Category: The Media

Melber v Gladwell on Egypt & Organizing

With global attention on the protests in Egypt, it’s not shocking that some people have fixated on the role of social networks like Twitter as driving the activities of anti-Mubarak protesters. Indeed, one of the first major steps Mubarak took to try to stymie the dissidents was completely shutting off the internet in Egypt (it was recently restored). Not shockingly, when it comes to triumphalism of technology in activism, Malcolm Gladwell, devote skeptic of all things digital, chimes in as an anti.

Without going at the thin and dismissive post by Gladwell myself, I’m turning it over to Melber, who writes:

The overarching problem here is the false premise, frequently employed in these disputes. No one is arguing that this is the first protest in world history. Very few people think the Internet is an essential prerequisite to revolution. Instead, they’re exploring whether the web and networked communications open up new and effective ways for citizens to converse and organize each other in repressive societies. (Access to mobile phones and text-messaging, for example, may have helped young people organize in Egypt and Tunisia in a different way than landlines or websites.) We can engage these issues without taking anything away from the French Revolution. Now, whether people “always” communicate grievances in authoritarian societies—a dubious claim—is less important to foreign policy than what comes of those communications.

…

[W]hen Gladwell simply announces that how people communicate is “less interesting” than why, he’s just stating his personal, editorial preference as accepted fact. The banal reality is that different people find different things interesting. And really, by ending his defensive post with that line, Gladwell sounds a bit like the recent Onion headline tweaking his predicament: “Panicked Malcolm Gladwell Realizes Latest Theory Foretells End Of His Popularity.”

Actually, Melber’s conclusion reminds me a lot of his demolition of Lee Siegel’s book, Against the Machine. In 2008, Melber wrote:

By combining the fact-free observations of a futurist pundit and the hypocritical tirades of a sinful preacher, Siegel’s book is as unreliable as it is insufferable. Ironically, he sounds like the caricature of bloggers he denounces: uninformed, shrill, defensive, and self-obsessed. The nascent web culture does have problems, which fine thinkers have tackled before (Cass Sunstein and Yochai Benkler, for example). But Against the Machine fails to support its antiweb hostility, let alone offer specific reforms, because it’s too busy ranting in the mirror.

Gladwell really does sound eerily like Siegel, whose old man yelling to get off his lawn routine is getting quite old by now.

But to back up a step, Gladwell’s overall critique is that social networks and the internet are incapable of building the sort of deep ties which he says are requisite to produce meaningful social and political change. First, this denies that most social networks are, in fact, social and built upon close personal relationships. But more importantly, in the situation we have in Egypt now, what evidence is there that this mass uprising is built on deep ties between the anti-Mubarak activists in the street? What says that two strangers standing next to each other, sharing shelter from thrown rocks, must or even do have a deep tie? More likely they are there because they both knew it was time for change and time for action. They may have been brought there by a tweet or by a phone call, but they’re there. There’s no unitary way that people come to action and that’s totally fine. Hopefully Gladwell grasps this and will stop pissing into the wind sooner rather than later.

Bai Hates the Internet

Matt Bai has always held a special hatred for the online left, from bloggers to the politicians who appeal to voters through blogs. As such, it’s not shocking that he writes a misleading and factually inaccurate column like the one today titled, “For Obama, Getting Message Out Online Is a Challenge.”

No, it’s not. Obama has maintained incredibly high approval ratings among Democrats through his ability to talk with them directly. His presidential campaign built a list of 13-15 million hardcore Democrats. Obama has been able to use this list to talk directly with them about his agenda, his successes, and what the opposition is saying about him. The email list – and to a lesser extent, friendly political blogs and WhiteHouse.gov – have enabled Obama to talk directly to Democrats, without having to rely on media filters like, say, Matt Bai. It’s no surprise that Bai is upset that he doesn’t get to be the first one to tell Democrats what they should think about Obama (note he still uses an opinion voice in his columns, so he clearly still tries to tell Dems what to think – he’s just irrelevant to the actual formation of opinions outside of the Beltway).

Take a look at Bai’s opening salvo against Obama:

Yet there’s also something oddly retro about the State of the Union address that President Obama will deliver on Tuesday — something that belongs to the last century, like compact discs and appointment television. While the speech will give Mr. Obama an opportunity to extol his record on health care and financial regulation, it may also serve to remind us of how surprisingly little he has accomplished when it comes to bringing presidential communication into the broadband age.

That’s not to say the White House isn’t trying. In fact, the president distributed a video preview of his speech to supporters over the weekend. And Mr. Obama’s advisers have scheduled a series of interactive online events for the days after the speech, his second State of the Union, highlighted by a presidential interview with questioners on YouTube.

As proof that Obama hasn’t accomplished anything online, Bai puts forward the actually new  and revolutionary use of the internet to augment the quality of presentation of the State of the Union. The White House presentation will include both additional graphics and information about the points President Obama is making in real time, as well as providing for a direct interaction between the President and the American people. How this proves Obama has “surprisingly little…accomplished” in online communication is a mystery.

Answering questions online, however, really just amounts to the same kind of televised town hall that presidents have been doing since the dawn of the broadcast era, except that now you watch it on a different kind of screen.

Both computers and TVs have screens, so obviously talking to people through a computer is just like a televised townhall.

Like his predecessors, Mr. Obama interacts from time to time with a few highly motivated voters at such events, but he has yet to find a new way to make himself accessible or compelling to the wider electorate online.

Sure, you might have only a couple hundred people in a televised townhall, but this post-SOTU broadcast online might only reach a few hundred thousand people. With both televised townhalls and internet Q&A sessions, hundreds of millions of Americans aren’t watching. Both fail in equal measures!

Bai goes on to make an assertion with absolutely zero basis in fact about the White House’s use of new media:

Even without creative steps by the White House to harness social media and other technology-driven changes in the way people receive and share information, Twitter and its ilk have come to occupy an important place in political communications.

Wrong. The White House has used Twitter to field questions from the public to be answered by the White House Press Secretary, Robert Gibbs, as well as used “Open for Questions” peer submission and voting to do the same with the President and other senior administration officials. Beyond that, the administration has used government websites like Healthcare.gov and Cars.gov to provide information to the American public in easy-to-digest ways that have received voluminous traffic.

Truly taking the presidency online would not only enable Mr. Obama to get his message to some voters without passing through the traditional news media, but it would also reinforce the idea of him as a generational bridge, a politician pulling American government toward modernity.

And yet, so far, Mr. Obama’s greatest online innovation as president has been to upload a lot of video (like clips of his delivering the weekly radio address, a custom that goes back to Ronald Reagan), as if the iPad were mostly just a television without the knobs.

In my work in internet politics, I’ve found that there are a lot of people who think that innovation means creating new means for humans to perceive the world. Blogging is based on the written word. Audio content can be relayed through podcasts and mp3s. Photo sites like Flickr are based on still pictures. YouTube and other web video sites are all about moving pictures. A relatively small portion of internet users even use avatar based sites like Second Life.  But short of some brilliant web developers coming up for a way for humans to interact on the web through ESP or mental telepathy, there actually isn’t some big avenue for interpersonal human communication that isn’t yet present online. Sorry Mr. Bai, but the President using web video, delivered through multiple platforms, in multiple formats, on a regular basis actually is innovative, even if Obama hasn’t beamed his weekly presidential address directly into our brains.

Bai intermittently attacks Obama for not innovating, and deftly follows it with anger at the administration realizing new ways to reach people through the internet. We saw it above with the line, “as if the iPad were mostly just a television without the knobs,” but Bai continues on.

Perhaps, though, the president’s team is over-thinking the challenge, putting too much emphasis on how to use the trendiest applications or on how to interact with voters, when what really matters is creating an authentic narrative.

There’s a nice bit of moving the goal posts going on here. Bai doesn’t actually want Obama to “[bring] presidential communication into the broadband age,” as he first wrote. He instead wants “authentic narrative,” which undoubtedly would make for better fodder for political pundits like himself. While this, at first blush, seems like a ludicrous thing for the leader of the free world to be responsible for deciphering, Bai is helpful and tells us what it means:

You can easily imagine Mr. Obama sitting in front of a keyboard at the end of a long day, briefly reflecting on the oddity of a personal encounter or on the meaning of some overlooked event, or perhaps describing what it is like to stand in the well of Congress and deliver the State of the Union address. It could be that in order to expand the reach and persuasiveness of the modern presidency, Mr. Obama simply needs to be his online self — not so much a blogger as a memoirist in chief, walking us through history in real time.

As much as I am a denizen of the internet, notably one who came to politics through blogging first and foremost, I find it hard to believe there would be a less useful use of the President’s time than maintaining a personally written blog every night, for consumption by Matt Bai and the American public. Seriously, Bai’s great idea for “authentic narrative” is the President of the United States sitting at his laptop, live blogging how he used part of his day to solve America’s problem, and the other part to blog about it. I’m sorry, but I voted for Barack Obama so he could lead the country as our President, not so he could tell me in his own voice what it was like to have a 60 minute meeting with Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood. For chrissakes, the man is the President of the United States and he has more important things to do than blog.

And it goes without saying, were Bai’s batshit insane vision for Presidential time allotment be realized, the moment the President was blogging while some natural disaster or terrorist attack took place, it would be fodder for both pundit and Republican assaults on the President and his irrelevant and dangerous blogging habit.

Matt Bai clearly is both unaware of what he actually thinks the President should be doing to reach Americans through the internet and unaware of what the White House is actually doing to reach Americans through the internet. If the coming bells and whistles stand out ahead of tonight’s State of the Union address, it’s because they are new and innovative, which at one point in this column was what Matt Bai said he wanted the President to be doing. In the end, beyond being an incredibly insulting assault on the hard work of the people who do new media at the White House and DNC, Bai’s piece is little more than a statement about how uncomfortable he is with the notion that powerful politicians, including the President, can talk to voters without going through pundits like Matt Bai.

Taibbi on Young Journalists

Not that this is an area I ever write about, but Matt Taibbi has a great passage in a piece beating up Matt Bai in which he assails the culture many young, ostensibly liberal, journalists adhere to in a well-charted path to Beltway acceptance and success.

Bai is one of those guys — there are hundreds of them in this business — who poses as a wonky, Democrat-leaning “centrist” pundit and then makes a career out of drubbing “unrealistic” liberals and progressives with cartoonish Jane Fonda and Hugo Chavez caricatures. This career path is so well-worn in our business, it’s like a Great Silk Road of pseudoleft punditry. First step: graduate Harvard or Columbia, buy some clothes at Urban Outfitters, shore up your socially liberal cred by marching in a gay rights rally or something, then get a job at some place like the American Prospect. Then once you’re in, spend a few years writing wonky editorials gently chiding Jane Fonda liberals for failing to grasp the obvious wisdom of the WTC or whatever Bob Rubin/Pete Peterson Foundation deficit-reduction horseshit the Democratic Party chiefs happen to be pimping at the time. Once you’ve got that down, you just sit tight and wait for the New York Times or the Washington Post to call. It won’t be long.

I would just advise any young journalist who is coming up through a liberal magazine or news website to ask themselves if this looks like you. If it does, is it really what you want to be doing? How you want to be seen?  It’s not too late to change.

More importantly, people who read up-and-coming young liberal journalists should read this passage and wonder if it looks like your favorite wonk or pundit. Have they recently defended a top administration official for leaving public service to take a luxuriously compensated job at a big Wall Street bank because, after all, the journalist has never personally seen the former public servant drown a bag of puppies, so they can’t possibly be a bad, greedy person? If so, it’s probably time to stop reading this person, as they will soon be beating up on unreasonable liberals (at least, more than they already do).

Matt Bai Is Nuts

Matt Bai has a piece in the New York Times today, titled “‘Blame the Blue Dogs’ Theory for Democratic Losses Doesn’t Add Up.” It’s just plain nuts. Actually, it’s worse than that. Bai primarily seems to be laundering the Conventional Wisdom that Blue Dogs and the Third Way want to take hold – namely, don’t pay attention to the fact that our preferred policies and tactics were enacted over the last two years when trying to figure out why we were decimated at the polls.

The reality is that the size and cohesion of the Blue Dog caucus made them a key voting bloc during the last two years. As a result, they had major input on the content of legislation passed by the House. Their threat to walk was always hanging over negotiations and often they ended up not voting for legislation that they’d worked hard to get modified to be satisfactory for them (See: the Stupak Amendment). But to suggest that the Blue Dogs didn’t have a major hand in the nature of legislation that the House passed is to be in pure denial of the facts. The problem the Blue Dogs faced is that their efforts prevented Congress from doing more to help people. The stimulus was smaller than necessary because Blue Dogs prevented the “political will” from existing, to use the phrase that was repeated to justify an insignificantly large stimulus. They shrunk jobs creating bills. They limited the scope and efficacy of healthcare reform.  They pursued pork for themselves as bargaining chips. In short, Blue Dogs were critical agents in making sure what efforts the Congress made towards righting the economy and helping voters were too small to be effective.

Policy is not like porridge. The middle point between liberal ideas and conservative ones is not just right. As we saw, when Blue Dogs go their way, America’s porridge stayed too cold to be palatable.

I doubt many voters went into their voting booth last week and said, “Congress was insufficiently liberal, so I will vote my Blue Dog rep out of office.” But they likely did say, “Congress bailed out the Wall Street banks, didn’t create a job for me or my wife with the stimulus, and haven’t punished the people who caused the economic collapse. All of these were things my Blue Dog rep made happen – I’m going to vote him out.”

Clearly Matt Bai, the few remaining Blue Dogs, and the Third Way do not get that Democrats lost because the policies that were enacted were too timid to be effective. They failed to make peoples’ lives better. It’s not about liberal or conservative for voters – it’s about efficacy. But when we political operatives look at last week, we have to ask ourselves, “Why weren’t the laws of the 111th Congress enough to fix the economy, create jobs, and keep voters happy?” Any sober answer to that question would lead one to find the obstructionism by Blue Dogs and conservative Democrats which was removed by watering-down every major piece of economic legislation (at the behest of Blue Dogs). That is, not enough was done because of conservatives in Congress. Voters punished them for this. The lesson is clear to me, but obviously the conservatives who have a vested interest in convincing the rest of the party that their political malfeasance wasn’t the cause of electoral defeat will refuse to learn this lesson, while sending their lackeys like Matt Bai out to talk down to anyone contradicting them.

Awful

Why is Alessandra Stanley still allowed to write about politics? Lines like this make me want to pull my hair out:

Mr. Stewart made other jokes on Wednesday, but it was actually more disconcerting to watch Mr. Stewart apply the standard liberal critique to Mr. Obama than it was to see the president of the United States bandy words with the host of a late night comedy show. Mr. Obama, after all, is more practiced, having set precedents with similar star turns when visiting David Letterman, Jay Leno and the women panelists of “The View.”

First, anyone who watched The Daily Show last night would know that Jon Stewart delivered pretty much the same critiques that he, uniquely from a television perspective, has been delivering throughout the Obama administration.

Second, this is just awful writing. What is “disconcerting” about Stewart’s delivery of “the standard liberal critique”? We don’t know because Stanley never tells us.

Update:

Adam Sewer has more at the Plum Line.

Back to Journalism

I think Steve Benen’s take on the move by Peter Goodman from the NY Times to the Huffington Post is an interesting one. I don’t know why the standard operating procedure for the mainstream press has become one where reporters can repeat what two sides are saying in a controversy, but not say which one is right. But that’s the way it is and it’s one of the most frustrating aspects about being an informed news consumer – I know that the healthcare bill has no death panels in it, but the reporters I read won’t tell me flat out that Republicans are lying.

Benen writes:

For the public that wants to know who’s right, and not just who’s talking, it creates a vacuum filled by online outlets. For journalists who want to “tell readers directly what’s going on,” it creates an incentive to abandon news organizations that demand forced neutrality.

Hopefully the continued growth of outlets like Huffington Post and Talking Points Memo, along with the expansion of reporter-bloggers at sites like FireDogLake and Daily Kos, will provide meaningful competition and real alternatives to what we get from the traditional press. People like Ryan Grim, Brian Beutler, Marcy Wheeler, Sam Stein, and David Dayen are proof that you can tell your readers when someone is right or wrong and still be a journalist. In fact, that’s what makes for real journalism.

Extremism & The Media

Rick Perlstein has a post up on the New York Times’ Room for Debate blog in a discussion, framed by the Times, of how the internet has played a role to rising extremism, as seen with the Koran burning pastor in Florida. Naturally Perlstein flips this flawed premise on its head from the start.

The problem is not the Web. Anti-JFK rallies “revealing” to every school child in Orange County, California that Communists planned to colonize the United States by the year 1970 drew bigger crowds than Tea Parties today, with nary a blogger among them.

The problem is that elite media gatekeepers have abandoned their moral mandate to stigmatize uncivil discourse. Instead, too many outlets reward it. In fact, it is an ironic token of the ideological confusions of our age that they do so in the service of upholding what they understand to be a cornerstone of civility: the notion that every public question must be framed in terms of two equal and opposite positions, the “liberal” one and the “conservative” one, each to be afforded equal dignity, respect — and (the more crucial currency) equal space. This has made the most mainstream of media outlets comically easy marks for those actively working to push public discourse to extremes.

Don’t blame the minister and his bait-and-switch bonfire either. Once upon a time anticommunist book burnings and threats of book burnings were not unheard of. The difference is that Associated Press reporters did not feel obliged to show up. That shift in news values, not the rise of the Internet, is the most profound way that times have changed.

When the press cares more about selling conflict than telling stories that actually matter, the appeal of extremism is evident. But it’s also flat out bad for our country to give attention to any gasbag who tempts us with base hatred. As we just saw, there’s a lot of ignorance that is driven by hate from demagogues like Glenn Beck on TV and radio. This isn’t about the internet, as Perlstein says, it’s about the media making the people who hate other Americans more important than the people who are trying to solve problems in all three branches of government. Burning a book is more appealing to the media than a hearing on prison reforms or building telecommunications infrastructure in rural America.

Bad Bai

Matt Bai is back and playing his best Adam Nagourney role of concern trolling Democratic politics and policies. This time his target is Social Security and, not shockingly, Bai adopts conservative deficit hawk talking points which are devoid of any basis in reality in order to make the case that any Democrats who oppose Social Security cuts are nuts. Dean Baker takes Bai to task over his assertion that Treasury Bills are “often referred to as i.o.u.’s”:

This is of course absurd. The business pages of major newspapers are full of references to Treasury bonds all the time. The bonds are never referred to as “i.o.u.’s.” The article then includes the bizarre assertion about government bonds that the only way for the government to make good on the bonds it has outstanding: “is to issue mountains of new debt or to take the money from elsewhere in the federal budget, or perhaps impose significant tax increases — none of which seem like especially practical options for the long term.”

Bai’s opinion, it is radically at odds with perceptions in financial markets. These markets view it as almost inconceiable that the government will not honor its bonds, which is why the interest rate on long-term bonds is near its lowest level in the last 60 years.

Bai also describes the process of the government selling bonds in this absurd manner:

So this is sort of like saying that you’re rich because your friend has promised to give you 10 million bucks just as soon as he wins the lottery.

No, selling trust fund bonds is more like you gave your friend $10 million and he’s promised to pay you back $10 million, plus interest.

Scarecrow at FireDogLake (as well as Dean Baker above) both have problems that the Times ran Bai’s piece as news, when it’s clear he’s editorializing and advancing political opinions that aren’t based in reality. Scarecrow writes:

This is the big con, folks, maybe the biggest con in an era of big cons, and it’s all designed to take money paid by middle class and seniors and put aside for their retirements, and use it as a cover for tax cuts for the richest people in America. Matt Bai just told us he is a dupe in that con, but what excuse do the New York Times editors have?

I don’t think it’s surprising that a reporter who likes punching hippies is punching hippies on our key issue. But there is a real question about how some of this bunk slipped its way past the Times’ editors.

A loss of trust

Brilliant:

Every time someone gets something thing wrong in a consequential way, the loss of trust should advance, ratcheting up with each such error detected, to the point where it becomes the safest default position to assume that someone — McArdle, for example — is always wrong till proven otherwise.

I think similar things could be said about Tom Friedman, Joe Lieberman, and Conventional Wisdom.

Thomas Levenson also points out that McArdle’s attack on Warren is of the Breitbart variety:

And that leads me back to the thought that got me going on this post. It seems to me that what we read in McArdle here is a genteel excursion into Andrew Breitbart territory. Like the Big Hollywood thug, she misleads by contraction, by the omission of necessary context, by simply making stuff up when she thinks no one will check (again, see the footnotes for examples). And like Breitbart, she does so here to achieve a more than on goal. The first is simply to damage Elizabeth Warren as an individual, to harm her career prospects.

As I said earlier, the actions of Breitbart are simply part of the basic toolkit deployed by rightwing pundits and operatives. Seeing it used by McArdle is no more surprising than seeing it used by Zuckerman or Breitbart.