Blog: Blogging

It's sad when journalists do a hit piece on bloggers. It's triply sad when the group tut-tuts on camera after the reportage about those silly bloggers' low ethical standards, only to have it turn out that the reporter who did the piece didn't read his sources, nobody fact-checked anything, and as a result the capstone accusation that justifies the piece is entirely false. And then it's quadruply sad when the media outlet in question issues a correction, and continues to get it wrong, only a little less wrong.

Here's the backstory: The New York Times did a fairly shoddy expose about how some bloggers get paid, and in response, Jonathan Singer of MyDD wrote a tongue-in-cheek post where he claims that he is really Jerome Armstrong, and so are Chris Bowers and Matt Stoller and Scott Shields. "Thought you met Matt, Chris or Jonathan at Yearly Kos or some other event? Most likely you met one of the young fellows I paid to play those roles. They're just out of work, dime a dozen actors from Los Angeles. Anyone could have played them." A local Boston commentator/tool named John Carroll then reported it as fact that Jerome was really all these other people.

After much well-deserved criticism and ribbing, they posted a correction on their show blog, but... wait for it... they still didn't read the post, saying that Jerome was kidding, when in fact Jerome didn't write the joke in the first place (Jonathan did, claiming to be Jerome)!

This would all be merely funny if it weren't for the extraordinarily self-righteous tone of the original piece, saying in effect, "these bloggers think they are journalists, but look, they aren't up to the same standards." No, they're above, at least above the standards of this particular show.

Nothing arouses conservative ire like former President Bill Clinton, and a lot of people in politics crave the glamour of proximity to famous people. Combine these in an event where some people participate in a lunch with Clinton, and where the only information available at first is a photograph of the bloggers involved, and we have a recipe for bad behavior.

When women first started advocating for the right to vote, or equal treatment in the workplace, or protection against violence, many people not only resisted these changes but ridiculed the individuals involved. That continues to this day - the terrific blog Feministing gets enormous numbers of nasty comments, far more than more general-interest political blogs. The authors get attacked in the most objectifying ways, like commenters commenting on their "fuckability" no matter what serious topic they are trying to cover.

Most recently, a conservative blogger named Ann Althouse attacked Feministing founder Jessica Valenti for her participation in the aforementioned Clinton lunch. It seems she happened to be standing in the front row and was turned at an angle to the camera (as were the others near her), making the shaper of her breasts visible. Since in the worldview of those who attacked the liks of Susan B. Anthony back in the day, women should only succeed in the world based on their looks, and those who look good must be doing so only to get ahead, Jessica was savagely attacked by Althouse and her commenters for "flaunting" her body.

Well, Jessica Valenti has my eternal respect for being a real trailblazer. She puts up with a lot of abuse on her blog in order to expose young people to feminism. And now she is once again setting an example by not letting critics use her looks to silence her words while also not letting enemies make her ashamed of being attractive. Here's Jessica's take-no-prisoners strike back and another great response from another terrific blogger, Feministe.

On the other end of bad behavior we have another little hoopla about the same picture which happened to only include white bloggers. Peter Daou, who organized the event, invited black and Latino bloggers, who unfortunately couldn't attend. It's reasonable to point out the issue, but it opened the door for some people, envious they weren't invited, to harp on race to the detriment of everyone. Unfortunately, we have trouble separating real racial conversation from the tendency of a few people to bring up race every time they aren't personally given the attention they feel they deserve, as Firedoglake's Jane Hamsher says explains in reaction to one such critique.

I'm sad when a prominent figure tries to step into the netroots world and gets savaged from all sides for trivialities. It happened when Mark Warner threw his party at Yearly Kos that would raise no eyebrows in any corporate industry conference but had bloggers self-flagellating over whether they were being "bought". And now, under attack from the right with valiant people like Jessica Valenti defending themselves for being too pretty, we're "shooting ourselves in the foot," as Oliver Willis put it, not just by criticizing the "first black President" for not being concerned enough with racial diversity, but also by jumping on yet another influential public figure trying to reach out.

I'm at the NDN Annual Meeting this morning, where Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton just addressed the conference. Many in the blogosphere vehemently oppose Senator Clinton's Presidential ambitions, and she has made the tactical decision to ignore the blogosphere rather than engaging with it - in my opinion, a poor choice.

But at the conference, the Senator said much with which progressive bloggers would enthusiastically agree. She drew clear distinctions with Republicans on major policy areas such as health care, making higher education affordable, and a competent FEMA. She made a clear case for the importance of Congressional oversight of what is going on in the executive branch. She believes that having an honest discussion about Iraq in Congress is vital. She even mentioned Net Neutrality.

The first questioner brought up what I'd been wanting to ask Senator Clinton. What do you think of new communication technologies like blogs, he asked, paraphrased. And she thinks they're great, she said. But does she really? Because she couldn't resist throwing in a dig, referencing one conservative commentator who had remarked, "Progressive blogs beat up on Republicans and other Democrats, while conservative blogs beat up on Democrats and progressives." The clear implication was that the criticism she is receiving online is counterproductive.

Ironically, Clinton had a different attitude about dissent at the start of her speech, when she praised the recent Congressional debate over Iraq. Many reporters, parroting right-wing memes, wrote that the Democrats were fractured just because they were not all marching in lock-step. That's healthy, she argued. Democrats should be praised instead for actually talking about the issue and airing their differing opinions. And she's absolutely right.

So, here online, blogs are airing different opinions about policy positions Senator Clinton has taken, about Iraq or flag burning. But deep down, the bloggers and the Senator agree 99% of the time. If Team Hillary were to participate in the online community, I'm sure much of the most visceral dislike would dissipate. Too bad that's not happening.

Bloggers Jerome Armstrong (MyDD) and Markos Moulitsas Zuniga (DailyKos), authors of Crashing the Gate, stopped in New York City on their book tour Tuesday evening for a signing event at Pioneer Bar hosted by Cosmopolity, Young People For, and DL21C. Following the signing, they came uptown for a little reception for Cosmopolity and YP4 members and friends, including a few other bloggers like Matt Stoller (MyDD), Nancy Scola, Nathan Newman (TPMCafe), and others, as well as my Congressman, Jerrold Nadler.

Political blogs have built enormous communities of engaged individuals who communicate with each other online. People share ideas, debate, and become friends (and enemies) online. But sometimes there's just no substitute for old fashioned, face to face social interaction, and bloggers across America are increasingly supplementing their online conversations with one down at the local pub. In many cities, that means Drinking Liberally.

An informal, non-programmatic, free progressive social gathering is turning out to be the perfect complement to a vibrant local blogosphere. Some of the most successful Drinking Liberally chapters, in fact, are those with close ties to area bloggers. Philadelphia's chapter, instigated by top national blogger Duncan Black (Atrios), has blossomed not only into Drinking Liberally's fifth largest (as measured by mailing list size) but also a regular convocation for Philadelphia's blogging community, from topical conversation to drunken singing.

A blogger in Minneapolis took over the defunct local chapter, brought in other area bloggers, and quickly built it into a thriving community, the organization's tenth largest. And last week, a Milwaukee blogger called for the formation of a local chapter, and was quickly joind by a chorus of other local writers eager to meet and interact in person in addition to online.

The ideas and energy have often flowed in the other direction as well, from drinkosphere to blogosphere; liberal drinkers from Williamsburg, Brooklyn to Washington, DC started their own blogs, prompting the drinkingliberally.org Web team (i.e. me) to deploy a blog system on our server for chapters like Louisville and Cambridge, Mass.

Just as we saw - and Steve Gilliard so eloquently described during RNC Week at The Tank - when bloggers meet in person they form friendships which strengthen the blogosphere online, and have the enriching opportunity of talking with readers face to face. The bloggers can in turn utilize their wide online reach to grow and diversify the crowds at the physical get-togethers. Through this virtuous cycle, vibrant, thriving communities develop simultanously and symiotically both online and off, on the blog and in the bar.

I've always been very nervous about the McCain-Feingold campaign finance law, and the initative to regulate Internet speech is a great example of why. Reducing the ability of those with a lot of money to corrupt the political system is a very worthwhile goal; reducing the ability of citizens to participate in the political process is very bad. Applying the McCain-Feingold rubric - requiring FEC disclosures, and counting anything that helps a candidate as an in-kind contribution - to all political activity, including individuals speaking out online or groups of people gathering for political purposes, will stifle both. We'll end up with a world where professional PACs can participate in the political process, but nobody else can. And that's just as bad a future as any the law is trying to prevent.

In the reactions to this on blogs and mailing lists, I've seen a lot of apt comparisons. Is it a contribution every time someone tells a family member about a candidate over the dinner table? Is a lawn sign a contribution equal to the value of renting billboard space on that street - potentially very high in a city?

The problem here is the same as one around copyright: individuals have become used to doing certain things, like singing songs to each other, giving books to their friends, or talking about candidates. The Internet allows these activities to suddenly reach orders of magnitude more people. People put home movies to music using popular songs all the time, but if they put them on the Internet, content industries can find out about it and sue. If I encourage my friends to vote for someone, that's fine, but if I do it online, millions of people might read that and suddenly it's something the FEC wants to regulate. But the law shouldn't drastically change our behavior just because we live in a more connected world and can communicate with more people.

Update: Fafblog gives a great satirical take on the same point:

The Medium Lobster's one complaint is that the judge's ruling doesn't go far enough. Certainly the excesses of the blogosphere will now be held in place, but how can there be true campaign reform when the spoken word goes unchecked? Every day, millions of Americans make unchecked and unregulated political contributions by making political endorsements on sophisticated verbal logs - or "verblogs," if you will - comprised of billions of currently untracked sound waves transmitted through the atmosphere. Until these words are properly tracked, counted, and restricted by the FEC according to the arbitrary limits of McCain-Feingold, American democracy will forever remain a prisoner of Big Speech.

Sunday a wide array of bloggers including Markos Moulitsas Zuniga, Matthew Yglesias, Annatopia, Steve Gilliard, Aldon Hynes, Matt Stoller, and many more settled in at The Tank after watching some of the many pre-RNC protests. We wrapped up the day with a barbecue in the courtyard and visits from Joe Trippi, Sam Seder, and Christopher Lydon.

I spent the week in Boston at the Democratic National Convention. Blogger helped with a party thrown by the DCCC honoring bloggers. Near the end, I got to witness Kos debating two very political operative-looking guys from the DCCC about the Ginny Schrader / "No Comment" flap.

It seemed to me at the timethat Kos may have jumped the gun a bit in his criticism, and the DCCC insisted after the fact that "No Comment" wasn't as laden with meaning as Kos took it to be. Whether that is true or not is irrelevant. I'm sure Kos's feelings stem from a general lack of enthusiasm for any nontraditional campaigning that comes from all the party committees, which is very real.

Kos wrote a summary of Wednesday's dispute which shows an advanced stage of fixed pie-itis. The DCCC's logic goes, there is only a fixed amount of support they can give, so they need to focus it on the best people. Therefore, they need to find the people who will slog through rain and sleet to raise money and prove themselves viable, then fund those people. Whereas online money is easy, so it doesn't prove the candidate's mettle, and as a result we shouldn't raise online money.

If that is really their belief, it reveals a deeply ingrained attitude that the existing, traditional donors are the only ones who matter. As one commenter asked, why should money from the Net be treated as less revealing of a candidate's ability to raise more than money from wealthy people at fundraising dinners? To get the Net's money a candidate needs to persuade bloggers to solicit donations and individuals to agree to give them. Someone who is successful at that has shown just as much ability to run a campaign as someone who raises the same amount in paper checks.

(Alternately, one commenter on the Kos story suggested they don't really believe that, but rather simply want control. If so, that reveals another problem in the party apparatus, that many people are striving for personal power rather than success for the party as a whole, and refuse to try new ideas to see if they work because of the risk of losing control.)

I attended Andrew Rasiej's Personal Democracy Forum conference yesterday, flying in on the first flight from Houston (departing 6:45) after spending the whole night partying with Jeannie and Brian's wedding guests. (Pictures to come).

When I arrived, Congressman Anthony Weiner was saying that he didn't feel a need to have a blog because he's not convinced it would reach his constituents. He feels those people already hear from him and know how to reach him, and he much prefers to hold town hall meetings in Queens and Brooklyn where he knows the attendees are voters in his district.

I'll leave aside for a moment the question of whether his constituents really do get to hear from him as much as they want (I never got any mail from Major Owens, Jerry Nadler, or Anna Eshoo while living in Park Slope, the East Village, or Cupertino; I never had an opportunity to go to any town halls, and their Web sites are all so dry and full of boring press releases that I don't know anything about them).

Even if Weiner does mail people in his district and invite them to town halls, he can only reach maybe 300 people in one of those meetings, if that. Why wouldn't he want to have a blog where he could reach 30,000, of which 300 might be in his district? More importantly, I'm not in his district but Kim is. My opinions might influence her vote, especially if there were to be a close race. Why shouldn't Weiner want to influence me? Sure, it's not as important as directly speaking to one of his constituents, but reaching 30,000 people who might influence someone in his district seems like a smart idea to me.

Weiner did make the very good point that he has no way to know who is reading his blog, nor what effect a blog would have. We need ways to prove to elected officials that they'd benefit from more dialogue with the public.

The Official Journal of the European Union has a set of responses by European Commissioner Bolkstein to questions posed by a Dutch member of the European Parliament. These questions are very hostile towards Google, and usually ignorant and/or outright incorrect. For example, he implies that Google sells its actual search results to the highest bidder, instead of just small colored boxes on the side.

But I found this one most amusing:

Q5. Is the Commission aware that Google takes over businesses specialising in ‘weblogs’, i.e. on-line journals of young people, which can later be used as evidence against them and could follow them all their lives, causing them to lose jobs and making it impossible for them to form relationships?

Those weblogs... they can really ruin your life!