you — is disclosure and transparency.
If you reveal your interests and you don’t dissemble — if you tell your readers where you’re coming from and you don’t pretend to be coming from someplace else — you’re likely to do fine. This approach works as well for the “standalone journalist” as for the corporate executive or the P.R. person or the political advocate. The only people who stand to lose are those who were profiting from a system that allowed them to keep their sources of cash relatively obscure. (Why does the word “lobbyist” spring to mind?)
It seems to me that efforts to categorize bloggers are ultimately futile; there are as many different kinds of bloggers as there are bloggers — which is why generalizations about them so often err. That’s why I take issue with this passage from an otherwise extremely good Chris Nolan piece on these matters:
| What’s now known as the “blogosphere” is about to fracture…. There’s going to be a division between folks writing online with lots of editorial experience and tested news judgment and those who are coming to this with an agenda or a set of very specific goals. Sooner or later — it’s already happening, really — the activists will break away from the editorial folks. |
I don’t know what Nolan means by “break away,” and I don’t really get how the blogosphere can fracture; it’s already in a million pieces. The two categories Nolan describes can never be fully disentangled. Consider, for instance, the work of Josh Marshall. He is as well-credentialed a “real journalist” as anyone blogging today. Yet his blog, which has provided some of the smartest commentary on the Republican effort to dismantle Social Security that you will find anywhere, has most recently spearheaded a campaign to identify and list those “fainthearted” Democrats in Congress who might be considering breaking ranks and supporting Bush’s plan, so readers can contact them and try to get them to line up in support of Social Security.
What sort of tag would you use here: Activist? Journalist? Or something for which these older labels are inadequate? We’ve got “tested news judgment” and “a set of very specific goals,” together, right there.
These waters have run together; you won’t ever divide them again. It’s one big pool. We’re never going to be able to sort people out and put them in neat little boxes, and that’s okay. But we can try to keep the water clear.
Happy New Year! Do you know where your Social Security dollars are?
Josh Marshall‘s regular postings on the Social Security debate have been impassioned, persistent and invaluable. Today’s Talking Points Memo lays out, in different and probably clearer language than I have been able to muster, the point I’ve been intermittently making here about the Bush Administration’s duplicitous case for Social Security “reform” — that the “crisis” Bush and co. are scaring the nation with is one of their own making, since they’ve squandered so much of the fiscal reserve set aside precisely to shore up the retirement system’s future:
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After 1980 we started borrowing money big-time to finance our deficits — in large part because of tax cuts on high-income earners. However you want to slice it, we started spending substantially more than we were taking in in tax revenue. So where’d we borrow the money? This is from memory, so I may have the numbers a bit off. But I believe about $4 trillion of that debt was borrowed on the open market — individual Americans have them in their investment portfolios, or pension funds hold them, or the Chinese, Japanese and the Saudis and others have them in bonds. But about $3 trillion of those dollars we needed to fund the 1980s and 1990s deficits we managed to borrow closer to home. We borrowed it from the Social Security (and a few other government) trust fund(s). Almost the entirety of President Bush’s Social Security phase-out plan comes down to a simple proposition: finding out how not to pay it back. |
Josh’s writing here comes close to the “It’s a Wonderful Life”-style clarity on this subject that so often eludes even our most gifted economist-pundits, and that I ached for a month ago. As this debate unrolls in the New Year, he is someone to keep up with.
BONUS LINK [Via Brad DeLong]: For those interested in delving a bit more into the numbers, this post by Brad Setser is a great complement to Marshall’s.