Newsweek Editor: Who Cares If Bloggers Criticize Us? As Long As They Link Us, We've Succeeded
(November 16, 2007 -- 4:49 PM EDT // link // )

One thing that really bums this blog out is this inane idea still harbored by some in the traditional media that if you're getting criticized equally by both sides of the blogosphere, you're "doing something right."

Case in point: Newsweek editor Jon Meacham. The Columbia Journalism Review points us to a rather dispiriting interview that Meacham gave to Howard Kurtz, in which Meacham addressed Newsweek's hiring of Markos and Karl Rove to contribute political articles. Here's what Meacham, who occupies a very powerful post in journalism, had to say about this mag's decision:

"I'm fully prepared for both the right-wing and left-wing blogosphere to be outraged, which means we're doing our job."

If you take an equal pounding from both sides, that means "we're doing our job"? Please stop it. Right away. Thank you.

The editor of one of the two top newsweeklies tells us he goes to sleep with a smile on his face if he gets lots of criticism, so long as it came from blogs on both sides. But "doing our job" presumably here means "doing good journalism." So if people on both sides say you aren't doing good journalism, the correct response isn't to say, "thanks, I appreciate it." Rather, one should say, "Hmmm. People are criticizing me. Is there something to what they're saying? Is one side perhaps right?"

You always hear variations of this. The problem is this presumption that blogospheric criticism from both sides is equally illegitimate because it's equally rooted in nothing but ideology or partisanship. By this model, blogospheric criticism can't ever be an accurate response to any actual journalistic failures on your part. It can only be because the bloggers are trying to game the refs and get you to help their cause. If both sides are being equally noisy, this means that your journalism isn't helping either side and thus is "balanced." So no blogospheric criticism can ever be substantively legit.

The subtext lurking under this attitude, unwittingly suggested by Meacham here, is even worse: That blogospheric criticism is a goal because it boosts traffic. Blogs are good for traffic and nothing else, so never mind whether the criticism of the quality of our journalism is right or could improve our discourse. If we generate lots of anger and traffic, equally distributed on both sides, we're "doing our job."

Thing is, one side can be right, and the other wrong. Not sure why this is difficult to understand.

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NY Times' Kit Seelye: McCain "Bitch" Episode Is Bad For Hillary
(November 16, 2007 -- 10:49 AM EDT // link // )

This is pretty weak stuff.

Today's New York Times has a piece on the now-notorious episode where John McCain basically stood by while one of his supporters called Hillary a "bitch." It reports that McCain has now sent out an email trying to raise money off the whole affair.

The piece, by "Kit" Seelye, contains this startling bit of analysis:

Clinton allies have suggested in the past that sexism-based attacks can actually help Mrs. Clinton by inspiring sympathy among women. They may even win over some voters who understand that campaigns are brutal but who appreciate a candidate who can “handle it,” as former President Bill Clinton recently said of his wife.

At the same time, the episode may remind voters that many people have strong feelings about Mrs. Clinton and make them question whether they want to live with animosity and polarization.

The piece adds that this episode may serve as "a reminder that many voters view Mrs. Clinton as divisive."

The "bitch" episode is bad for Hillary? Hmmm -- that's a pretty silly conclusion. First off, there's far less analysis in this piece on the question of whether this is good or bad politically for John McCain, even though he's the person who stood by while his supporter uttered the slur and proceeded to raise money off of it. We only hear Seelye's views on whether this is good or bad for Hillary, even though her only involvement in this was that a McCain supporter somewhere thinks she's a "bitch" and gave voice to that sentiment.

Secondly, not to put too fine a point on the notion that journalism should be a quest for accuracy, but the piece doesn't bother mentioning that McCain's email completely misrepresented McCain's handling of the episode.

And finally, the idea that this affair is bad for Hillary because it will "remind voters" that she's divisive really is a comical reach. If voters are reminded of this it will be because they're being reminded of it by ... people like Seelye, who says it here twice. As always, your political media figures will just never acknowledge their own role in shaping our political narratives and our perceptions of public figures.

This piece spends far more time telling us that this "bitch" episode is bad for Hillary than it does in telling us whether McCain's fundraising appeal was, you know, true or not. Bizarre journalistic priorities indeed.

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Why Won't New York Times Columnists Attack Each Other By Name? Answer: There's No Good Reason
(November 15, 2007 -- 2:43 PM EDT // link // )

Updated below with a letter to me from former Times columnist Syd Schanberg.

For days now people have been blogging about the ongoing battle unfolding among Paul Krugman, David Brooks and Bob Herbert on the New York Times Op ed page. The columnists have been duking it out over whether Ronald Reagan consciously race-baited when he gave an infamous 1980 speech supporting states' rights just outside the town where three civil rights workers were murdered a generation ago.

As many have pointed out, none of these columnists has even once mentioned his colleagues by name. Some have speculated that this is in deference to some sort of Times policy or unspoken tradition. The problem is that this reticence prevents the columnists from engaging each other's arguments as directly as possible, because so doing would give away the identity of the target.

This got me wondering: Why don't these columnists address each other? Is there a real reason for it? Well, as best as I can determine, there isn't any such reason. In fact, the columnists probably could start naming each other by name tomorrow and nothing would happen.

First I asked Times spokesperson Catherine Mathis if there's any particular policy in place that forbids this. After checking she said that there was no such policy.

Next stop: Susan Tifft, the co-author of a well-known history of the paper called The Trust: The Private and Powerful Family Behind The New York Times. She told me that she couldn't recall any particular episode where columnists clashed with one another or any guidelines against it ever getting laid down, either publicly or privately. She did, however, point to one semi-relevant episode from Times history.

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David Broder Again Writes About Clinton Marriage -- Less Than A Week After Vowing Not To
(November 15, 2007 -- 8:02 AM EDT // link // )

Wow, that didn't take long. David Broder, in a chat with readers last Friday:

New York: Will you and the media ever apply as much scrutiny to the Giuliani marriages as you have done to the single Clinton marriage?

David S. Broder: I plan to leave both subjects alone.

David Broder, in his column today:

No one who has read or studied the large literature of memoirs and biographies of the Clintons and their circle can doubt the intimacy and the mutual dependence of their political and personal partnership.

No one can reasonably expect that partnership to end should Hillary Clinton be elected president. But the country must decide whether it is comfortable with such a sharing of the power and authority of the highest office in the land.

It is a difficult question for any of the Democratic rivals to raise. But it lingers, even if unasked.

Now, Broder can write about whatever the hell he wants, as far as this blog is concerned. And the question of how Bill might impact a Hillary Presidency is in some ways a legit one.

But what interests me here is the level of outright denial we're seeing at play. The inability of Broder and other pundits not to return to the topic of the Clinton marriage -- as Broder did here despite suggesting a week ago that he wouldn't -- is really almost neurotic at this point, like a bad nervous habit or a facial tic. No one watching Chris Matthews spew spittle flecks on MSNBC can doubt this. Yet they'll never acknowledge this obsession or admit that they would never spend anywhere near the same amount of time on the marriage of any Republican Presidential contender.

But there's actually more to it than this. I submit that your pundits are in the grip of an almost desperate desire to see voters reject the Hillary candidacy principally because of Bill and nothing else. Broder, for instance, keeps telling us that this will happen one of these days, you just wait. Two months ago he wrote that Bill's role in a Hillary Presidency was something "the country will have to ponder." Today he again tells us that "the country must decide whether it is comfortable" with it. It just doesn't matter that the same voters whom Broder is famous for spending so much time talking to have told pollsters again and again and again that they are comfortable with this and see it as either a non-issue or a positive.

How to explain this weird yearning for the voters to see Bill as Hillary's albatross? Maybe it's just that pundits keep hearing other pundits say this and just mindlessly repeat it. Or maybe a return by Bill to the White House would represent some kind of defeat for the pundit establishment. In the late nineties your pundits were deeply invested in the priggish conviction that Monica-gate would convince voters that Bill was thoroughly unfit for the Presidency -- but voters roundly rejected this view, and continued to reject it for years after. Now we're in round two, and this time, by golly, the voters really will see that the pundits were right -- they'll finally realize just how bad Bill was for the country.

These are admittedly crude explanations. But I can't come up with anything better.

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Adventures In Winger Mendacity, Part 9,463: Media Research Center Responds!
(November 14, 2007 -- 10:52 AM EDT // link // )

Here's some more fun stuff for you on Brent Bozell and Tim Graham, the hapless leaders of the Media Research Center, which is a conservative "media watchdog" group that traffics in some of the seamiest anti-Hillary smut and hucksterism that you can find anywhere.

Bozell and Graham are on a tear right now to prove that a fifth column conspiracy of liberal media elites is trying to destroy the country from within by elevating Hillary to the White House. As I noted here yesterday, the duo have a new piece in National Review that tries to prove this by pointing to an old Margaret Carlson article in Time magazine in which she allegedly described Hillary gushingly as "an amalgam of Betty Crocker, Mother Teresa, and Oliver Wendell Holmes."

As I wrote here yesterday, however, a look back at Carlson's article shows that she actually didn't describe Hillary this way at all. Rather, she mocked Hillary backers for presenting her this way. This didn't stop these alleged media critics from chopping Carlson's quote in this laughably dishonest way, however.

Now Graham has responded to our post from yesterday. And his reply, quite literally, is that it was okay for the duo to lie audaciously about Carlson's original quote, because she praises Hillary elsewhere in that article and in her other writings. I'm really not making this up -- look for yourself.

But the whole thing gets even more ridiculous than this.

It turns out that Bozell and Graham have a whole new book out that documents the entire years-long pro-Hillary liberal media conspiracy in all its dastardly glory. And as ConWebBlog notes,the two are basically using this phony quote as one of the centerpieces of the book's entire promotional effort. Check this out from the book's promo page:

In Whitewash, L. Brent Bozell III and Tim Graham of the Media Research Center, America’s largest and most respected media watchdog organization, expose the unprecedented media favoritism that is the real key to Hillary’s political career. Marshalling stunning evidence compiled exclusively by the Media Research Center, the authors show how the media have relentlessly promoted Hillary from the moment in 1992 when Time magazine introduced her to the country as an “amalgam of Betty Crocker, Mother Teresa, and Oliver Wendell Holmes.”

Now Bozell is claiming that this wasn't just Carlson who said this; he says that Time magazine as an institution "introduced her to the country" this way.

Of course, this didn't happen at all. What Carlson actually wrote was this: "Friends of Hillary Clinton would have you believe she is an amalgam of Betty Crocker, Mother Teresa and Oliver Wendell Holmes..." etc, etc.

We've seen no shortage of two-bit confidence men hawking all manner of anti-Hillary paraphernalia over the years, of course, but rarely does anti-Hillary hucksterism descend to quite this level of buffoonery.

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Some Amusing Mendacity From Some Self-Described Conservative Media Watchdogs
(November 13, 2007 -- 5:07 PM EDT // link // )

If you're going to present yourself as a conservative media watchdog who claims to be policing accuracy in the media, it's probably not a good idea to blatantly and dishonestly chop quotes from articles that are still readily available in Nexis and online.

Brent Bozell and Tim Graham are both top officials with a conservative media watchdog group called the "Media Research Center," an outfit that's devoted to ferreting out the fifth column liberal bias that has infected our media and is busily working to destroy our country from within.

Bozell and Graham have now co-authored an article for National Review calling on the media to stop lauding Hillary. One thing they hold up as proof of the media's liberal conspiracy to promote Hillary is this:

When it comes to Hillary Clinton, the national media have flagrantly abandoned their duty as a supposedly independent, dispassionate press. They have shamelessly served as cheerleaders for Mrs. Clinton from the moment she emerged on the national scene in 1992, with Time’s Margaret Carlson describing her as “an amalgam of Betty Crocker, Mother Teresa, and Oliver Wendell Holmes.”

Wow -- did Margaret Carlson really describe Hillary in such gushing and cringe-worthy terms?

Well, no, as it turns out. No, she didn't.

The original article Carlson wrote is still online. Here's what she actually said:

Friends of Hillary Clinton would have you believe she is an amalgam of Betty Crocker, Mother Teresa and Oliver Wendell Holmes. She gets up before dawn, even on weekends, and before her first cup of coffee discusses educational reform. She then hops into her fuel-efficient car with her perfectly behaved daughter for a day of good works.

Fortunately, Hillary Clinton, the latest wife to be challenged to fit perfectly into the ill-defined role of political spouse, is more interesting than that.

As you can see, Carlson was actually mocking Hillary supporters for presenting her in such glowing terms. But Bozell and Graham cheerfully told National Review's readers that Carlson herself had presented her in these terms. Even more amusingly, they held this up as proof of the media's liberal bias.

I know, I know, this is just garden variety wingnut mendacity. Standard fare. Low-hanging fruit. Still, it was definitely worth a quick laugh.

Special thanks to TPM Reader VG for sending this one in.

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Why Does Camp Hillary Push Back Against Media So Aggressively?
(November 13, 2007 -- 10:27 AM EDT // link // )

The New Republic's Michael Crowley has posted an engaging piece about Camp Hillary's strategy for dealing with the media. His basic take is that Hillary's advisers view the press as a hostile foe to be defeated at all costs.

Why does Camp Hillary treat the press this way? One political reporter Crowley talks to offers this explanation: "They've cultivated this attack-machine image because they think that Democrats want that."

It's true, as I've noted here before, that one of the unheralded developments of Campaign 2008 has been that all the leading Dems, and not just Hillary, have made aggressive pushback against both the traditional and wingnut media a key part of their efforts to court Dem primary voters who have had it with the media's maltreatment of Dems over the years. Such pushback has gone mainstream in Dem primary politics.

That larger context aside, it's really not hard to explain why Camp Hillary is so aggressive with the media: The Clintons have been getting slimed by the big news orgs for over 15 years. Just look back over Campaign 2008 alone and ponder all the bogus Hillary stories we've had. Here's a partial list:

* Hillary's alleged failure to tip the Iowa waitress

* Hillary's phony southern drawl

* The supposed 20-year-plan by Hillary and Bill to take over the world, or at least deliver them both the Presidency, as alleged by Jeff Gerth and Don Van Natta and denied by the one person who supposedly had first-hand knowledge of their dastardly plot

* The baseless claim that Hillary eavesdropped on political opponents in 1992

* The bogus media claim that Bill Clinton accused Hillary's Dem rivals of "swiftboating" her

* The media's hyping of Hillary's supposed refusal to release Presidential records, a tale that was taken apart in today's Washington Post and which wasn't matched by any similar media outrage about Rudy's refusal to release his Mayoral papers

And on and on. Putting aside the Hillary campaign's more routine efforts to spin the press, the real story here is that the Clintons have been swimming against the media slime-tide for far longer than any of her Dem rivals. As a result they have a more immediate grasp of the media echo chamber/Freak Show dynamic at play, which is that once bogus stories are injected into the media bloodstream there's literally nothing that can get pundits and commentators -- and even some self-described journalists -- to stop repeating it.

John Edwards and his hair know this, and Obama the flag-pin-hating Muslim is learning it, but the Clintons have been living and breathing it for years and years.

You don't have to naively assert that the Clintons are merely passive victims of the press or deny that the Clinton camp aggressively tries to spin the media to its advantage to acknowledge this fundamental media state of play. With the Freak Show there's literally no room for error -- once a story gets written into the Freak Show's script there's no going back. So the idea is to move as quickly as possible to strangle these stories before the Freak Show gets a hold of them. This is what's largely driving Camp Hillary's aggressiveness with the press. No mystery here.

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Washington Post: Forget Edwards -- The Dem Primary Is Nothing More Than A "Clinton-Obama Rivalry"
(November 12, 2007 -- 1:06 PM EDT // link // )

As all you regulars know, one of this blog's running gripes is the refusal of your political media to acknowledge their own role in creating the narratives that help determine the outcome of campaigns.

Case in point -- this nugget from today's Washington Post report on the sparring between the candidates at the Jefferson-Jackson Dinner this weekend:

Edwards was the first of six presidential candidates to speak, and he tried to elbow his way into the Clinton-Obama rivalry with a populist call for Democrats to stand up against corporate interests and cleanse Washington of the corrupting influence of money and power.

According to WaPo, Edwards' speech was all about trying to "elbow his way" into the Hillary-Obama "rivalry." This makes it sound as if Campaign 2008 were less a political race than some kind of exclusive party that Hillary and Obama are throwing that Edwards is rudely trying to crash. But who decided that this race is little more than a Hillary-Obama rivalry in the first place? Why, WaPo did, of course!

After all, the same WaPo reporters who chose to describe Edwards' speech as an effort to "elbow" his way into the Hillary-Obama rivalry also chose to devote the first eight paragraphs of their piece only to what Hillary and Obama said. They chose to wait until the ninth graf to tell us what Edwards said. This despite the fact that the reporters also acknowledge that polls show that in Iowa the race remains "a competitive three-way contest."

So if by WaPo's own admission this is a competitive contest between all three candidates, why go to such extreme editorial lengths to frame it as a two-person race that Edwards is trying to "elbow" his way into?

This might not have been worth bothering with if it didn't perfectly capture a lot about what's been wrong with so much of the reporting on Campaign 2008. What's bizarre is how blatant this has become -- in cases like this no one even bothers to conceal how unabashedly manufactured the chosen narrative of the moment is.

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Broder Says He Won't Write About Rudy's Marriage -- Despite Devoting Multiple Columns To The Clinton Marriage
(November 12, 2007 -- 10:15 AM EDT // link // )

I'd missed this on Friday but it's definitely worth a quick note. Check this out from David Broder's chat with readers:

New York: Will you and the media ever apply as much scrutiny to the Giuliani marriages as you have done to the single Clinton marriage?

David S. Broder: I plan to leave both subjects alone.

So Broder won't be writing about the Clinton and Giuliani marriages going forward? Wow, how impressively high-minded of him!

Now that Broder has been asked directly whether he'll show the same level of interest in Rudy's multiple marriages that he and his media colleagues showed in that of the Clintons, Broder suddenly says that he's going to be avoiding both topics. This is kind of funny, because he hasn't shown any such reticence in the past when it comes to looking at the Clintons' union -- far from it.

As recently as two months ago -- Sept 6, 2007 -- Broder wrote that the Clintons' marriage was the most important political fact about Hillary. "Her marriage is the central fact in her life, and this partnership of Bill and Hillary Clinton is indissoluble," Broder wrote. "She cannot function without him, and he would not have been president without her. If she becomes president, he will play as central a role in her presidency as she did in his. And that is something the country will have to ponder."

On May 25, 2006, Broder devoted nearly a whole column to that notorious front-page piece by Pat Healy in The Times that documented the state of their marriage in almost comically absurd detail. Broder was very sympathetic to the piece, saying that it showed that "the drama of the Clintons' personal life would be a hot topic if she runs for president." If Broder thought the Clinton wasn't fair game here in any way -- or disapproved of the level of attention The Times gave to the Clinton marriage in that piece -- he certainly didn't say so.

And back when it really counted -- when the GOP tried to impeach Bill Clinton over his affair -- Broder thought the Clinton marriage was completely fair game. He wrote multiple columns at the time arguing that his affair threw his entire character and even fitness for the Presidency into question.

Yet now, suddenly, when a questioner asks Broder whether he sees serial adulterer Rudy's marriage as fodder for judging his fitness for the Presidency, Broder effectively dodges the allegation of his and the media's double standard by suddenly going all high-minded and saying he won't be discussing the marriages of Rudy or Hillary. The obvious hypocrisy here aside, I propose that we hold Broder to his promise.

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