First, They Came For The Bloggers

Despite my frequent tirades and endless vituperation toward the corporate media and its minions, I do believe Jon Carroll means well. As I've said before, there are good reasons he's the only columnist on my blogroll: he has intellectual honesty, perspective, an understanding of human nature and how it tends to operate. These qualities are quickly lost on many self-styled pundits, who are only looking to make a name for themselves by being just "outrageous" enough to get invited on all the cool screamfests, and maybe pimp a useless book or five.

But these are important qualities when it comes to digging through facts and perception, and not being distracted by truth agendas and values lectures. "Truth" and "values" are transitive in nature, anyway; they are worse than useless, they have become weapons in today's sound-bark dialogue.

So it's all the more disappointing that Carroll maybe misses some of the proverbial forest for the trees:

While the whole thing was going on, I did not understand the excitement over the Ned Lamont-Joe Lieberman battle for the Democratic nomination for senator in Connecticut. If Lamont won, it would prove that the Democrats in the Northeast are unhappy about the war in Iraq, and I think we know that already.

....

The other major story to come out of the Lamont campaign was the influence of bloggers, particularly a small cadre of anti-war bloggers who vigorously supported Lamont. I was annoyed by the usurpation of bandwidth by the Lamont story because some of my favorite morning reads -- www.dailykos.com, www.atrios.blogspot.com, www.talkingpointsmemo.com -- became heavily involved in the minutiae of the campaign, and a lot of other stories just got lost. Throw in the attention paid to the Mel Gibson nonstory -- really, the anti-Semites of significance these days are the ones running entire nations, like President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran -- and you've got a less colorful and diverse blogosphere.

Couple things here, both of which are central to Carroll's take on all this. First is that while perhaps "we all know" how Democratic voters in general -- and northeastern Democratic voters in particular -- feel about the war and the administration, there is and has been a demonstrable pattern of cognitive disconnect in play here. The media reflect the mentality of the Beltway, which has been staid, clueless, diffident -- everything that the "nutroots" of the "angry left" have not been.

Bloggers have generally acted in pretty good faith in challenging the received wisdom of the media, and have gotten shit in return for it. Do the media engage in any mea culpas when caught on their bullshit, or -- more importantly -- do something about it? No, they hem and haw about validity of the complaints, mumble some useless platitudes about their version of "objectivity", and then piss and moan about the intemperate nature of their critics. Then they wonder why their profession is held in even lower regard than lawyers and turkey strokers.

The media, locked in by behavioral inertia, corporate flaccidity, and maybe even a healthy dose of Stockholm Syndrome, have shown absolutely no interest in changing the paradigm, and Carroll alludes to it himself by mentioning the Mel Gibson non-story. Who spent more time combing over this nonsense, blogs or media? I'll bet my last porno that 90+% of the politically serious blogs mentioned Gibson only as new developments initially appeared -- that is, when the story first broke, and then perhaps again when the allegations were reliably confirmed. The "responsible" media, on the other hand, milked something like two solid weeks out of it.

Now, I think the Lamont/Lieberman story, and the role of bloggers in the development of that story, holds more than just the "are the angry nutroots a force to be reckoned with, and should we all be afraid" canard the media are currently wanking. The anger throws them, for one; for all their newfound wisdom regarding the blogsurgency™, the profilers seem amazingly ignorant of the fact that many (if not most) of us started this in one form or another well before the blog paradigm started getting established. Chat fora and BBS services were around for years before Blogspot and the rest of them hit, and we proto-bloggers, one by one, jumped to the new wave. What we brought with us was the form of discourse we had cultivated -- snarky, vulgar, nasty in tone and tempo. Everything happened and continues to happen in more-or-less real time, or at least to our individual dictates. This is alien to established media presences, who are tethered to having to fulfill their revenue model to continue their legitimacy.

There is a freeing aspect to all that, which the media simply cannot approach. Bloggers assume that if they build it, people will come; the media, because they are owned and operated by corporations, are scared shitless that if they build it, a carload of freaks from the Jeebus Told Me To Boycott You If You Build It Society will gang-fax them and threaten their bottom line.

I don't have a bottom line. I don't have advertisers to please, and my policy with pleasing readers is roughly the same as Frank Zappa had with his fans -- if you enjoy it, great; if not, blow it out your ass. Blogs are the ultimate niche marketers in that regard, as Carroll recognizes, and there's freedom in that. I don't have (or want) to be everything to everyone; if someone wants to read about American Idol or underwater basketweaving or whatever, there's bound to be a blog for them out there somewhere.

It is not clear that bloggers had much real impact on the Connecticut primary, but they're a new wild card in the political process, and that makes them a story. I have always appreciated the fierce independence of bloggers, and I fear that, as they accumulate influence, they'll be co-opted in the classic capitalist way. (As soon as bloggers really influence elections, Rupert Murdoch will begin buying them by the long ton.)

He's probably right about this, but so what? If Rupert Murdoch wants to try to co-opt me by throwing money in my direction, I encourage him. I am a political capitalist in the Jesse Unruh mold -- if I can't take Murdoch's money, drink his whiskey, fuck his women, and still talk shit about him the next day, then I don't belong here in the first place. Shit, paying me to do this would just give me more time, money, and freedom to do ever more digging and writing.

I realize that not everyone is cut from the same cloth, but I submit that that's the operative dynamic of every corporate media entity anyway, so why the fuck should the truth-to-power folk starve while overpaid shitheads like Tweety and Russert gorge on lobster?

It seemed to me unwise for Markos Moulitsas to have starred in a TV campaign commercial for Lamont. It seems he wants to be a Player, and being a Player is not compatible with fierce independence. Experience suggests that, somewhere along the line, there's a price for seeking power. The price could be a loss of credibility, or a cringe-inducing compromise, or something else. I'm not saying it's happened or it will happen; I'm saying that's what experience suggests.

This is true, just as it might be true for, say, Bill Keller to appear in an actual campaign commercial. It's bad form, and perhaps dilutes the line between editorializing and electioneering. But that line gets crossed all the time in subtler, more subtextual ways, frequently with the tacit help of the aforementioned responsible media. At least Kos (who has not paid me for this tepid endorsement, damn him) put it up front, and let people decide for themselves.

And what of that decision, anyway? What of the propitiously-timed foiling of the British terror plot (coyly nicknamed "Shakes On A Plane", heh-indeedy), and VP Undisclosed Location's cheap politicizing of security information, as a way of quelling electoral dissent? Again, not possible without an understanding of the flaccid, pseudo-objective posturing routinely employed by the media.

Vice President Dick Cheney was unaware arrests in an alleged terror plot in Britain were imminent when he accused Democrats of being soft on national security, the White House said on Friday.

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Cheney said on Wednesday the defeat of Sen. Joe Lieberman in Connecticut's Democratic primary on Tuesday over his support of the Iraq war could embolden "the al Qaeda types" who believe the United States would cut and run if put under enough pressure.

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White House spokesman Tony Snow said Cheney had been briefed last weekend on the British threat but did not know the arrests were imminent when he spoke and that he was simply reacting to the outcome of the Connecticut primary.

"There was no anticipation of an operation that day," Snow said. "He had no reason, I don't think, based on my conversations, there was no strong reason to believe that something was imminent."

That's really what the CT senatorial election primary was a referendum on -- it clearly delineated the electorate between people who have enough common sense to interpret the available information, and retards who think Tony Snow and Dick Cheney have anything resembling their best interests at heart.

But that's not how it was portrayed in the "responsible" media; instead, the whole procedure was characterized as a life-or-death showdown between "serious" "moderates", who were really neither of those things, and angry elitist leftists, who despite all those marginalizing labels, hold positions which jibe with a clear majority not only of their own party, but with the entire country.

The only thing they got right about the entire dynamic was the anger part, and at this point, anger should be axiomatic. If the media spent half as much time asking why Bush couldn't be troubled to maybe postpone his vacation/fundraising trip long enough to help defuse the Israel/Lebanon crisis, as it does giving face-time to the usual gang of religious hucksters reading entrails and divining said crisis as the onset of Armageddon, we might get somewhere. But again, as Carroll himself alluded, they're content to hump whatever manufactured celebrojourno freak show they can, until it's beaten well and good into the ground.

Carroll one more time:

Nicholas Lemann in a recent New Yorker wrote an article about blogging in which he accused bloggers (or "citizen journalists") of not being real journalists. It was an interesting article, but it was hurt by its failure to define "journalism." Is Hunter S. Thompson a journalist? Tom Wolfe? Garry Wills? William Buckley? Where exactly is the line, and who draws it, and who appointed them? What is definitely true is that "citizen journalists" and salaried journalists have failed to make common cause. They each consider the other to be the enemy, and the real enemy is out there, all the people who spin the truth and bury the truth. Journalism should be about revealing the world as it really is.

Lemann didn't use his best example, a book he wrote almost 15 years ago called "The Promised Land: The Great Black Migration and How It Changed America." It's a wonderful book, a model for anyone who wants to practice journalism. It's not reactionary, it's free from cant, and it takes the long view. We all need to learn how to do this stuff better, whether we work for ourselves or for a multinational corporation. If the truth will set us free, then we'd better start figuring out what the truth is and how to proclaim it. It would be easier if we did it together.

That's a nice idea, but I've no clue how that's supposed to occur. At this point, the media have so devalued their own currency, that I think most bloggers use them simply as a resource for cites and links. For now, that still carries some legitimacy. But consider -- the bloggers who physically went to Connecticut and followed Lamont's campaign around, why do you think they did that? Sure, it was a cause they believed in, but perhaps there's also a nugget of justified suspicion, that if someone wasn't right there on the scene to record what went down, that would leave the "legitimate" media to cover it. And then the story would be rendered useless, larded with "objectivity" tropes and plaints from the usual "anonymous sources" about those nasty ol' nutroots and their crazy candidate overturning their little corporate apple-cart.

Never forget -- Lieberman humps a lot of big-money legs to stay in office. His wife is a lobbyist for Big Pharma. Does the media cover any of that? No, they leave it to the nasssty bloggerses, to Matt Taibbi, to the last few professionals who care more about the story behind the story, than about clawing their way to the adipose tissue of the middle, the Lexuses, the beach houses in the Hamptons, the kewl kids parties with Sally Quinn. There's a lot of fucking money here at stake, and that's why even Karl Rove is reaching out to Holy Joe.

And I have no idea how we crazy bloggerses are supposed to "work together" with people who are conditioned and co-opted to represent a pre-ordained agenda from above. I have no interest in "working with" people who stenograph anonymous press releases unquestioningly, who trudge every day to the White House Press Briefing room and let themselves be abused by a piece of shit like Tony Snow.

This White House traffics in contempt, showers it in abundance upon the vaunted fourth estate, who in turn project that contempt, whether deliberately or in their usual dickless passivity, upon people like me, who do this for free, just because we love to tilt at that windmill and foolishly think that somehow, somewhere, there's value in it.

There's no value in taking even a minute of shit from the likes of Tony Snow or George Bush or Don Rumsfeld, and if the MSM wants any measure of respect and cooperation from us, then they should get up on their hind legs already, march en masse out of that dump of a press room, throw off their chains, and work with us, rather than smugly dismissing us. But it took blogs to discover that Jeff Gannon™ was a Republican plant, even though he'd been at daily briefings for two years; it took blogs less than a week to discover that the newspaper of record in the nation's capital had hired a serial plagiarist to be their trophy conservatard blogger (and then a month of obfuscating and sneering from Pravda to get past it). This bespeaks a profoundly unserious, irresponsible paradigm at work, but because I use dirty words, I'm a bad guy.

I kinda feel like the unfortunately-named Michael Bolton in Office Space who, when asked why he doesn't change his name to avoid pestering by geeky Bolton fans, defensively replies, "Why should I change my name? He's the one who sucks."

So, you know, when the so-called Headline News Network no longer marquees the screamfest bloc of assholes like Glenn Beck and Nancy Grace, when the Cable News Network finally understand that perhaps the actual news is more important than making stars out of the sock puppets who simply read it, then perhaps we get somewhere. Till then, I have no use for a profession that thinks it's great fun to help Ann Coulter sell books. The media simply have to do a better job of policing themselves, and marginalizing their own idiots, but as the saying goes, their paychecks depend on them not recognizing that.

It's a resource -- for now. At the point where actual information-gathering becomes cost-effective for the "citizen journalist" (a term which I personally have no use for), the dinosaurs will officially be extinct. That too is part of what Lamont/Lieberman presaged.