Kevin Drum donned his Campaign Desk hat yesterday and took a swipe at the media, throwing in a little background check to build his case. But, for clarity’s sake, let’s start at the beginning (if there ever is a beginning in the blog world).
In the June issue of The Atlantic Monthly, Joshua Green writes about opposition research, formerly known as “dirty tricks.” (We’d also refer you to Campaign Desk’s own take on the subject.) Green opens with this:
As voters turn their attention toward the coming presidential election, an abiding question from the previous one frustrates Democrats: How is it, they wonder, that Al Gore told small fibs and was branded a liar while George W. Bush told big ones and was elected President? Gore’s many exaggerations may have been foolish — that he had somehow invented the Internet, that he grew up on a Tennessee farm, and so on. But surely, this line of thinking goes, they paled alongside Bush’s audacious claim that he could cut taxes by $1.3 trillion, effortlessly privatize Social Security, and still balance the budget.
Green’s repetition of the Gore/Internet anecdote produced a howl from Bob Somerby at The Daily Howler. “How did Gore get branded a liar?” asks Somerby. “Easy! Because Green’s colleagues kept reciting phony claims about Gore and looking away when Bush told real whoppers. Green knows this, of course, but prefers to play dumb.”
Near the end of his long take-down of Green, Somerby plaintively asks his readers:
Why do you only hear from The Howler about scribes of low caliber like Green?. … Frankly, we’re tired of pointing these matters out while the web’s career typists look away, behaving fraternally as colleagues trash your interests and make an ongoing joke of your lives. And no, we aren’t kidding — we really do mean it. Ask them directly why they never seem to speak up about garbage like this. Why do they happily beat up on cons, but stand by silent when it comes to the Greens? They and their publications sat silently by while the War Against Gore put George Bush in the White House. Don’t you ever want to ask why they’re so mild, even now?
Among the “career typists” mentioned by Somerby was Kevin Drum of Washington Monthly‘s Political Animal, who heard from Howler readers big-time. Drum’s reponse: “The answer is equally simple: press criticism is a full time beat for Bob. It’s not for me, which means you see it only occasionally here. The blogosphere is a vast place, and there’s room for all of us in its endless ecosystem. Bob does his thing and I do mine.”
Drum went a step further, however, offering this observation (stealing the refrain from Campaign Desk’s favorite song): “I agree with Bob that the biggest problem with the national press isn’t really either liberal bias or conservative bias, but rather laziness, pack mentality, inability to resist spin (despite their cynical pose), and a willingness to compromise themselves in order to retain access. All of which means that the press is creating storylines this year with the same reckless abandon that they did in 2000. (Something that, ironically, was the very point of Green’s Atlantic article.)”
And to conclude today’s report, we stray off the campaign trail briefly to report on the power of prayer, courtesy of Amy Sullivan, who writes “some of these [items] are so priceless I couldn’t even make them up if I tried.” (We know the feeling.)
South Dakota Gov. Mike Rounds proclaimed a statewide day of prayer as part of a plan to cope with a springtime drought in the state. Apparently, writes Sullivan, South Dakotans are hot-wired to heaven, because it started raining on May 23, the day of prayer. “And it didn’t stop for fourteen days.”
As they say in politics and a few other places, be careful of what you wish for.
–Susan Q. Stranahan
Susan Q. Stranahan wrote for CJR.