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August 3, 2007
The Press Lives "Off" Politics, The Kossacks Live For ItNotes and comment from day one of YearlyKosChicago, Aug. 2: My favorite part of Yearly Kos last year was the instant and spontaneous standing ovation (with full throated yells) that went to Gina Cooper, who organized the whole event, sweating all the details that go onto bringing 1,000 people together for a weekend of Net politics. She got another O this year, perhaps less spontaneous but just as heartfelt, for bringing to Chicago 1,500 attendees, 200 experts and speakers (of which I am one) 120 volunteers, and the top five Democratic candidates: Clinton, Obama, Edwards, Richardson and Dodd, who will all appear at a candidates’ forum Saturday. Plus a sold out press gallery. While it may seem that Yearly Kos is a tribute to Markos Moulitsas, the founder of Daily Kos, and a celebration of his rise to power broker status, the crowd knows that it is Cooper and her volunteers who have the vision and do the work. And I don’t mean for a second that Kos is the CEO with the ideas and Cooper the efficient aide who carries out those ideas. Cooper is CEO of this event; Markos helps her out. The cool thing about it is the Markos knows this. Forces of resistance Howard Dean addressed the crowd last night, and he said something that showed why the top five candidates, the speaker of the House and the Senate majority leader came to Yearly Kos. He was talking about the importance of HR 881, the Voter Confidence and Increased Accessibility Act of 2007, which would require a paper trail for every voting machine. (It’s still being negotiated and may come to a floor vote this summer.) Dean told the Kossacks that we need all of you, “meaning yourself and every person who pays attention to you on the Net…” to make noise about the bill. And there you have it. Bloggers aggregate attention to politics. Therefore they get attention from politicians. The press lives off politics, these Kossacks live for it. And it’s this logic—not paying their respects to Boss Kos—that brought the candidates and Dean to Chicago. I found Dean’s appearance dense with cross-references, for he would never have become chairman of the Democratic Party if the beyond-the-beltway forces known as the Netroots had not demanded that the party choose someone who thinks differently— Kos included. This was apparent when Dean slyly said to the crowd that while the Internet was forcing politics to become more two-way, “there are forces of resistance even inside the Democratic party.” True. But those forces are a lot stronger within the Republican party, a story the national press is just waking up to. (Though Jose Antonio Vargas of the Washington Post has been keen on it: Online, GOP Is Playing Catch-Up; see also Zack Exley at OffTheBus and Vargas today on YearlyKos.) To me this is the vital subtext of the Chicago convention for watchers of the 08 campaign. Putting your ideas at risk As I was walking around the conference Thursday, ducking into panels and training sessions that started even before the official opening, I kept thinking about a famous passage from Christopher Lasch, the great social critic and historian who died in 1994— before the rise of the Web. In the Revolt of the Elites, he said we learn more from argument than from information, not because opinions are weighter than facts, but because to argue for your ideas (in public) puts those ideas at risk. And that is how we learn. Gina Cooper at her diary on Daily Kos: “While I support sending the same bill back to the President, I’m not a foreign policy expert and, so, I accept that I could be wrong.” Lasch in his book: If we insist on argument as the essence of education, we will defend democracy not as the most efficient but as the most educational form of government, one that extends the circle of debate as widely as possible and thus forces all citizens to articulate their views, to put their views at risk, and to cultivate the virtues of eloquence, clarity of thought and expression, and sound judgment… small communities are the classic locus of democracy— not because they are “self-contained,” however, but simply because they allow everyone to take part in public debates. Instead of dismissing direct democracy as irrelevant to modern conditions, we need to re-create it on a large scale. And then he wrote, “From this point of view the press serves as the equivalent of the town meeting.” But that was pre-Web, and too simple. Today we can see that it is not the press that “extends the circle of debate as widely as possible,” but its great disrupter, the read-write Web, along with read-write communities like Daily Kos, Open Left and Redstate.com. It is not the press (or the parties) but the open Web that allows every active user to take part in public debates. Information’s predicate Professional journalists think of argument as a derivative good made from news; information—new and accurate—is the thing of value, they say. Lasch thought they were wrong, and the Daily Kos community shows why he was right. For it is their passionate involvement with the arguments in national politics that causes the Kos people to seek out information, chew it over, or piece the story together themselves when the news media won’t do the job. Participation is information’s predicate. During the age of big media our journalists lost sight of that fact. It took the Web to make them face it again. The open platform approach of OffTheBus—I’m co-publisher with Arianna Huffington—says to contributors: participate in democratic politics by covering the campaign, and you can make the front page of Huffington Post. (Curious? Come to our meet-up at Yearly Kos: Friday, 2:30 in 106B of McCormick Place.) “I know you think we failed you.” Matt Bai, who writes about politics for the New York Times Magazine, is going to co-moderate the big candidates’ forum Saturday with Joan McCarter, a Daily Kos contributor known on the site as mcjoan. This pairing is itself unprecedented— a journalist from the one-way press and a diarist from the read-write Web quizzing the candidates with questions supplied by the Kos community. I was on a panel with Bai at last year’s convention, and there was a moment in it that I will never forget because it has not been repeated since. Bai, the only representative of the traditional press on the panel, was taking a bit of heat for the performance of his colleagues under Bush. (Almost all panels with bloggers and journalists on them become bloggers vs. journalists panels, even though we know that conflict is over.) At one point Bai, who was sitting at the far end of the table that sat six, turned to us and said, “Look, I know you think we failed you.” There was no “but.” Almost every political journalist will by now concede that the press failed in its duty during the run-up to the Iraq war. But what Bai said was different. We the press failed you, the people whom Bush actively misled. We failed by not stopping him. I have felt for some time that the press corps is making a gigantic error that will paid for in future fuck-ups by not apologizing more completely and searching its soul more carefully for the reasons why it collapsed under Bush— and thus failed the American people. They have let outside critics do the job. Matt Bai, who is younger than most of his colleagues at the Times, is not a part of that mistake. This, I think, is what landed him on the stage for Saturday’s forum. (Along with articles like like The Inside Agitator, about Dean at the DNC.) The seeds of that invitation were sown at last year’s panel. It also helps that he has a book coming out this month titled, ” Billionaires, Bloggers, and the Battle to Remake Democratic Politics.” Actually that’s the subtitle. The title is… The Argument
Posted by Jay Rosen at August 3, 2007 1:39 AM
Comments
It's not up to the press to start or stop anything. The only issue regarding Iraq in which the press could claim to be culpable is wrt WMD. Which, as all know but few mention, was only one of a number of reasons to go to war in Iraq. I do think, though, that if you beat yourself up sufficiently and publicly, you may think you have the public convinced it's the only error you have made or will make. Won't work Posted by: Richard Aubrey at August 3, 2007 11:54 PM | Permalink Richard is right, though not complete. Political journalism has collapsed in Bush's presidency precisely because the journalists thought it was their duty to stop Bush, instead of telling the truth. Matt Bai's apologizing to the Kossacks for not stopping Bush shows that he hasn't seen the real cause of the problem. The NYT is not a branch of the federal government, even if the staff think it is; its only claim on the public trust is its honesty and truthfulness. If the NYT abandons its honesty to bend US policy -- to stop Bush, for example -- it abandons the source of its authority, and soon ceases to be an authority. On another note, if the Kossacks do manage to pass a bill requiring an audit trail on paper for every federal election, they'll have accomplished one real service to the republic. Since the bill won't help Democrats get elected, it'll even count as an unselfish and public-spirited act ... Posted by: Michael Brazier at August 4, 2007 2:30 AM | Permalink Jay, I tried to capture your thoughts at the YearlyKos here, hopefully accurately: "News media like DailyKos were in our past. And, they will be our future." (Steve Boriss, The Future of News) Posted by: Steve Boriss at August 4, 2007 9:18 AM | Permalink "I have felt for some time that the press corps is making a gigantic error that will paid for in future fuck-ups by not apologizing more completely and searching its soul more carefully for the reasons why it collapsed under Bush— and thus failed the American people. They have let outside critics do the job." Amen, brother. The collapse was all but complete. Posted by: Steve Lovelady at August 4, 2007 11:27 AM | Permalink "Almost every political journalist will by now concede that the press failed in its duty during the run-up to the Iraq war...." This is why Lippman, as a realist, got it right and Dewey, as an idealist, got it wrong. The Lippman-Dewey debate, which began 85 years ago, was exactly about the "duty" of the press in our society. Lippman was correct in identifying the incentives for the quality and flow of information among the governed. I wish it would be more Deweyan, but I find little evidence for it. To argue that a system has collapsed from a point that never existed seems sentimentally naive. It's too bad there isn't more Carey in PressThink: We create, express, and convey our knowledge of and attitudes toward reality through the construction of a variety of symbol systems: art, science, journalism, religion, common sense, mythology. How do we do this? What are the differences between these forms? What are the historical and comparative variations in them? How do changes in communication technology influence what we can concretely create and apprehend? How do groups in society struggle over the definition of what is real? These are some of the questions, rather too simply put, that communication studies must answer. re: argument The State of the News Media 2007: Major Trends The Argument Culture is giving way to something new, the Answer Culture. Critics used to bemoan what author Michael Crichton once called the “Crossfire Syndrome,” the tendency of journalists to stage mock debates about issues on TV and in print. Such debates, critics lamented, tended to polarize, oversimplify and flatten issues to the point that Americans in the middle of the spectrum felt left out. That era of argument —R.W. Apple Jr. the gifted New York Times Reporter who died in 2006, called it “pie throwing” — appears to be evolving. The program “Crossfire” has been canceled. A growing pattern has news outlets, programs and journalists offering up solutions, crusades, certainty and the impression of putting all the blur of information in clear order for people. The tone may be just as extreme as before, but now the other side is not given equal play. In a sense, the debate in many venues is settled — at least for the host. This is something that was once more confined to talk radio, but it is spreading as it draws an audience elsewhere and in more nuanced ways. The most popular show in cable has shifted from the questions of Larry King to the answers of Bill O’Reilly. On CNN his rival Anderson Cooper becomes personally involved in stories. Lou Dobbs, also on CNN, rails against job exportation. Dateline goes after child predators. Even less controversial figures have causes: ABC weatherman Sam Campion champions green consumerism. The Answer Culture in journalism, which is part of the new branding, represents an appeal more idiosyncratic and less ideological than pure partisan journalism. I predict that the extremist tones will eventually cool off. People get tired of things pretty quickly these days. I see a lot of bloggers and commenters turning off to the ranters just as they are starting to do to the radio and television screed-mongers. As to whether journalists failed the American people, I have to say that they flat-out did. It was not just that they did not report the truth--or seem to dig for it--but they participated in the jingoism that prepped the public for war. I recall watching "The Today Show". They had already prepared a sexy intro to their show full of militaristic, patriotic music, and portentous graphics. Their first guest was a doubter (how'd that happen?) who called them on how they presented the case for war with this intro. He was never heard from again. They also agreed to the "imbedded" nonsense. Even the military's PR guy (see Control Room) wonders about the releases he's putting out that don't jibe with what he's seeing. Ferdy. The embed program was greeted tentatively by some in the legacy media. The problem was thought to be that the reporters might become too sympathetic to the US soldiers. Posted by: Richard Aubrey at August 8, 2007 9:51 PM | Permalink The Internet's Potential in the World of Ideas: Some links. "After Matter" section tracks the discussion that happens after posting. Current example: Time magazine's Washington bureau chief, Jay Carney, was criticized in my post: It’s our responsibility not to be labeled left or right is a case of a political journalist blurting out a deep truth about his profession. Carney and Tumulty really do define their responsibility this way: to avoid what would get them labeled Jay Carney replied to my post. "...I do think Rosen is twisting a simple comment into a pretzel in order to make it fit with an all-purpose critique of the MSM." Idea diffusion: The People Formerly Known as the Audience. The People Formerly Known as the Audience: Technorati search. Authority in blogging: Technorati authority: a comparison. USA Today's politics blog. And its Technorati ranking. Ubiquity in Google and Google ranking: NYU Journalism Department home page. Google search: links to NYU Department home page. (334 pages linking to department home page.) Google search: PressThink. (17,700 pages link to PressThink.) Embedding ideas into search: PressThink: Bill O'Reilly and the Paranoid Style in News. Google search: Bill O'Reilly paranoid style. Reference point for breaking news Eason Jordon resigns as president of CNN. Getting journalists to examine their practices: Kurtz column, Interviews, Going the Way of the Linotype? Arguing with journalists: An Exchange with Neil Lewis of the New York Times. Huffington Post version: "Something Quite Breathtaking" Widening the Circle of Journalism: Without a doubt, one of the best blogzines on the web, Jay. Well done. The subprime market collapse is just another step towards the inevitable collapse of the US dollar which many believe will be the trigger to create the Amero and North American Union. These are important matters that people should be aware of as it may change a lot of things as we see them today. www.amero.am is a knowledge and resource web site for you to read, vote and discuss these important matters. |
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