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February 28, 2007Convicted Egyptian Blogger Appeals Sentence
As noted in this morning's Technology Daily:
Attorneys on Monday appealed the sentencing of an Egyptian blogger who has been ordered to serve three years in prison for insulting Islam and Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak online.
AP reports that a court hearing has been scheduled for March 12 to review an appeal of the prison sentence of Abdel Kareem Nabil.
Egyptian government officials have defended his jailing, despite growing concern among human rights groups and the American government. "No one, no matter who he might be, has the right to interfere with Egyptian legal matters or comments on Egypt's decisions," Foreign Minister Ahmed Aboul Gheit said.
Among other things, Nabil, a former law student at the Al-Azhar University in Cairo, had said his school was "the university of terrorism."
Tech Daily also called attention to two editorials in the mainstream media in defense of Nabil's right to speak freely on his blog. Here are links to and excerpts from the editorials:
-- The Boston Globe: "[T]he heart of free speech must be the inviolate right to offend even the most powerful forces in a society. This is a truth too often forgotten -- not only by autocratic states but also in liberal democracies. Amer the blogger deserves to be defended by democrats everywhere. Astonishingly, Egypt is campaigning to be host of the United Nations Internet Governance Forum in 2009, and the world's democracies could start by opposing that bid."
-- The Washington Post: "As a political prisoner, [Nabil] will join Ayman Nour, who was sentenced a year ago on fabricated charges after he ran for president against Mr. Mubarak on a liberal democratic platform. As many as 800 members of the Muslim Brotherhood have also been jailed in the past year. This by a government that continues to be one of the largest recipients in the world of U.S. aid, collecting more than $2 billion a year."
Posted by Danny at 09:35 AM | Comments (0)
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In today's Politico, columnist Roger Simon offers this snapshot of political journalism in the information age:
Last week, I traveled from Washington, D.C., to Carson City, Nev., a distance of more than 2,600 miles, to watch a political debate on TV. ...The actual debate was going on live and in person someplace near me. Where, I am not sure, because we in the press don't bother to ask any more.
We don't care about seeing debates in real life. We care about electrical outlets and wireless connections for our laptops and a reasonable view of the TV monitor. Long ago, we gave up the battle of actually witnessing that which we write about.
And thus began the evolution to much of the "live-blogging" that exists today, where participants watch and comment on major events from the comfort of their homes or from blog parties like the one hosted by CNN on Election Night last year.
Posted by Danny at 09:13 AM | Comments (0)
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Google's Role As A Grassroots Tool
This article -- written by Heather Greenfield, one of our senior writers at Technology Daily -- is being reprinted with permission of National Journal magazine.
The story was published in Friday's edition and revisits the report about "Google bombs" that Heather broke for Tech Daily and MSNBC last fall. Numerous media outlets reported on the topic after Heather broke the news.
The magazine article leads with an account of how bloggers and others also are using Google AdWords to attack the political candidates they oppose.
Information Wars
by Heather Greenfield
In a Senate race that hinged on 9,329 votes, 315,508 people saw a Web page with a Google ad that read "Learn about George Allen. Did George Allen use racial slurs?" Nearly 1,000 people clicked on that link, which took them to a CBS News article about the Virginia incumbent's alleged racism.
The ad was targeted to computer users in Virginia, as well as the District of Columbia, Maryland, North Carolina, and West Virginia, in hopes of reaching Virginia voters at home or at work. Although it's impossible to gauge whether the small advertisement that popped up in response to Google searches on "George Allen" played a role in the defeat of the Republican senator from Virginia last November, liberal blogger Chris Bowers is delighted with his $326 ad buy.
"I certainly think the money we put into the search-engine-optimization campaign was well spent, and other campaigns would be wise to [copy] it," said Bowers, a regular contributor to MyDD, a popular liberal blog.
Campaign consultants who specialize in so-called new media were aware of the tactic's potential even before the 2006 mid-term elections. Asked to identify the most effective tool or strategy that a candidate could use in the final weeks of a campaign, both liberal and conservative consultants cited search-engine ads tied to key words or phrases.
Mark SooHoo, vice president of Campaign Solutions, an online strategy company serving conservatives, said that buying Google AdWords or the equivalent on Yahoo or MSN reaches voters ready to pay attention. Advertisers choose key words and create ads around them. When people search online for information on that topic, the ads appear to the right of the search results.
"It's a good, low-cost, low-barrier entry, easy-to-set-up way to get involved," SooHoo said. Candidates get name exposure free of charge, he said, and their campaigns pay only for the number of times their ads are clicked on.
Another appealing feature, SooHoo said, is that campaigns can limit their ad word spending in advance to $100, $1,000, or any other amount. "It just turns off when you're done," he explained.
Peter Leyden, director of the New Politics Institute, a think tank that publishes advice on new media for Democratic candidates, is equally enthusiastic about the effectiveness of ad words. "Very few politicians do buy those ads, so you can buy them very cheaply and be sure your site is seen," he said.
That Bowers spent just $326 to steer nearly 1,000 people to an article critical of Allen shows how inexpensive the tactic can be. The Allen race was one of about 50 that Bowers tried to influence using ad words. Total cost: $500. "We had something crazy, like 14 voter contacts [visits to pages containing his ads] for every cent we spent," Bowers said.
Bowers' efforts to influence the 2006 election went beyond purchasing Google AdWords. Using a technique known as Google-bombing, he also attempted to move certain news articles higher in the search results when computer users typed in the names of particular congressional candidates.
Bowers used MyDD to ask for readers' help in compiling negative mainstream news articles about 50 Republican congressional candidates. Next, MyDD posted a list pairing each of the targeted candidates with one negative article. Bowers then asked like-minded bloggers to create a link from their blogs to the chosen negative article for each candidate. (Conservative bloggers tried to counter Bowers's Google-bombing with a similar campaign that linked Democratic congressional candidates to negative articles.)
Search-engine operators object to efforts to manipulate search results, because they undermine the engine's credibility. But many businesses have tried for years to ensure that their Web site appears on the first screen of a relevant Google search. These companies pay consultants for what's known as search engine optimization; there's even a Search Engine Marketing Professional Organization.
SEMPO member Brian Easter, who is CEO of NeboWeb, helps companies raise their profiles in Google searches. But he says that only certain profile-boosting techniques are regarded as fair, or "white hat."
"Google-bombing is considered a 'black hat' search-engine-optimization practice," Easter said. "It's not considered one of the best practices, but a lot of people [use] that in short-term campaigns."
Easter said that one reason he would not recommend Google-bombing is that it can be traced and reported to the search engine's operator. And the bombardiers could find their company or client stricken from search results as punishment, he warned.
Easter added that in his line of work, "it is a lot easier to try to push a message forward on a search engine than to push something down."
The most famous case of successful political Google-bombing happened in late 2003. Washington state blogger George Johnston took credit for initiating a six-week campaign in which Internet pranksters successfully linked the term "miserable failure" to President Bush, so that Bush's official biography was the first result listed when anyone did a search on that phrase.
Once that connection was created, it survived until last month, when Google updated the formula it uses to produce search results. Now a Google search on "miserable failure" returns news articles about the infamous Google-bombing.
Blogger Tim Tagaris used the Web site GooglebombCT to launch a Google-bomb campaign against Sen. Joe Lieberman of Connecticut before last year's Democratic primary. And other bloggers tied the surname of then-Sen. Rick Santorum, R-Pa., to a scurrilous definition that gained the top spot on Google searches on "Santorum" weeks before the November election.
The MyDD Google-bombing campaign that began a little more than two weeks before the 2006 election was anything but the flop that some had predicted because of its late start.
When it was launched, only a few of its chosen articles ranked in the first 100 search results for any of the 50 targeted Republican congressional candidates. In less than a week, those articles appeared on the first page of the search results for 36 of the 50 candidates. In a report to fellow bloggers, MyDD's Lucas O'Connor called that achievement "mind-blowing."
According to Leyden, getting on the first page of search results is important because studies -- including one by the Pew Internet and American Life Project -- have found that most Internet users never reach the second page. And a more recent Pew study last September found that 26 million Americans, or 19 percent of the adult population, were using the Internet to get information on the upcoming midterm elections.
A Google-bombing campaign led by John Hawkins of Right Wing News tried to reach some of these potential voters by countering the MyDD-led attack. Right Wing News encouraged conservative bloggers to Google-bomb 45 Democratic congressional candidates about the same time that the liberal effort began. Less than a week later, conservatives reported that 35 of the 45 negative articles it was promoting were popping up within the first three pages of Google searches.
Google does not condone Google-bombing, but the company fears creating worse problems if it tries to block it. "Objectivity remains at the core of our mission, so we're reluctant to alter our results by hand in order to prevent items from showing up," said Google spokesman Ricardo Reyes.
The popularity of a given Web link plays a role in how high the link is listed in a search result. But, Reyes noted in an interview, other factors come into play, and a page connected to a mainstream news organization would rank higher than a blogger's.
Reyes said he is not convinced that the results reported by the bloggers mean that their Google-bombing succeeded in manipulating search-engine results because rankings change for many reasons. "We constantly update our search algorithms," he said. Reyes added that search engines will likely do more updates ahead of the 2008 election in an effort to keep search results objective.
In the meantime, a few bloggers are uneasy about Google-bombing, but O'Connor isn't among them. He insists that MyDD was performing a public service. "Fighting back is not inherently the same as fighting dirty," he said. "This is the system in which we've been forced to operate for the time being.
"If these legitimate and relevant issues were already being discussed in a press which was more concerned with facts than giving equal time to opposing opinions, this wouldn't be necessary, and I'd sit back and watch," O'Connor continued. "But reporting [by mainstream news organizations], by and large, is nothing more than he said/she said at this point. And that doesn't serve the public interest."
O'Connor is already strategizing for the 2008 election. He wants to release his next round of Google bombs earlier.
Posted by Danny at 09:24 AM | Comments (0)
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As noted in Technology Daily's AM Edition on Friday:
Political bloggers fear that campaign publicists acting as "sock puppets" will infiltrate their sites anonymously to post flattering comments about favored candidates, The Boston Globe reports.
When blogger Erick Erickson of RedState spotted articles supporting Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., he traced them to a Michigan political operative whose firm worked for McCain, a 2008 presidential candidate. Erickson and other political bloggers say they worry that public relations firms masquerading as grassroots citizens could plant favorable opinions of a candidate, much like businesses do now.
"This is going to happen more and more, and blogs are going to have to be vigilant," Erickson said. "I expect there will be commenters jumping in and trying to build negative campaigns to cause scandal for the other side. That's my fear."
Markos Moulitsas Zuniga, the founder of liberal blog Daily Kos, added that campaigns understandably promote their candidates and efforts." If they do it openly, it's well-accepted," he said. "If they use sock puppets, then it's a big deal."
On a side note, one blogger at RedState cited the Globe's differing descriptions of Daily Kos and RedState as further evidence of the media's liberal bias.
Posted by Danny at 09:15 AM | Comments (0)
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In The Blog's-Eye: Rep. Bachmann's Iraq Analysis
Rep. Michele Bachmann was the subject of ridicule by liberal bloggers a month ago when she was caught on film making a determined effort to get a hug from President Bush after the State of the Union address. Now she is in the blog's-eye again for her apparent suggestion, and subsequent clarification, that half of Iraq might be partioned to Iran and used as a Middle Eastern safe haven for terrorists.
Bachmann made the comments in an interview with the Minneapolis Star Tribune, which published excerpts at The Big Question, one of its blogs. "There's already an agreement made," she said. "They are going to get half of Iraq, and that is going to be a terrorist safe-haven zone where they can go ahead and bring about more terrorist attacks in the Middle East region and then to come against the United States because we are their avowed enemy.”
Liberal blogs pounced on the statement. Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo called Bachmann a "whackjob" and said, "Shi'a Iran is going to run Sunni western Iraq as a terrorist safe haven. And the new terror country's official name will be the Iraq State of Islam. Aren't the Shi'a Arabs in southern Iraq going to be a little bummed?"
Think Progress also called attention to Bachmann's comment in an effort to paint her as a conspiracy theorist -- and reminded readers of the Bush-hugging incident for good measure. And at least one Republican blog, Ankle Biting Pundits, was baffled by the incident.
"[C]an anyone possibly explain what she’s talking about?" Because this plan she speaks of sounds like a conspiracy theory straight out of moonbat central. Yet this is a Republican saying this. If ever clarification is called for, it’s now."
Bachmann did indeed offer that clarification, and both The Big Question and Think Progress noted it. "Bachmann is declining to be interviewed about her statement that an agreement was in place to divide Iraq and create an Iranian-controlled terrorist safe haven there," the Star Tribune's Eric Black wrote. "But she has issued a statement in which she says she's "sorry if my words have been misconstrued.'"
She said she was referring to "the idea that Iraq might be partitioned into three distinct entities -- Kurdish, Shiite and Sunni" -- and that the Shi'a of Iran might engulf the Shi'a area of Iraq either peacefully or by force.
Posted by Danny at 09:18 PM | Comments (0)
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Nevada Democrats Gamble With Fox News
The Democratic Party and Fox News -- you couldn't think of much stranger bedfellows. And that explains why Democratic bloggers are angry with the Nevada Democratic Party for picking Fox News Channel and Fox News Radio to host and broadcast a debate of Democratic presidential contenders in Reno, Nev., come August.
Here is a sampling of the outrage:
-- Americablog: "The entire audience will be stuck, momentarily, watching Fox's hacks spin the debate against every candidate. I think we can do better."
-- Daily Kos: "Any presidential candidate who does the debate will further validate the conservative machine's propaganda machine. At a time when Democrats should be doing everything to destroy the network's credibility, they are planning to do the opposite."
-- MyDD: "Fox News is a partisan Republican propaganda shop that hosts 'news anchors' that call Democrats traitors on a fairly regular basis. This is not a channel that deserves legitimacy. They will screw us."
The netroots are so irritated by the planned debate that they are pressuring Nevada Democrats to reverse course on it. BlogPAC, an initiative run by Chris Bowers and Matt Stoller of MyDD, has a petition online that lets readers e-mail several Nevada Democrats at once. At last count, 2,500 people had participated in the effort.
The petition poses an interesting alternative to broadcasting the debate on television: "just stream it on the Internet where progressive blogs can carry it."
The online activist group MoveOn also reportedly is planning a campaign to challenge the choice of Fox as the debate host. "I sure hope someone tfrom the state party is reading this," Reno and Its Discontents noted. You might want to brace yourself. The Moveon.org campaign makes more sense to me than the online petition because it will be paired with a media assault against Fox News’ status as a news agency."
Conservative blogger Michelle Malkin, a regular commentator at Fox, dismissed the outcry as "Fox News Derangement Syndrome."
Posted by Danny at 12:25 PM | Comments (1)
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As noted this morning in Technology Daily:
An Egyptian court has convicted a blogger of insulting both Islam and Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, Reuters reports. Abdel Karim Suleiman, a former law student in his early 20s, was sentenced to four years in jail over eight articles he wrote on his blog since 2004.
Suleiman was the first blogger to stand trial in Egypt for his Internet writings. He said the articles represented his own views.
"It's a dangerous precedent because it will impact the only free space available now, which is the Internet," a fellow blogger who attended the trial. "The charges were undefined and vague."
Technology Daily also cited another Reuters report that will be of interest to bloggers. Google announced that it will offer copy-protection technologies to try to prevent unauthorized video-sharing via YouTube and its other services.
Google CEO Eric Schmidt said offering the software to copyright holders so they can identify pirated videos uploaded by users is "one of the company's highest priorities." While Schmidt said he does not have a timeframe for completing the technology, he said the tool would be used to cover all of Google's services.
Posted by Danny at 09:58 AM | Comments (0)
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So says Katha Pollitt of The Nation in a blog post at TPMCafe that reacts to the first blog scandal of the 2008 campaign:
Politicians use any angle they can against their opponents. Bloggers write hundreds of thousands of words off the top of their head. Put those two facts together, and it's obvious that your words will be held against you.
Posted by Danny at 09:32 AM | Comments (0)
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Netroots Enemy No. 1: Rep. Ellen Tauscher
A month ago, Beltway Blogroll cited the Contra Costa Times in California in reporting that liberal bloggers have a new favorite target in moderate Democrat Ellen Tauscher.
Today, The Washington Post finally got the memo from the West Coast and featured the threat to Tauscher as the lead in a front-page piece. Here are some excerpts:
Democratic leaders want their activists to focus on beating Republicans. But the grassroots and netroots believe the political tide is shifting their way, and they can provide the money, ground troops and buzz to challenge Democratic incumbents they don't like. ... "Absolutely, we could take her out," said Markos Moulitsas Zuniga -- better known as Kos -- the Bay area blogger behind the influential Daily Kos site. ...Tauscher's Web site no longer features photos of her with Bush or Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman (Conn.), who lost a Democratic primary of his own last year but won reelection as an independent.
Those photos survived in Google's cache; bloggers have dubbed one shot that appears to show Bush's hand on Tauscher's thigh "The Caress," an allusion to "The Kiss" -- video and photos showing Bush embracing Lieberman after the 2005 State of the Union address -- which dogged the senator in his fight against insurgent Ned Lamont. Tauscher donated and has helped raise a total of $2 million for Democrats over the past decade, and since 2003 she has voted with her party more than 90 percent of the time. This year, she has marched in lock step with Pelosi. But to netroots sites such as Daily Kos, Firedoglake, and Crooks and Liars, she's Lieberman in a pantsuit. ...
"It's not just about her voting record," said Bob Brigham of San Francisco, an activist who recently started the Ellen Tauscher Weekly.
The latest blog wars began simmering in December after Tauscher led a New Democrat delegation to meet with Bush about bipartisan cooperation, irritating the netroots. They boiled after her former chief of staff, Katie Merrill, posted a scathing piece on a California Web site attacking the netroots for attacking Tauscher. ...
Brigham says it's never wise to tell the netroots not to do something: "That's the worst move you can possibly make."
My guess is that the blogosphere will be buzzing with reaction to the story today. I'll keep an eye out and pull together links and commentary here.
UPDATE: Extreme Mortman offers a little "blogging perspective" to the "bravado" of Kos by pointing readers to Post column about an Egyptian blogger who is in jail and awaiting a potential death sentence for sharing his opinions. "What’s happening in Egypt seems a bit more compelling and critical for our blogging attention than the ability to influence a congressional district election here at home," Howard Mortman wrote.
Posted by Danny at 10:11 AM | Comments (1)
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As noted this morning in Technology Daily:
The Electronic Frontier Foundation has sued a military unit to learn more about its practices in regularly reviewing hundreds of Web sites, including blogs written by troops.
The Washington Times reports that the foundation particularly wants to know if the military may be censoring the opinions of soldiers.
The unit monitors the Web sites to make sure that sensitive information is not being outed online, but the "surveillance" of troops' blogs raises questions about what topics troops may address. While the Army unit in question is not able to delete sites, it can notify commanders of the content.
Posted by Danny at 09:27 AM | Comments (0)
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Blog Bits
It looks like I've been missing out on a good local blog story near my home in Manassas, Va.
Via Instapundit, I just learned that a blogger who goes by the name Black Velvet Bruce Li has found himself in a legal tussle with city officials in Manassas Park, Va., because of his coverage of a raid on a business there about a year ago. For more information on the story, visit special archive pages of both Black Velvet Bruce Li and The Agitator.
Radley Balko of The Agitator also said this at the Hit & Run blog of Reason magazine, where Balko works: "The behavior of city officials in this case is really infuriating, though not terribly surprising. After spending hundreds of thousands of taxpayer dollars in a relentless effort to shut down [a] business, they're now spending yet more taxpayer dollars to threaten a blogger for daring to tell anyone about it."
At the federal level, publications all across the country are dutifully reporting the early trend story of the 2008 presidential campaign: the impact of emerging online technologies.
I was quoted in a Washington Post story over the weekend about young voters using social networks like Facebook to get active in the political arena, and the Kansas City Star quoted me earlier this month in a piece about online political video.
The Washington bureau of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch also had a broader weekend story about politics and technology, and today The Mercury News in San Jose, Calif., published a piece by MediaNews' Washington bureau.
Other coverage has appeared in Computerworld, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and even Voice of America.
Ed Cone also opined on "the Internet effect" in politics in a column for the Greensboro News & Record. Syndicated columnist E.J. Dionne examined whether the Internet edge of Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., could help him compete presidentially despite the money edge of Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, D-N.Y.
And the campaign of Democrat John Edwards took more verbal beatings over the weekend for its brief but embarrassing involvement with two sharp-tongued bloggers. The criticisms included an over-the-top comparison of the Edwards bloggers to white supremacist David Duke.
At e.politics, meanwhile, Colin Delany noted that "the real change has been the emergence of sites that are focusing specifically (and often solely) on how candidates are using the Internet." He specifically mentioned three newcomers in recent weeks: Blog the Campaign in '08, PrezVid and techPresident.
I'm also collecting online audio and video by and about the presidential campaigns at my side venture, AirCongress.
Here are some other recent blog bits:
-- Clinton's campaign launched her blog. TalkLeft noted the development. Two other new blogs worth noting: the new blog of Rep. J. Gresham Barrett; ICANN Blog, the new online forum of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers; and Campaign Matters, a 2008 blog by The Nation.
-- Amanda Marcotte is getting her 15 minutes of fame and then some after resigning from the Edwards campaign. Today she was a guest (along with the other controversial former Edwards blogger, Melissa McEwan) on the BlogTalkRadio show of HeadingLeft. Marcotte also is a guest blogger at TPMCafe all week. And on Friday, she penned an entry at The Huffington Post in addition to her story at Salon.com.
-- In the wake of the Edwards blog scandal, Matt Stoller of MyDD pondered the role of the campaign blogger as someone who has served in that capacity before. One nugget from his post: "Presidential campaigns especially, but any campaign really, are not the place for personal expression. They are not the place to be free of constraints. They are a place where you move carefully, ethically and deliberately to channel information to benefit your candidate, and ideally, keep yourself out of the picture. In that vein, being a campaign blogger is not so different than being any other member of staff."
-- The military is monitoring the content on blogs kept by soldiers, and the Electronic Frontier Foundation has sued to get details about the practice for fear that it could infringe upon constitutional rights to free speech.
-- "Network neutrality" for high-speed Internet content was a hot topic in Congress and on the blogosphere last year. Now the action appears to be moving to the states, and Stoller is following it for MyDD. (UPDATE, 2/20: The Washington Post reported that bloggers and other Internet activists are working to make net neutrality an issue for the 2008 presidential campaign.)
-- Bloggers, politicians and political insiders recently attended the "Rocky Mountain Roots Camp" in Colorado for a primer in online politics and to make connections with fellow travelers in that sphere.
-- Michael Maglio, a city council candidate in Claremont, Calif., shocked more traditional politicians in his city by taking his local campaign to YouTube.
-- The Colorado Confidential blog will receive a "Mark of Excellence" award from the Colorado Society of Professional Journalists. I second this thought from one of Colorado Confidential's contributors: "One way I think traditional media can promote higher standards is to recognize not only that the world of blogs is full of people who want better products from media outlets and who give instant feedback on how to improve, but also that some of the people writing blogs or commenting on news stories online have great expertise in certain subject matter areas. Accessing this expertise can help improve the product."
-- Buried under debt? Tried telling the world about it on your blog as an incentive to get fiscally responsible. The idea is working for some debt bloggers.
Posted by Danny at 09:15 AM | Comments (0)
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The 'Angry, Adolescent Glory' Of Liberal Blogs
Dan Gerstein was despised by leading liberal bloggers last year when he served as a communications director for the re-election campaign of Sen. Joseph Lieberman, D-Conn.
Gerstein got his revenge today with an anti-netroots screed in political Washington's newest publication, The Politico. The basis of his argument was the netroots reaction to the first blog scandal of Campaign 2008 -- the hiring and eventual resignation of two bloggers by Democratic candidate John Edwards.
Here's an excerpt of Gerstein's column:
Throughout the course of the controversy, the left’s bigger digital diatribers never stopped to address the substance of what the Edwards bloggers actually wrote before joining the campaign. Had the bloggers done so, they might have found the postings were widely deemed by Democrats and Republicans alike as bigoted and patently offensive to many Christians, not just devout Catholics or evangelicals.Nor did they ever stop to think how hollow and hypocritical it sounded for the same people who ravaged George Allen, for his "macaca" moment in last year's Virginia Senate campaign to cry "free speech" when confronted with a far more nasty, vulgar, and hurtful display of prejudice from two of their own.
Instead, right until the bitter end, most liberal bloggers responded in their familiar mode -- by lashing out at their critics and trying to marginalize them. This was, in their eyes, purely a manufactured controversy by the "right-wing smear machine" and a cynical attempt to silence and marginalize the netroots.
I haven't seen any significant reaction to the piece yet and what's out there has been rather restrained for bloggers. That tells me one of two things: 1) Gerstein is irrelevant and not worth liberal bloggers' time now that he's not working for Lieberman; or 2) not many of them are reading The Politico.
At his Dangerous Thoughts blog, Gerstein had more to say about his own column than his critics, including his prediction that bloggers would prove his thesis by further attacking him.
"Hard as this may be for my critics in the netroots to believe, I want this incredibly powerful medium to reach its potential as a democratizing and empowering force in our politics," Gerstein wrote. "But for that to happen, it has to grow up and shake off its growing reputation as an online 'Lord of the Flies' theme park. In that respect, my column was another attempt to hold up a mirror to the madness."
DotCommonweal seconded Gerstein's point and said "it's time for establishment Democrats to re-evaluate their relationship with Kos and company. ... There is certainly something exciting about what the Internet, especially blogs, can offer political discourse. But the notion that well-mannered commentary is antithetical to the nature of the blogosphere, especially when it's an uncomfortable fit for bloggers, if allowed to guide the lefty netroots, may go a long way to ensuring their obsolescence in the years to come."
Posted by Danny at 09:17 PM | Comments (2)
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Bloggers are starting to react to yesterday's accusation, quickly followed by a retraction, that the new blog of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi was guilty of copyright infringement by posting excerpts of floor debate from C-Span.
Some conservative blogs, like Capital Briefs and GOP Bloggers, were quick to jump on the accusation part of the story when the Republican Study Committee issue a press release with the accusation in it. Unfortunately, nearly 24 hours later, those blogs still have do not appear to have told their readers about the retraction issued by the RSC.
Two prominent liberal blogs, Daily Kos and MyDD, blamed C-Span for the controversy and said Congress needs to make sure the nonprofit doesn't own the copyright to official congressional video.
"Video access to the house is a major innovation in democracy," MyDD's Matt Stoller wrote. "Being able to remix and use that video in public speech on the internet is becoming increasingly critical to our democracy." And Markos Moulitsas Zuniga of Daily Kos urged Pelosi to do something to combat "the ridiculous notion that our government's proceedings can't be spread far and wide without running afoul of copyright laws."
Wizbang said the dispute over the footage posted on Pelosi's blog could have a long-term, positive impact for the blogosphere as a whole: "I'm of the opinion that the content that C-Span has aggressively worked to protect over the years really should be available to the public, and this may ultimately help the next blogger who gets a take-down notice from C-SPAN's lawyers. The real question in this case is would C-SPAN be so generous if if wasn't the Speaker's office posting the videos?"
As for Pelosi's blog, Republican new media strategist David All is impressed with what he has seen so far. "Unfortunately for House Republicans, it’s a pretty darn good blog, chock-full of interesting YouTube clips and her message."
Here are more blog bits for your reading pleasure:
-- Jerome Armstrong of MyDD is working with Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., to hire an eight-member Internet team for Kerry's Set A Deadline project to get U.S. troops out of Iraq. Politics and Technology also gave Kerry kudos for running the first Flash advertisement with Blogads in order to promote Set A Deadline. And Kerry was a guest of Heading Left at BlogTalkRadio this week to discuss the project.
-- Sen. Jim DeMint, R-S.C., was a guest blogger at The Victory Caucus, a new site that says its mission is to "deliver the perspectives and news on the war effort [that] the mainstream media neglects to help the American public understand the nature of our conflict and its true progress."
-- Rob Bluey of the Heritage Foundation, who now blogs at RedState, and MyDD's Stoller talked about their partnership in the Open House Project, which plans to make recommendations to the House on making its work more transparent to Americans. The project is backed by the Sunlight Foundation, which also is spearheading a citizen journalism project to analyze the transparency of congressional Web sites.
-- Democrat John Edwards is the first presidential candidate with an unofficial presence in the virtual world known as Second Life, according to techPresident. David All sees it as a second chance for Edwards to make a good impression online after the bad press generated by the first blog scandal of Campaign 2008.
-- From Blog P.I.: "Thanks to the Internet, and with the explosion of blogging especially, all of a sudden we political types have an easier time spreading around our dirt. In the past, we used to have to play by the rules of the old media: space limitations, kissing reporter’s butts and packaging the story just right. Now, and especially for big campaigns, all you have to do is leak it to a blogger."
-- Colin Delany of e.politics recapped the advice of online video experts who spoke at an Internet Advocacy Roundtable event. The discussion included several tips for making effective online political videos.
-- Joan McCarter of Daily Kos shared her thoughts about the blogging roundtable in Kansas that featured her and four other high-profile bloggers. One of her insights: "[T]he right blogosphere is dominated by professional political types -- many had already been media figures or relatively prominent GOP politicos before starting in on the blogging. In contrast, the majority of prominent left-wing bloggers came to it from outside of the political system."
-- The Washington Post profiled conservative blogger Michelle Malkin. Duncan Black of Eschaton clarified his criticism of Malkin as recounted by the Post's Howard Kurtz. Ed Morrissey of Captain's Quarters said Kurtz fairly captured Malkin's online persona.
-- On the local political blog scene, Greensboro City Manager Mitch Johnson complained about bloggers discussing allegations of impropriety in his office without contacting him for comment. As a result, Johnson now has agreed to meet with some of the city's bloggers. (Hat tip to Ed Cone.)
-- From The Washington Note: "[T]he issue of online expression in politically repressed environments interests me. Blogging seems to have a different vitality in an Iran or Afghanistan than it does in Japan, Canada or the U.S."
Posted by Danny at 12:32 PM | Comments (0)
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As noted in Technology Daily this morning:
Two researchers at the University of Maryland have proposed that the federal and state governments use Internet-based communities built around blogs, social networks and collaborative "wikis" to aid disaster relief, Nature.com reports.
Jennifer Preece and Ben Schneiderman outlined their proposal, which they have dubbed 911.gov, in a policy paper that was published Thursday in the journal Science. The researchers said that online reporting and networking by citizens is not available at the Homeland Security Department's information network or the Web site citizenscorps.gov.
Web communities have had prompt responses to natural disasters before. Just hours after the Indian Ocean tsunami in 2004, the volunteer South-East Asia Earthquake and Tsunami Blog was created. Google also mapped the flooding of Hurricane Katrina in 2005.
Posted by Danny at 11:51 AM | Comments (1)
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Amanda Marcotte, who quit as the "blogmaster" of the John Edwards presidential campaign this week, has published her first-person account of the first blog scandal of Campaign 2008 at Salon.com.
Here's what she took away from the experience:
Blogs are popular because they provide space for everyday citizens to engage in politics, in the language and manner that is comfortable for us, if not for the establishment. To my mind, however, it would be a terrible thing if bloggers did heed the advice to mind our manners and ape our betters if we want in, since this is supposed to be a democratic system that respects the right of everyday, common people to participate in politics.While there's a chance that the crusade to separate McEwan and me from the Edwards campaign was just a singular happening, the possibility lingers that this was just the first sign that the established media and political circles will not be letting the blog-writing rabble into the circle without a fight.
A Salon writer also published an article that seeks to answer this question: "Can liberal bloggers be both partisan kingmakers and independent journalists?" The writer defended Salon's earlier report that Marcotte and another Edwards blogger, Melissa McEwan, had been fired before being rehired -- all of which happened before both quit.
[A]s Salon reported the rumors of the firing, we noticed something disturbing: Instead of the blogosphere joining the search for truth, we encountered a decision to close ranks. The bloggers had never been fired; Salon was wrong; everyone move along, there's nothing to see here; please return to your stations. It started to look as though protecting the Democrats, the Edwards campaign and the role of bloggers in the new political firmament -- or some combination of all three -- was much more important.... When Edwards announced he was "keeping" the bloggers, the lefty blogosphere declared victory. ... But a few days later, Marcotte and McEwan resigned.
Maybe I'm the one who's naive, but the whole episode made me wonder: What does it mean if liberal bloggers aren't warriors for the truth, but rather for candidates? What does it mean for media, and what does it mean for politics? Why did either John Edwards or Amanda Marcotte enter their relationship so seemingly unready for what was likely to happen (assuming anyone in the Edwards camp had read Pandagon)? Either Marcotte would blunt her commentary, and lose the constituency Edwards was attempting to court, or else she'd alienate a whole lot of other people, and Edwards would spend the whole campaign defending her.
Posted by Danny at 07:16 AM | Comments (0)
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CapitolLink: Pelosi The Pirate?
Yesterday's news: House Speaker Nancy Pelosi launched a blog. Today's news: The House Republican Study Committee is accusing the California Democrat of illegally pilfering video content from C-Span and using it on that blog for partisan purposes.
"Though we applaud the Speaker's effort to adapt to new technology," the RSC said in a release, "the blog violated copyright and trademark law on the very first day. As of noon today, the Speaker had posted at least 16 videos that are copyrighted C-Span material from the House floor. The RSC spoke with C-Span today, [which] confirmed that these videos violate C-Span copyright/trademark of the House proceedings."
The release also said the video is being used in a partisan way because Pelosi's blog only "shows Democrat after Democrat offering their views of the non-binding Democrat resolution on the reinforcement and realignment of American troops in Iraq."
Calls to Pelosi's office and to C-Span have not yet been returned.
UPDATE: Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit said the RSC's charge sounds "bogus." "[T]he floor coverage is called public domain by C-Span itself," he wrote. "And even if this charge is somehow true, as I doubt, this is awfully small potatoes. If this is the most the RSC can find to complain about, then Pelosi must be doing a pretty good job."
Brendan Daly a spokesman for Pelosi's office also called the RSC accusation bogus and noted that the group has now retracted the statement after hearing from another official at C-Span. "They're 0-for-2 now," Daly said of Republicans who last week complained about Pelosi's access to military aircraft for travel between her San Francisco district and Washington. "The plane story was completely bogus and this is, too."
Daly added via e-mail: "Our legal counsel and C-Span’s legal counsel have each independently determined that C-Span video posted on the Speaker's blog is in the public domain and does not violate copyright law."
The RSC's retraction blamed the controversy on conflicting statements from C-Span. The committee first contacted Barry Katz, the manager of C-Span video assets, which the RSC said was "the employee identified as being directly responsible for answering questions to Congress about the use of C-Span material."
Bruce Collins, the corporate vice president and general counsel of C-Span, later called the RSC to say the information provided by the C-Span employee to the RSC was incorrect. "Given this contradictory information," a release said, "the RSC wanted to be the first set the record straight and withdraw the information included in the release."
UPDATE: Andrew Noyes, one of our senior writers at National Journal's Technology Daily, also covered the story at our blog, Tech Daily Dose. His story includes a response from a C-Span spokeswoman and commentary from observers on the complicated nature of intellectual property law.
Posted by Danny at 11:05 PM | Comments (7)
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Where do district attorneys go when they want to talk justice outside the courtroom? One answer: the new Talking Justice blog community built as an offshoot of Justice Talking radio program at National Public Radio.
The National District Attorneys Association today announced in a press release that it has joined some of the nation’s leading legal analysts and commentators at the blog, which went online at the beginning of February. Robert McCulloch, a prosecuting attorney in St.Louis County, Mo., and former NDAA president, discussed the role of prosecutors in the group's first post.
Talking Justice also features commentary from groups like the American Association for Justice, American Constitution Society for Law and Policy, American Tort Reform Association, National Law Journal, National Senior Citizens Law Center, Reason Foundation and SCOTUSblog.
Posted by Danny at 08:09 PM | Comments (0)
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Odds are good that not many folks outside the Beltway know that Rep. Duncan Hunter, a California Republican, is running for president. But John Hawkins of Right Wing News will be doing his part to change that.
Hawkins announced today that he recently joined the team at TCV Media, an Internet and branding firm, in order "to be their point person in building up buzz for Duncan Hunter online."
"I agreed to work a maximum of three months for the campaign. ... Additionally, while I am working on the campaign, I'm not planning to blog about any of the 2008 Republican contenders on [Right Wing News] unless a story too big to ignore hits the wires," Hawkins wrote. "That's because I don't want to come across like a shill for Duncan if I eviscerate one of his opponents or talk him up."
His announcement comes during a week when two bloggers resigned from the campaign of Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards amid controversy over their writings before joining the campaign.
Posted by Danny at 03:15 PM | Comments (0)
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Texas Shield Law Wouldn't Cover Bloggers
The Texas legislature is revisiting the issue of how to protect anonymous journalistic sources, but the current bill would not protect bloggers as one proposed in 2005 would have done.
The San Antonio Express-News reports that the measure aims to make whistleblowers in government and private industry feel comfortable talking to the media without fear of their identities becoming known -- but blogs would not fit into the definition of media.
Democrat Aaron Pena, one of the sponsors of the House version of the bill, said similar legislation died in the Senate in 2005, and if it is going to pass this time, it will not cover most bloggers.
Posted by Danny at 10:41 PM | Comments (0)
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Some of the nation's top political bloggers gathered in the heartland of Kansas yesterday for a discussion about the political impact of their favorite medium.
The bloggers were Jerome Armstrong of MyDD, Erick Erickson of RedState, Patrick Hynes of Ankle Biting Pundits, Scott Johnson of Power Line and Joan McCarter of Daily Kos. David Perlmutter, an associate dean at the University of Kansas journalism school and the author of the book "Blogwars: The New Political Battleground," moderated the talk.
Armstrong said one point of agreement among the bloggers is that blogging by presidential campaigns will not be a factor in 2008. "There is an expectation of blogger outreach and interacting with the existing blog communities," he wrote at MyDD after the event, "but a campaign is just not going to be able to compete with community blogs that have been longer standing and represent a more authentic interaction. ... I just don't see interesting blogging happening from within a campaign, and certainly that's the lesson from the Edwards bloggers debacle."
At least one blogger who attended was not impressed with the "narcissistic" experts and their take on the signficance of political blogs. "They talked endlessly about how blogging is so very, very different from the mainstream media," the blogger wrote. "They talked endlessly about how blogging is changing politics in America. Um, rich white people control the mainstream media. They also control the blogosphere. Rich, white men have always dominated politics.
"What's changing? Any illusion that the average American is getting a voice through the blogosphere is a complete and total invention in their mind."
Posted by Danny at 10:01 PM | Comments (0)
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The office of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has a new blog called The Gavel. The first entry dates back to Feb. 6, but the site did not officially launch until today.
Pelosi, D-Calif., explained the purpose of the blog in a video, noting that it launched just in time for this week's debate about whether to send more U.S. troops to Iraq. The Gavel will provide an unprecedented forum, in real time, about how the people's house is conducting the people's business," she said, noting that Democrats "are restoring long overdue oversight, accountability and transparency to our government."
Here's the video:
Although Pelosi has blogging experience as a guest at group blogs like The Huffington Post, her staff is generating the content at The Gavel. The bloggers include Jesse Lee, who used to blog at The Stakeholder, the blog of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee.
Another House Democrat, Hank Johnson of Georgia, also unveiled a blog this week. He appears to be posting the entries himself. "Readers should anticipate legislative announcements, video entries, posts from the floor of the House, and participation in the blogosphere's larger conversation," according to a press release.
On the lobbying front, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce has a new blogged called Fight The Fakes that is dedicated to discussing the economic effects of counterfeiting and piracy.
The blog will include updates about counterfeiting and piracy stories, developments about seizures and prosecutions, and other news. It also will feature guest writers and podcasts from industry, the Coalition Against Counterfeiting and Piracy, intellectual property experts, and chamber staff as they travel to problem countries like Brazil, China, India and Russia.
Posted by Danny at 05:26 PM | Comments (0)
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Edwards Bloggers: And Then There Were None
Yesterday, blogger Amanda Marcotte of Pandagon shocked the political blogosphere with her resignation from the presidential campaign of Democrat John Edwards just days after Edward had stood by her and resisted pressure to fire her. Today, Melissa McEwan of Shakespeare's Sister, quickly followed Marcotte out the revolving netroots door at the Edwards campaign.
Like Marcotte, McEwan blamed her abrupt departure on "sustained ideological attacks" and on people " who used public criticisms of me as an excuse to unleash frightening ugliness, the likes of which anyone with a modicum of respect for responsible discourse would denounce without hesitation." Here's more from her statement:
I would like to make very clear that the campaign did not push me out, nor was my resignation the back-end of some arrangement made last week. This was a decision I made, with the campaign's reluctant support, because my remaining the focus of sustained ideological attacks was inevitably making me a liability to the campaign, and making me increasingly uncomfortable with my and my family's level of exposure.I understand that there will be progressive bloggers who feel I am making the wrong decision, and I offer my sincerest apologies to them. ... There will be some who clamor to claim victory for my resignation, but I caution them that in doing so, they are tacitly accepting responsibility for those who have deluged my blog and my inbox with vitriol and veiled threats. ... This is a win for no one.
So the two bloggers who for the past week have generated more headlines than the candidate who hired them are now gone.
My headline may be a bit misleading, though. William Beutler of Blog P.I. notes that at least one other blogger is still on the Edwards campaign: Matt Gross, Edwards' "senior adviser for online communications/chief Internet strategist/general adviser on all things bloggy." But Beutler wonders whether Gross, who ostensibly had a role in hiring Marcotte and McEwan, might be the next to go.
UPDATE: Now for the roundup of reactions from the blogosphere:
-- Chris Bowers of MyDD: "I think someone, maybe BlogPac, should produce some sort of guide for independent bloggers with no experience working on statewide or presidential campaigns both what they should expect and what they should demand when they are first hired. Clearly, this wasn't something that Amanda and Melissa wanted to do. Then again, this entire experience might make such a guide moot, considering how much publicity this received online."
-- Confederate Yankee: McEwan "exhibited more class and dignity than Marcotte, even as I find it somewhat ironic that someone who calls my fellow Christians "christofascists" accuses others of unleashing "frightening ugliness, the likes of which anyone with a modicum of respect for responsible discourse would denounce without hesitation."
Posted by Danny at 08:05 PM | Comments (23)
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From Jim Geraghty of The Hillary Spot, reacting to the news that Pandagon blogger Amanda Marcotte resigned from the campaign of Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards:
Presuming it was a genuine resignation ... if you're a Democratic candidate, don't the netroots look like heavily shaken nitroglycerin right about now? Think about it, you embrace them, they embarrass you by alienating a demographic you're courting; you consider firing them, they raise hell and promise campaigns of vengeance; you stand by them, take the hit ... and then they quit on you, and everybody thinks you fired them anyway. With scenarios like this floating around, how in the world is embracing the blogs worth the trouble?
Geraghty, a former colleague of mine at one of the many Internet firms that folded in 2000, also highlighted some of Marcotte's comments in the announcement of her resignation, as well as another recent Pandagon post that could be interpreted as anti-Catholic. All of which prompted Geraghty to wonder, "Did this turn into a lose-lose for Edwards?"
Blue Mass Group, meanwhile, said the lesson isn't that the netroots are toxic for campaigns but that bloggers who go to work for campaigns need to forget about blogging independently once they do. "If you're blogging for a candidate," David Kravitz wrote, "there's nothing you can say on your own blog that is anything but a liability for your candidate, so you're just hurting the person you presumably want to win."
Not long before the job, Marcotte sounded like she held a similar view. But when I asked her why she continued blogging at Pandagon after joining the Edwards campaign, she seemed to change that stance.
Here are other reactions to the latest development in the first blog scandal of Campaign 2008:
-- The Agonist: "Edwards looks weak as a result of this. He was forced to back down. ... The Edwards campaign will be seen to have buckled under to pressure in this case and therefore Edwards looks weak. Period. This will also make it much harder for bloggers moving to campaigns or other high-profile positions in the future [because] a precedent has been set."
-- Ann Althouse: "The big picture is that the Democratic candidates have to interact with and please or at least appease the raging force that is the left blogosphere. No one has yet shown that they know how to do that well. ... [T]he Democratic candidates are afraid of the lefty bloggers. I don't think the Republican candidates are afraid of the righty bloggers. Think that's a problem?"
-- Chris Bowers of MyDD: "Overall, I can't help but think that all of [the netroots] work [in defending Marcotte] has gone for naught, and nothing will change for the better the next time this happens. And now the progressive blogosphere will look really bad, mostly for encouraging people involved in politics to act like normal humans."
-- The Fix: "The lesson here is that message control in the new media landscape is difficult, if not impossible, to achieve."
-- Ezra Klein: "Why was the Edwards campaign letting her blog privately? And I don't just mean in the aftermath to her being almost fired, I mean at all. From top to bottom, this has been a study in online incompetence from that campaign. ... A campaign that can hardly limp through the hiring of a blogger is not prepared for the rigors of the race."
There are plenty more links at Memeorandum to commentary that goes beyond the political angle to the story, if you want to explore those as well.
Posted by Danny at 01:00 PM | Comments (0)
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Edwards' Campaign Blogger Resigns
Amanda Marcotte has resigned as the blogger for the presidential campaign of Democrat John Edwards. She blamed her decision on Bill Donohue, the president of the Catholic League who last week demanded that Edwards fire her for anti-Catholic statements at the blog Pandagon.
Marcotte announced her resignation there. Here is an excerpt:
[The campaign by Donohue] was creating a situation where I felt that every time I coughed, I was risking the Edwards campaign. No matter what you think about the campaign, I signed on to be a supporter and a tireless employee for them, and if I can’t do the job I was hired to do because Bill Donohue doesn’t have anything better to do with his time than harass me, then I won’t do it. I resigned my position today and they accepted.
Unencumbered by her work for Edwards, she vowed to strike back. "The main good news," Marcotte wrote, "is that I don’t have a conflict of interest issue anymore that was preventing me from defending myself against these baseless accusations. So it’s on."
UPDATE: Here's a telling insight from Matt Stoller of MyDD about what it means for bloggers to work on campaigns (and he should know because he did a blogging stint for now-New Jersey Gov. Jon Corzine, D-N.J., in 2005):
Amanda feels encumbered by the campaign and unable to effectively defend herself from the right-wing. As such, it's the correct decision to make because a presidential campaign is the wrong place to be if you want to hit back at the right on your own behalf. Aspiring bloggers for campaigns should take note of the restrictions placed on your freedom when you go to work for a campaign. The personal cost can be quite high.
Michelle Malkin and Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit, meanwhile, are compiling links in reaction to Marcotte's resignation.
Posted by Danny at 10:14 PM | Comments (25)
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Extreme Mortman was shocked -- shocked! -- to see Washington Post columnist David Broder use the adjective "deranged" before the innocent-sounding noun "blogger."
But after this week's hullabaloo over the bloggers working for the presidential campaign of Democrat John Edwards, I'm willing to bet that a whole lot more people will make that ill-informed connection -- to bloggers on both the left and the right.
That's one sad reality that Republican new media consultant David All predicted as he pondered the lessons to be learned from the Edwards campaign's blog scandal. "[T]he damage left by stories, or controversies like this, hurt the entire ’sphere and those of us who work in it as a profession. They simply send new ripples of fear through an already scared and unknowing politician or company that some of us are trying to escort to the modern world."
The whole controversy made Jeff Jarvis of BuzzMachine wonder whether campaigns and conversation are incompatible.
The reputation of the blogosphere may be hurt by such scandals, but what about the candidates? Does their standing suffer when the bloggers affiliated with them get caught in a swarm? Not at all, says Chris Bowers of MyDD. He cited as evidence the support that Edwards won in a poll conducted during the heat of last week's controversy.
"[T]he vast majority of voters will have no idea this 'scandal,' ever happened, and most of those who know it happened will have forgotten the next day," he wrote. "Bloggers, even the most prominent ones, have national name-recognition numbers in the single digits. Even after 300-plus newspapers picked up one of more of the various wire reports surrounding the flap, and even after numerous cable news network segments on the story, I still bet that less than 10 percent of the country knows this happened."
That might help explain why the presidential campaign of Sen. Sam Brownback, R-Kan., was willing to hire a blogger from RedState in the midst of the Edwards campaign's blog scandal. RedState explained what that will mean for its group blog.
Other Edwards-related blog bits:
-- The Raw Story reported that Dan Gerstein, a top campaign aide to Sen. Joseph Lieberman in Connecticut last year, criticized the blogosphere as a result of the scandal. Gerstein: "There's a big problem in the Democratic Party right now. I think for a lot of Democratic bloggers, there's extremism, there's an anger, and there's a lack of accountability for what people say and do."
-- Daily Kos and MyDD were among the liberal blogs that warned dire consequences for the Democratic campaign that anonymously criticized the Edwards campaign for keeping the bloggers on board.
-- Donklephant: "American politics is about to become even dirtier and more trivial, thanks to the blogosphere, the efforts of candidates to harness it, and the ambitions of extreme, foul-mouthed bloggers, be they left-wing or right wing."
-- Garance Frank-Ruta of Tapped: "No one who signs up for a presidential campaign should be surprised if they get turned into an issue, and no one hiring people for such a campaign should be surprised if staffers get attacked. That's how things roll [in Washington politics]. Also: ... The issue is whether Democrats can figure out how to fight off such attacks."
-- The bloggers at Balloon Juice tried to head off problems by sending this message to campaigns: Don't hire me.
-- A writer at NewAssignment.net sees the Edwards scandal as further evidence of the ongoing blurring of the lines between media and politics.
-- From a diarist at Daily Kos: "What Bloggergate Says About The Movement."
For folks who are tired of the Edwards story or never much cared for it in the first place, here are some other blog bits from the past couple of weeks:
-- The White House invited four bloggers to its annual budget briefing.
-- Right Wing News said the Senate Republican message machine has improved greatly thanks to the hiring of blogger Jon Henke by Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky.
-- Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., was the guest on today's BlogTalkRadio show by Heading Left, and Rep. Brad Miller, D-N.C., will be the featured speaker at the BlueNC Women's Conference of bloggers on Saturday.
-- David All said something needs to be done to preserve congressional history online -- including the blogging (quite limited) that former House Speaker Dennis Hastert, R-Ill., did late in his tenure.
-- Arkansas state Rep. Steve Harrelson has been blogging from the House floor this year and has built quite a following, especially among his colleagues.
-- The North Carolina Democratic Party apparently is the first at the state level to hire an Internet communications director.
-- Matt Stoller of MyDD has taken on three consulting projects and disclosed that information to his readers. Some of them wondered whether his disclosures were sufficient. One of Stoller's ongoing projects (for the Sunlight Foundation) is called XXX.
-- Like Stoller and the rest of the crew at MyDD, are you part of the progressive blogosphere elite? Hint: If you have to click the link to see, you're not.
Posted by Danny at 09:54 PM | Comments (2)
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When Amanda Marcotte agreed to blog for 2008 Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards, she told her readers to expect "real commentary on issues that matter" under the "Rule of Amanda." But she also acknowledged that she knows "how the game works" and is "willing to play nice" as a campaign blogger in ways that are not apparent at Pandagon, where she gained her reputation as a blogger.
Daniel Drezner isn't so sure Marcotte's commentary is all that "real" -- and with good reason. "Who cares about campaign bloggers?" Drezner wrote. "They are little more than good PR stylists." (Hat tip to Instapundit.)
Ann Althouse agreed that boring commentary is an inevitability when bloggers go to work for campaigns. "I guess it's too bad when a good blogger gets a job like this," she said. "But bloggers are often people who need jobs and want to get into politics. It's their choice, but it is a choice to be boring."
But Zack Exley, who worked on the Internet team of Howard Dean in the 2004 presidential campaign, thinks he has a solution: Candidates should blog themselves instead of hiring people to do it for them.
"This is a whole new medium, a whole new channel for your own voice," Exley wrote. "You don’t ask someone else give your speeches or appear in your TV ads. So why have someone who barely knows you writing personal messages in your name that go out to millions of your most passionate fans and volunteers?"
That's a good point -- and it's especially relevant after the scandal involving Marcotte and Melissa McEwan, another blogger who is working for Edwards. Campaign bloggers were on a leash before the scandal, and you can bet that they will be on a shorter one now.
Most of them will voluntarily restrain their rhetoric for fear of losing their jobs if they cross the Marcotte/McEwan Line -- and those who don't may not have jobs for long.
On the other hand, Exley is living in a fantasy world if he thinks politicians are going to be much more open on their blogs than their hired hands. That won't happen as long as bloggers unrestrained by campaigns parse every word for hidden (and often imagined) meanings.
Posted by Danny at 01:29 PM | Comments (1)
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Rep. Major Thompson, D-N.Y., at The Huffington Post, speaking of House Homeland Security Committee Chairman Bennie Thompson, D-Miss., and his oversight of federal spending to recover from Hurricane Katrina:
With Bennie Thompson now on the case, the great mystery of the bungled Katrina recovery is about to be solved. Inspector Thompson, the new chairman of the Homeland Security Committee, is a genius at applying common sense. From the first hurricane winds and the raging floods to the present frantic paperwork shuffles and the accelerated political doubletalk, there has been very little common sense applied to a myriad of problems which are not rocket science. Expect "Big Bennie" to demand some simple answers in plain English.
Posted by Danny at 09:17 AM | Comments (0)
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U.S. Central Command Monitors Blogs
Fast-spreading Internet rumors have the potential to create headaches for the U.S. military, and that's why Central Command in Tampa, Fla., now has a team dedicated to uncovering and rebutting bad informaiton on blogs.
The St. Petersburg Times has the story. Here's an excerpt:
A three-person team monitors blogs -- Internet journals with commentary from ordinary citizens and, often, links to news articles -- that concentrate on CentCom's area of responsibility, which includes Iraq and Afghanistan. Team members contact blogs when inaccuracies or incomplete information are posted. They also ask bloggers if they can post a link to CentCom's own Web site, or they offer access to CentCom information and press releases. ..."It lets CentCom get information about soldiers directly to the American people," said Lt. Col. Matthew McLaughlin, a CentCom spokesman. “"t allows us to bypass those traditional media business models that dictate what gets covered, and what doesn’t. It's not a story when a soldier does something that helps 50 people in Afghanistan."
Posted by Danny at 10:57 PM | Comments (1)
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From an editorial in today's Los Angeles Times:
By trying to gin up support from the blogosphere, candidates are bringing lots of folks into the campaign who've left long trails of (often intemperate) commentary online. So not only do candidates have to worry about having their own gaffes preserved and promoted on YouTube, they may have to distance themselves from what their employees said before coming onboard. Expect this kind of nuttiness to continue until voters show that they care more about a candidate's thoughts than those of the hired hands.
Posted by Danny at 08:25 PM | Comments (0)
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Edwards Will Keep His Campaign Bloggers
Updated with new information in the main text and reactions at the bottom.
Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards posted this statement to his campaign blog not long ago:
The tone and the sentiment of some of Amanda Marcotte's and Melissa McEwan's posts personally offended me. It's not how I talk to people, and it's not how I expect the people who work for me to talk to people. Everyone is entitled to their opinion, but that kind of intolerant language will not be permitted from anyone on my campaign, whether it's intended as satire, humor or anything else.But I also believe in giving everyone a fair shake. I've talked to Amanda and Melissa; they have both assured me that it was never their intention to malign anyone's faith, and I take them at their word.
We're beginning a great debate about the future of our country, and we can't let it be hijacked. It will take discipline, focus, and courage to build the America we believe in.
Pandagon, where Marcotte blogs, has the statements of Marcotte and McEwan. You can tell they are working for a political campaign now because they are apologizing just like politicians.
Rather than saying "I am sorry," for instance, Marcotte wrote, "I am sorry if anyone was personally offended by writings meant only as criticisms of public politics." And this from McEwan: "It has never been my intention to disparage people’s individual faith, and I’m sorry if my words were taken in that way.”
Basically, Marcotte and McEwan have agreed to muzzle themselves while working for Edwards. That is in keeping with what Marcotte herself promised to do upon joining the campaign.
"I am the blogmaster," she wrote in answering readers (like this one) who wondered whether the campaign might "censor" her. "I am also an adult. I know how the game works. I’m more interested in helping my candidate win than anything -- luckily we see eye to eye on most issues. It was hard letting go of a platform where I can just run my mouth, but the fate of the world is important enough that I’m willing to play nice."
Daily Kos praised Edwards for the decision to keep the bloggers on staff: "It took a little while, but Edwards set the right precedent for how this type of smear should be handled. As a Democrat, I'm proud of him and his campaign."
More links and commentary:
-- Ann Althouse: "Edwards faced serious damage whichever decision he made, so it remains to be seen how reluctant candidates will be to hire bloggers. ... Anyone thinking of hiring a blogger as a liaison to bloggers will now check much more carefully, and there will be some worrisome things on everyone's blog. On the up side, this incident shows how much harm bloggers can do, so the candidates are on notice that they need to hire blogger wranglers."
-- Balloon Juice: "You can tut-tut about whether or not he should have hired them in the first place -- sure, it would have been safer to hire people with a less controversial past -- but he chose them, they are qualified, and he is sticking with them. If you ask me, that is admirable."
-- Chris Bowers of MyDD: "because he refused to cave to right-wing pressure and establishment campaign advice, Edwards will receive a significant amount of criticism. When this happens, we need to remember that he stood with us during this fight, and so we have to stand with him against the forthcoming attacks. This goes for everyone, whether or not you are an Edwards supporter."
-- Crooks & Liars: "We're still almost a year from the primaries and this was clearly the first shot off the Swiftboat prow for Edwards. But the netroots' work isn't done. This particular gambit might have failed, but there will be more and we must be prepared to face them and push back."
-- The Fix: "Edwards is saying that whatever the women wrote -- controversial or not -- before they joined his campaign late last month is largely immaterial. Is that the same standard he will hold to his non-blogging staff? If Jennifer Palmieri, Edwards' spokeswoman, had been quoted making the same comments that Marcotte and McEwan did, would she still have a job?"
-- Mary Katharine Ham at Townhall.com: "Probably wise, in a sense. ... The Nutroots hatred for betraying one of their own would have been brutal and everlasting. When Edwards picked these women, he threw in his lot with that crowd, and that crowd don't take kindly to traitors."
-- The Hillary Spot: "Good luck, whoever the ultimate coordinator for 'Catholics For Edwards' is."
-- Instapundit: Keeping the bloggers is "probably the right thing to do."
-- Michelle Malkin: "The Pandagonization of John Edwards is complete."
-- Protein Wisdom dubbed the bloggers' promise to behave "one of the most pathetic public surrenderings of personal integrity I've ever seen."
Posted by Danny at 05:25 PM | Comments (10)
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The controversy surrounding bloggers from the presidential campaign of Democrat John Edwards prompted this thought from Jim Geraghty, a former colleague of mine at Congressional Quarterly and now the blogger for The Hillary Spot:
By the way, if writing outrageous, furious blog postings can hinder your future career options, this may actually save the blogosphere. ... If using the F-bomb more frequently than punctuation and metaphorically spitting on the beliefs of others can hinder one's chances at future career opportunities, we may see a politer, more respectful, kindler and gentler blogosphere.
Jonah Goldberg of The Corner hopes Geraghty's vision comes true. I don't think it will, for this reason:
As in the rest of the political realm these days, when one side of the blogosphere behaves in a way that outrages the opposition (whether for good cause or not), it only infames the animosity between the two and makes the online world more polarized.
There is already evidence of such polarization as a result of the current blog scandal. While some bloggers and their readers on the left blame the campaign for not vetting the bloggers before hiring them, the most influential of the liberal bloggers are unanimous in characterizing the story as a right-wing smear.
And how have they reacted to that alleged smear? One of the bloggers, Glenn Greenwald of Unclaimed Territory, dug up some of the pointed commentary written by Patrick Hynes of Ankle Biting Pundits, who does online consulting for the presidential campaign of Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz. Another one, Chris Bowers of MyDD, said Edwards' decision to either keep or fire the bloggers in question would be a make-or-break issue in determining whether he could support Edwards in the primary.
It doesn't get much more polarized than that, and polarization frequently pushes people over the rhetorical edge. Rather than seeing the fewer "outrageous, furious blog postings" that Jim would like to see, I expect to see far more of them in the run-up to the 2008 presidential race.
Posted by Danny at 09:01 AM | Comments (2)
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Salon.com: Edwards Campaign Fires Bloggers
Salon.com is reporting that the presidential campaign of John Edwards has fired bloggers Amanda Marcotte and Melissa McEwan.
But the publication also reports this:
Speculation from sources that the two bloggers might be rehired was bolstered by Jennifer Palmieri, a spokeswoman for the Edwards campaign, who said in an e-mail that she would "caution [Salon] against reporting that they have been fired. We will have something to say later."This isn't the first Internet-related misstep for the Edwards campaign, which had been making an effort to reach out to the "netroots" but has found its popularity dropping in a straw poll done on the landmark liberal blog Daily Kos. Though he still leads the poll by one point over Sen. Barack Obama, Edwards' support has dropped nine points in the past three weeks.
I don't even know what to make of that story -- hired, fired and possibly rehired, all in a week's time. That would just be bizarre.
UPDATE: "The Salon story is not credible and cannot be verified at this time," said Chris Bowers of MyDD. "The campaign is still involved in internal discussions." He also warned: I have a pretty vicious rant and an important action alert lined up, but I am waiting to hear from the Edwards camp ... before doing anything."
Posted by Danny at 04:05 PM | Comments (0)
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As noted this morning in Technology Daily:
A Catholic group on Tuesday demanded that two bloggers recently hired by Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards be fired for items they wrote on the Internet before joining the campaign.
AP reports that Bill Donohue, the president of the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights, called on Edwards to fire Amanda Marcotte and Melissa McEwan for posts they wrote recently criticizing the stances of the pope and the Catholic church on homosexuality, abortion, contraception and other issues.
"John Edwards is a decent man who has had his campaign tarnished by two anti-Catholic, vulgar, trash-talking bigots," Donohue said.
The Edwards campaign did not provide comment in the story. Marcotte and McEwan were put the campaign's payroll last week.
National Review Online Editor Kathryn Jean Lopez also criticized Marcotte's writings about Catholocism.
UPDATE: The New York Times covered the story, too. And John Cole of Balloon Juice, a Pittsburgh Steelers fan, said he doesn't know "who to root for in this mess. My gut instinct is to treat this as a Browns/Cowboys Super Bowl, in which I would root for injuries."
Other commentary:
-- Ann Althouse: "I like to see bloggers use blogging to snag political jobs, and, on the other hand, I'm wary about this new activity of wrangling bloggers for the benefit of political candidates. For you bloggers seeking jobs: I hope you get them. But for you bloggers staying in this noble enterprise: Preserve your independence and don't let yourself get manipulated, even by some blogger wrangler you loved when she was one of you."
-- Tim F. at Balloon Juice: "In general I understand the instinct to incorporate bloggers into political campaigns. After all, few people understand a new media better than the new medianauts themselves. That said, in many cases it probably is not the greatest idea. ... [B]logging tech exists at a weird juncture between immediacy and permanence. We constantly communicate in first drafts, with all the attendant messiness that rushed communication implies, but our words stay out there forever, archived and easily accessed by Google."
-- Dean Barnett at HughHewitt.com: "On the one hand I can’t believe that Marcotte had become so comfortable in the left wing echo chamber that she actually believed her past didn’t preclude her from publicly entering a mainstream presidential campaign. On the other hand, I really can’t believe that the Edwards campaign apparently didn’t vet a high profile hire."
-- Duncan Black at Eschaton: "Uh, Edwards campaign? I'd suggest not taking campaign advice from the racist [Michelle] Malkin and bigot and professional outrage machine Bill Donohue."
-- Ed Cone: "They look weak to their friends and to their enemies if they cave on this thing. But they do need to get out in front of it and address the relationship of the campaign to bloggers and staffers, and to things that bloggers blogged before they were staffers."
-- Ezra Klein: "[T]he Edwards campaign chose her. They hired her. She left her blog for the position. And now they've got to defend their choice. To back down would either prove that their hiring process was incompetent and they didn't vet someone with anextensivepublic record, or that they'll collapse beneath even moderate pressure from rightwing professionals. Neither is a good look for the new campaign."
-- James Joyner at Outside the Beltway: "Having top bloggers on the staff makes sense, because these people have demonstrated not only that they have the ability to express themselves in writing but that they 'get blogging. As a bonus, they probably have a network of other bloggers that they can reach out to with more credibility than some flack on the communications staff. At the same time, however, there is a serious downside that Edwards is now discovering: Bloggers have a “paper” trail. The longer someone has been blogging, the more of their sometimes-developed thoughts are out there for public consumption."
-- Ed Morrissey of Captain's Quarters: "The blogosphere features many talented and rational writers on both right and left, and even in between. It's incumbent on the campaigns that hire bloggers (and media outlets, too) to distinguish those from the frothing lunatics at all points on the political spectrum. Their failure to properly vet bloggers reflects much more on the values and competence of the campaign than it does on the blogosphere in general."
-- Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit: "A lot of the lefty bloggers are up in arms that this has become a scandal. ... I suspect that this is because a lot of them would like to join the establishment and now fear that their prior anti-establishment rantings will get in the way. It'll be interesting to see if there's more Pandagon-like airbrushing of blog archives over the next few weeks."
-- Matt Stoller at MyDD: "If a campaign's first instinct is to grant credibility to manufactured complaints, then that campaign simply cannot make it through the right-wing gauntlet. This is also poor framing; the Edwards campaign knew what they were getting when they made the hires, and now to pretend like the bloggers did something wrong is not ok. It's a pure 'I'm going to offload responsibility onto the lower beings' play."
Posted by Danny at 01:40 PM | Comments (0)
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Sen. John McCain has a lot of work to do if he wants to win the backing of conservative bloggers for his run at the Republican presidential nomination in 2008.
His campaign, which includes Ankle Biting Pundits blogger Patrick Hynes as a consultant, tried to make nice with a few of the bloggers yesterday. But to hear Mary Katharine Ham of Townhall tell it, McCain's blog outreach didn't do much to assuage the longstanding animosity that the bloggers have for McCain because of his advocacy for campaign finance rules, among other things.
Ham praised McCain's campaign for organizing the first of what it promises will be on-the-record chats with bloggers. She compared it with a good first session of "couples therapy." The relationship is still on the rocks, though, and Ham said the burden is on the McCain team.
"Some of the answers were good, but I didn't feel like conservative bloggers' real, politely presented, substantive issues with McCain were taken as seriously as they could have been," she wrote. "I mean, we've got some deep-seated issues, here, that have developed over many years for some of us. There were only a few of us on the call, and I wish we could have gone longer."
GOP new media consultant David All live-blogged the call and offered this take on it afterward:
This was not a "Team McCain giving us the Jack Bauer interrogation to support his candidacy." It was, rather a, "Hey, we know we don't agree on all the issues, but we respect your contribution to the process, want to know how you're feeling, and want to include you in our kitchen-cabinet to help us make better decisions next time."
Others commenting on the call:
-- Captain's Quarters: "If the blogosphere wants to maintain a position of credibility, then we cannot be seen as the mud factory of the elections, especially in the primary. Campaigns (for president or anything else) that want to use blogger credibility as a channel to reach the voters need to be careful of using bloggers to bubble attack memes up to the surface."
-- RedState: "While specific policies weren'at the focus of the call ... I hope they play an important role in the future. For now, the mere fact that bloggers are commanding the attention of McCain's team is positive step."
-- Wizbang Politics: "I explained that my problems with McCain were more general, rather than policy specific. ... An example I gave was my problem with his past history with the media, including his playing up the maverick persona, which often is portrayed in the media as McCain battling those evil, unreasonable Republicans."
Posted by Danny at 09:20 AM | Comments (0)
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As noted this morning in Technology Daily:
A man who kept a freelance video blog has now become the longest-serving journalist behind bars in U.S. history, but he has lots of supporters, News.com reports.
On Wednesday, dozens of people gathered for a demonstration at San Francisco City Hall to demand the release of Josh Wolf. Ross Mirkarimi, a San Francisco supervisor, said he was "angry as hell about this" and called for a "serious outcry, and not just only by us."
In a statement, California state Assemblyman Mark Leno, called Wolf's plight a "travesty of justice."
Wolf's friend, Julian Davis, said that "if Josh isn't released today, he'll be the longest-held journalist under contempt."
Posted by Danny at 08:58 AM | Comments (0)
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Amanda Marcotte's 'Conflict Of Interest'?
Pandagon blogger Amanda Marcotte has been the subject of much debate here and elsewhere the past few days because of her new assignment as the "blogmaster" for the presidential campaign of Democrat John Edwards.
One thing has gone unmentioned in that debate, however. Late last year, after Marcotte took me to task for my New York Times article about bloggers hired by campaigns, she told her readers this:
I think it's a conflict of interest to blog independently while working for a politician, but if you disclose it, then it's up to the audience to decide how much attention they pay you.
Marcotte continues to blog independently at Pandagon while working for Edwards.
Marcotte also said in response to a reader's comment that disclosure by bloggers working for campaigns may not be sufficient. "I think you're technically right," she said of disclosure being the key, "but the one problem is that disclosing in a post gets buried fast."
Marcotte's Jan. 30 disclosure that she is working for the Edwards campaign already is relatively buried (a few pages deep) in the Pandagon archives. Neither her biography on the site nor her author page currently appear to mention her work for Edwards.
I have e-mailed Marcotte to ask if her view has changed about it being a conflict of interest to blog independently while working for a campaign and to ask whether she considers her current disclosure post at Pandagon to be sufficient.
UPDATE: Marcotte said she does not now see blogging independently while working for a campaign as a conflict of interest and said disclosure of such arrangements is sufficient. "For myself, I am happy to have a permanent disclaimer," she wrote in an e-mail. "My opinion has always been that permanent disclaimers are good things. If my comments earlier indicated otherwise, I am sorry they were confusing."
Marcotte also pointed me to the disclaimer at Pandagon. It is on a separate page rather than being included as part of her bio or the archive of all of her posts.
Marcotte did not answer a question about whether it might be more useful to have the disclamer on those pages, too, or even within each post that she writes at Pandagon. Several bloggers hired by campaigns last year followed that approach, and one posted a running disclosure across the top of each page on his personal site -- at the request of the campaign that hired him.
Posted by Danny at 11:06 PM | Comments (5)
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We're only one month into 2007 and the first blog scandal of the 2008 campaign already has erupted.
The central character: Amanda Marcotte of Pandagon, who this week accepted a job as "blogmaster" to the presidential campaign of Democrat John Edwards. Part of her job is to write at the campaign blog.
The scandalous storyline: Like all bloggers, Marcotte is fast and loose with her opinions, and her opinion of the infamous rape allegations against lacrosse players at Duke University didn't sit well with some folks. When Marcotte started catching flak for that opinion, she apparently deleted it and started altering other comments at Pandagon.
Marcotte's move to the Edwards campaign and the subsequent hiring of another blogger, Melissa McEwan of Shakespeare's Sister, as netroots coordinator won praise from her netroots friends.
"What this move symbolizes in the blogosphere is that Edwards team understands how to move to the left on the issues," wrote Jerome Armstrong of MyDD. "The early move by Edwards to consolidate the liberal wing of the Democratic party at the beginning is very smart."
But now Marcotte's attempts to airbrush her past are fast becoming a black-eye for Edwards, even as he earned raves yesterday for a speech at the Democratic National Committee winter meeting in Washington. "Edwards should demand Marcotte’s immediate resignation from the campaign," wrote K.C. Johnson of Durham-In-Wonderland, who blogs about the Duke case and acknowledged being a supporter of Barack Obama, an Edwards presidential rival.
Some commeters in a forum at TalkLeft called Marcotte a "political liability" to Edwards, and one said that "if she feels this man should be our next president, it might be wise [to] make herself politically correct immediately or resign from the position."
As often is the case in politics (and blogging) -- and as a prominent blogger like Marcotte should have known -- the cover-up is worse than the crime. And it doesn't help that Marcotte has been both dismissive and defiant in response to her critics.
"[I]f I see the words 'Duke' or 'lacrosse' in an e-mail that has the whiff of accusatory tone, I'm deleting it and simply not going to reply to it," she wrote at Pandagon. "I have never, ever stated that I think that anyone should go to jail without a proper trial. Those comments will also be deleted from this thread."
That thread eventually was closed, but the controversy surrounding both Marcotte's thoughts on the Duke case and her subsequent attempts to alter the historical record is continuing.
Patrick Ruffini, now the e-campaign director for Republican presidential candidate Rudy Giuliani, said Marcotte crossed a "bright red line" into bad taste. And this insight from Betsy's Page, gets to the heart of the issue:
Hiring a campaign blogger is now necessary for each campaign. But this episode shows how treacherous the waters can be when a candidate just dives in and picks someone. For now Edwards and his campaign will be in the position of having to defend what this woman has written in the past and explaining why he found her particular writing style so suitable for his campaign.
Other blogs covering the story include Brainster, Hit & Run, Outside the Beltway, Overlawyered and South of Heaven. Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit also has called attention to Marcotte's woes.
Some people think the controversy is ridiculous. "You're opposing Edwards' candidacy by criticizing his blog manager, for her opinions posted on a different blog, about a state-level criminal case?" one commenter wrote at Overlawyered. "'Foul language' -- that's what you base your decisions on in the most important political race in the democractic world? And that's what it took to distract you from an issue in any way related to the actual candidate: 'comic joshing' about the house he lives in?"
But whether it should have or not, this story now seems to have generated the kind of feeding frenzy that ensued among liberal bloggers when conservative Ben Domenech of RedState was accused of, at first denied and later admitted to plagiarism, costing him a high-profile blogging job at The Washington Post. Marcotte eventually may face the same professional fate.
One other footnote: Marcotte's behavior the past couple of days reminded me of something I discovered at Pandagon late last year when researching my New York Times article on bloggers who had gone to work for campaigns. One of those bloggers, Jesse Taylor, got his start at Pandagon before joining the campaign of now-Ohio Gov. Ted Strickland, a Democrat.
I reported Taylor's move when it happened in October 2005 and linked to his announcement at Pandagon. When I clicked back to Taylor's post in November 2006, it was gone and there was no sign of it in Pandagon's archives. I had to search the Wayback Machine to find Taylor's post again.
Did Marcotte, who claimed ownership of Pandagon upon Taylor's departure, scrub the site of his disclosure, and if so, why? Those questions came to my mind last fall but didn't seem worth asking then. They were just a curiousity.
Now that Marcotte has shown a penchant for deleting Pandagon content that causes her grief, maybe the questions are worth asking -- though I gather that my "whiff of accusatory tone" would just land any query I sent to her in the electronic trash.
UPDATE: Marcotte still has her fans in the liberal blogosphere, as evidenced by this love-her-lively-writing praise at EzraKlein.com:
I hardly ever read campaign blogs, even for campaigns I really like. They're not usually written very well, and the people who write them sometimes don't really seem to understand how the blogosphere works. They don't link to other people, and they're so predictable that you don't have to do much more than look at the post title to figure out what the post will say. To summarize all that I've just said, campaign blogs aren't usually written by Amanda Marcotte.
He's right about the quality of campaign blogs; most of them are pitiful. But embracing the unpredictability offered by the Marcottes of the world may not be the best move for candidates.
UPDATE: Ezra Klein and other bloggers are rightly taking me to task for mentioning the missing announcement about Jesse Taylor at Pandagon. I thought twice about adding that footnote to my coverage of the brewing Marcotte controversy; I should have thought three times and not included it. It sounds like the missing post and others from the fall of 2005 were just the result of technology problems at Pandagon.
I also should have contacted Marcotte rather than assuming, based on her comment about her critics, that she wouldn't respond to a query from me.
Posted by Danny at 09:01 AM | Comments (75)
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Anti-Blog Hysteria In The State Capitols
First Texas, now Tennessee. There's something strange in the state legisaltive air, as lawmakers keep introducing anti-blog bills and then backing down when bloggers start screaming.
I mentioned the Texas story in passing a couple of months ago in one of my blog bits roundups. In that instance, state Rep. Vicki Truitt pre-filed a bill that would have specified that defamatory statements online are subject to libel law.
Bloggers interpreted the measure as a threat against them and started ridiculing Truitt before any statute said they couldn't. The outcry prompted Truitt to say she would narrow the bill.
This week, the anti-blog sentiment surfaced again in Tennessee. Blogger Bill Hobbs repoted that state Rep. Rob Briley and state Sen. Jamie Woodson also had proposed legislation aimed at online defamation. Hobbs said the bill would require bloggers and others who write or publish content online to remove allegedly defamatory comment within two days lest they "create a presumption of malice intent."
It didn't take long for a blog swarm to materialize in the Volunteer State, either, with popular Knoxville, Tenn.-based blogger Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit joining the critics. Before long, Riley had posted a comment to Hobbs' blog, stating that he would withdraw his bill immediately.
The anti-blog front appears to be moving northeast. Will my home state of West Virginia be hit next? As I recall from my time as an intern at the Capitol in Charleston, there's still time left in this year's session for one of my hillbilly brethren to turn against the blogosphere.
UPDATE: Balkanization and TalkLeft, two blogs written by lawyers, explain why the anti-blog bills seem to be constitutionally doomed, even if legislators decide to pursue them. Plus the latest news on Tennessee's bill, via Instapundit.
Posted by Danny at 11:07 PM | Comments (8)
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The Trashing Of The Blogosphere
You know the mainstream media are out to get blogs when you see a headline that says "Blogs Make Spreading Untruths Easier" over a story that mentions blogs only in passing.
The Indianapolis Star slapped that headline on a story about rumors that Sen. Barack Obama of Illinois, a likely Democratic presidential candidate, attended an Islamic school in Indonesia as a 7-year-old. In reality, the school was "public, secular and open to all faiths."
While the AP account did blame blogs in part for spreading the rumor, it said Fox News was "most notably" the media outlet that fostered the misperception. And the story was actually more about how politicians need to respond to fast-spreading controversies in today's changing media world than it was about blogs.
"Stories seemingly trivial or even untrue will appear instantly and reverberate through the media," the article said. "Candidates most skillful in anticipating them and reacting swiftly will have a big advantage."
So why the headline? Simple. Some green-eyeshade journalist, either at the Indianapolis paper or AP, hates blogs and saw an opportunity to unfairly trash bloggers just as some media outlets did Obama.
He or she is not alone. The Calgary Sun has a report about a new blog book that characterizes blogs as political communities for lonely people. The book is titled "Blogosphere: A New Political Arena," and the author is Michael Keren, a university of Calgary professor.
Here's an excerpt from the article, beginning with a quote from Keren:
“Blogging promised to give us some control ... but I think we are the same human beings we have always been, basically confused and alienated from the systems all around us.”Although the medium offers seemingly unlimited freedom of expression, Keren said bloggers too often shape public opinion by reporting distorted versions of the facts. “Social dialogue and political dialogue must be marked by restraint -- one of the victims of the blogging phenomenon is the truth,” he said.
Keren notes blogging has become a tool for politicians, big business and celebrities, which he said undermines notions of the medium belonging to the masses.
UPDATE: The Chicago Tribune did much the same thing as the Star in Indianapolis, but it chose an editorial as the forum for this bizarre poke at bloggers: The Obama story "is a sign of the growing indifference Internet 'journalism' presents on the question of truth. Rumor is good enough. Bibles of blogging are created based on nothing more than rumor."
Americablog and Think Progress rightly chastised the newspaper for publishing that drivel.
Posted by Danny at 12:04 PM | Comments (1)
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Recent blog bits
-- When Vice President Richard Cheney wouldn't disclose details about his staff, TPMMuckraker refused to take "no" for an answer and dug up some details on its own from the White House phone directory and the Legistorm database that includes staff and salary details about Capitol Hill (Cheney has staff there because he is president of the Senate).
-- A writer at RedState ponders the right timing for bloggers to endorse presidential candidates within the Republican Party: "Right now I think it makes a good deal more sense for all of us to first decide what it is that we want in a candidate -- and what we can live with, and what we can't -- and then start measuring our candidates and see whether or not they fit."
-- Blogads recently released its annual survey on political blog readership.
-- Scholarships Around The U.S. is offering a $2,000 scholarship for political blogging this year. The scholarship is new, and the deadline to compete is Sunday. The political blogging award is in addition to the $10,000 scholarship for blogging in general first awarded last year, when it was for $5,000.
-- Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., has been flacking his new book, "Positively American: Winning Back The Middle-Class Majority One Family At A Time," at The Huffington Post.
-- There's a new newspaper in Washington called The Politico, but Washington Post media critic Howard Kurtz said the content isn't all that new. Instead, the paper (which hired away two of the Post's top political reporters is "relying on an old-fashioned concept: reporting." The Politico does have a "Politics 2.0" column worth following for anyone in the politics and technology arena.
-- Mitch Kokai, the communications director for the conservative John Locke Foundation in North Carolina and a writer at its blog, The Locker Room, has been acting like a reporter in the halls of the state Capitol. His actions give pause to The Progressive Pulse. (Hat tip to Ed Cone, who earlier noted the North Carolina's successful effort to keep some bloggers from getting media credentials to cover the state legislative session.)
-- A political writer at the Austin American-Statesman in Texas pondered what blogs can -- and can't -- bring to coverage of the state legislature.
-- Some newspaper readers in Santa Fe, N.M., have launched issue-specific legislative blogs while lawmakers are in session in that state. Those blogs are offshoots of the legislative blog being written by Steve Terrell, a staffer at the paper.
-- What's new in school these days? Teachers venting on blogs.
Older blog bits
-- For a liberal Democrat who typically blogs at Daily Kos, Adam Bonin had a good run at the conservative RedState. His role in fighting to keep blogs out of federal campaign-finance rules won him friends across the blog aisle, and he kept them through a joint effort to force more transparency about campaign finances for Senate candidates.
But alas, that strange blogfellows relationship has ended. RedState booted Bonin from its ranks when he started saying things folks there didn't want to hear. Here's what RedState Managing Editor Erick-Woods Erickson said about the decision in an e-mail to me:
RedState takes an aggressive stance on blocking users who have been rude, profane, or otherwise abused their time at RedState. We let individual contributors make the call and I support the contributors' decisions, rarely considering a reversal (and there was no request from user in this case anyway). There are a number of people who come to RedState who do not share our political philosophy, but participate without incident nonetheless. There's even a site for folks who've been banned.
-- Patrick Hynes of Ankle Biting Pundits has been doing consulting work for Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., as McCain explores a 2008 presidential run. So why did New Hampshire Democrats give him credentials to cover a campaign event of Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, D-N.Y., the frontrunner in the Democratic race? Hynes explains.
-- Clinton, by the way, caused quite a stir with her first purchase of blog ads after announcing that she has formed an exploratory committee. Like any great investigator, Blog P.I. covered the story in excruciating detail.
-- Paul Hodes of New Hampshire and Tim Walz of Minnesota, two of the netroots candidates elected to Congress for the first time last year have been rewarded with the top two leadership posts of their freshman Democratic class.
-- Investigative bloggers are proving that you don't have to be a professional journalist with credentials to produce good journalism. That might help explain why British journalist Will Lewis was so frustrated to hear American journalists debating at length whether journalists should blog. His answer: "Of Course We Should Blog."
Posted by Danny at 11:57 AM | Comments (0)
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Last year amid the blog swarm against the "secret hold" on a budget transparency bill in the Senate, I offered a friendly warning to congressional staffers about e-mailing bloggers. It's time for a refresher course.
Why? Because Eric Carbone, the flack for Sen. Joseph Biden Jr. goofed big time yesterday in firing off an e-mail to Markos Moulitsas Zuniga of Daily Kos and no doubt is regretting the decision now. Carbone has learned a bit about the blogosphere by living; his colleagues in Capitol flackery can learn by reading what happened to him.
The back story: Biden, D-Del., officially announced yesterday that he is running for president in 2008. On the same day, he talked about the "articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy" that is Sen. Barack Obama of Illinois, himself a likely Democratic presidential candidate. All that sounds flattering until you put in front of it the part where Biden said Obama is "the first mainstream African-American" running for high office to fit that description.
Moulitsas was among the bloggers to pounce on that remark, calling Biden a vulgar name for his racial insensitivity (Biden has now apologized for the remark).
As flacks are wont to do, Carbone tried to run interference for his boss. He e-mailed Moulitsas and griped that Kos, a blogger of all people, was giving a "one-sided impression" of Biden. That was not a smart move because it only invited Moulitsas to attack again. Here's the result:
"Aside from the fact that this poor guy (Eric Carbone) thinks blogs are supposed to be 'fair and balanced', it's true, I've completely forgotten to write about the other side of the story -- how Biden is a bought and paid for subsidiary of MBNA. When Bank of America acquired MBNA, Biden was likely part of the package deal."
So instead of Biden catching just a little bit of grief for an insensitive racial comment, thanks to Carbone's e-mail, Biden got slammed with the longstanding allegation that he is in the hip pocket of the financial industry that is such a big presence in his home state.
The lesson for flacks: Think before you click.
You're much better off griping to me about bloggers on background than you are going on the record and taking your complaints directly to the source. Odds are good that the blogger you criticize is going to react just as Kos did -- by mocking you and attacking your boss with even more ferocity.
Posted by Danny at 09:15 AM | Comments (1)
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