I wonder if the events surrounding the push-backs to Deborah Howell (Ombudsman) and James Brady (Executive Editor) of the Washington Post will, in 20 years, be seen as one of the great battlegrounds, or launching pads, of the wider awareness of the power of people being able to connect, converse and confront the established powers that be.
Matt Stoller of MyDD describes the unfolding of a hastily-called panel on the issues that have been raised:
Some Real Questions
by Matt Stoller, Sat Jan 28, 2006 at 01:52:07 AM EST
After reading the thirtieth article on how liberals who want liberalism and centrists who want to win are fighting for the soul of the party, I should probably chime in. Lobbyist Steve Elmendorf, quoted in the article, echoes this general theme:
“The bloggers and online donors represent an important resource for the party, but they are not representative of the majority you need to win elections,” said Steve Elmendorf, a Democratic lobbyist who advised Kerry’s 2004 presidential campaign. “The trick will be to harness their energy and their money without looking like you are a captive of the activist left.”
It’s weird to face this constant infantalizing, over and over and over. Actually, it’s a lot like boarding school, which I attended, with its rigid arbitrary hierarchies based on physical strength, wealth, and age.
I bring this up because I attended a luncheon yesterday with bloggers and media folk, which was kindly put together by the Shorenstein Center. Deborah Howell was there, as was Jack Shafer of Slate, Mike Krempasky of Redstate, Judy Woodruff, John Aravosis, Wizbangblog, and lots of others. I didn’t blog it because I wasn’t sure it was on or off the record, but since Hotline wrote about it, I guess it’s fair game. Jane and Atrios are each talking about what I said, and they basically get it right.
The discussion started with a thoughtful presentation by Rebecca McKinnnon, who runs Global Voices. Are bloggers journalists? Should journalists blog? What is blogging? Who’s being brought into the conversation? Steve Clemons chimed in with an excellent comment that blogs present a vehicle for a perfect marketplace of ideas, and allow a way to expand upon the necessary ‘cartel’ of the Op-Ed pages. There was a lot of handwringing about media models, and pricing, and whether journalists will survive. I made the point that I was worried that the blogosphere and the MSM was a framework that was ultimately unhelpful to the development of this important medium, and that it breeds unnecessary hostility between people who have a lot in common.
Deborah Howell got there a bit late, but when she arrived, we really had no choice but to circle to the recent ‘incident’. She talked about ‘the incident’, and the hate speech, and how awful it all was. She said a lot, but the line that was fascinating was when she said something to the effect of “I got all these attacks calling me a right-winger. My friends would howl at that notion.” She took great umbrage at the flack she got for her column on Bob Woodward, which she called hard-hitting. Jack Shafer followed up with his description of the whole thing as an ‘online riot’, and analogized it to the race riots in the 1960s. It really sounded like the quasi-racist fraidy-cat suburban upbringing, personified. In fact, throughout the discussion, Shafer kept acting abrasively, challenging various bloggers to delete the offensive comments he would put up on their blog that very night.
That was sort of the point that did it. Shafer was comparing some angry emails - a minority of the commentary - to a real riot where people were hurt and killed. And the solemnity of the ‘incident’, what ‘happened’ to Deborah, was just nuts. John said ‘Grow up’, and his point was that posting on a controversial subject and not expecting lots of comments, some of which were mean, is silly. I explained the joke of calling a ‘blogger ethics panel’, that we often see bizarrely high demands for ethical behavior in the blogs, and bizarrely low demands for ethical behavior offline, usually from the same group of people. (An example I didn’t go into was Jerome working for Dean, which of course meant payola even though he wasn’t blogging at the time, versus Chris Matthews pulling down 20K-50K per speech talking in front of trade associations with clear political agendas, which just means that they are ‘respected’).
I sort of flipped out at Jack Shafer, who seemed the whole time to be baiting us. Howell was actually very nice; she seemed personally wounded, which I thought was silly. She’ll get over it. But the notion that it was some grand ‘incident’, with victims and a mob, is willfully ignorant. It’s just public discourse, like you’d have in a bar.
Shafer acted just like a clever troll. It was like he wanted to be flamed, and was upset that no one was picking a fight with him. I made the point that the hostility was coming from the institutional media, not the blogs, because it is. The public is raucous and sprawling, but it is fundamentally civil. It was Shafer who was calling us violent rioters disturbing the peace.
.