On May 12th, Media Matters sponsored a panel discussion called “Why Media Matters: The Role of the Media in the Democratic Process” which details the essentials of the differing perspectives of media critics and the members of the press who are on the receiving end of that criticism. Often a hot topic in netroots circles, to be sure.

Many of the arguments that I’ve heard from both sides were detailed and eloquently stated. And it provides a one-stop shopping spree for those of us like me who are obsessed with the discussion of — as Greg Sargent puts it the tagline of his blog Horse’s Mouth — the reporting of politics and the politics of reporting. Or, as Brattlerouser and Jamison Foser would remind us: It’s the media, you rather-less-than-super-sharp person.

Media Matters described the panel, moderated by Media Matters founder, David Brock this way…

Eric Boehlert is an award-winning journalist who has written extensively about media, politics, and pop culture. His new book is Lapdogs: How the Press Rolled Over for Bush.

Kathy Kiely, Congressional reporter, USA Today

Lynn Sweet, Washington D.C. bureau chief, Chicago-Sun Times

Dick Polman, national political reporter, The Philadelphia Inquirer

Paul Waldman is a senior fellow at Media Matters for America. His new book is Being Right Is Not Enough: What Progressives Must Learn From Conservative Success.

Now, of course, Boehlert, Waldman and Brock represented the conventional wisdom of today’s active progressive media watchdogs. Kathy Kiely and Lynn Sweet provided the media insiders perspective. But Dick Polman was there as the media insider who backed up the critics’ claims.

The two sides, thought not mutually exclusive, boil down to this…

From the critics, Boehlert…

I think the press needs to be held accountable for what happened in the 2000 campaign, and the 2004 campaign. And I think what’s happening today in terms of not being fair with Democrats and not giving them, you know, whether it’s keeping them off the Sunday shows, as Media Matters has documented, or lots of other ways.

They’ve held the Bush administration to a completely different standard, and I think again, there was sort of a titanic shift when Republicans came to town in how the press was going to deal with the White House.

Polman adds this perspective from the trenches…

And when I finally got [a story about the Downing Street Memo] in, we ran it on a Sunday, but we ran it on page six, which of course, anybody that knows newspapers, or is within the newspaper business — the left-hand side is six, and that’s not considered a good page either. The right-hand side — you know, the eye goes to the right when you open it up. So if you’re on page six, it’s a bad page. I rarely, if ever, have been on page six. Ever. In the Sunday paper. So it was very interesting it was for that story, and there was no reference to it on the front page. It was just sort of stuck in there in this little funny, space…

…now there’s so much sort of “bad news” or true news about intelligence snafus and covering up stuff that didn’t go with the program and the White House — there’s so much of it out there, that now it’s like it’s almost not news. So you know, the paradox is that the White House in some ways gets an advantage there, because you know, a lot of — a lot of media won’t consider it to be news to report yet another person coming forward. So I think all these factors come into play here.

But both Lynn Sweet and Kathy Kiely provide what seems to be the most common first kneejerk defensive response to media criticism, which doesn’t actually address the critiques… To me, this always seems simply a way to dismiss all this evidence as just tinfoil hat stuff from those annoying peasants with pitchforks out in flyover country…

Monolithically, Sweet says…

…the media’s not monolithic, there is no we, it’s me. You know, I don’t get my instructions from central — from the central office. You know, here’s the plan today, what to do or not. And actually if you saw how papers really get out each day, you’d be surprised that we — you know, that everything comes together from the crosswords to the front page, because it’s an incredible process. It is. So the kind of — with all respects, when I get broadsides about the press, we’re talking about a lot of different organisms that live independently…

Monolithically, Kiely adds…

…I can tell you from a first-person standpoint that the press definitely is not monolithic. In fact, if anybody tells you that there’s a media conspiracy, just know this — we should be so organized.

But, within some rather well-stated comments which provide a fuller picture of the daily lives of reporters, they ultimately come to kind of agree with the critiques (and echo the Daily Howler) and suggest that because of reporters’ — as well as the minority Democrats — lack of subpoena power, it’s just too darn hard to challenge the Bush administration.

Which Brock couldn’t help using for this jab…

I think Lynn and Kathy have given us one of the stronger arguments I’ve heard to turn over the Congress this Fall to the Democratic hands, because then we’ll have a press that isn’t acting like lapdogs.

But, whether one thinks corporate media is controlled by fat white men in closed rooms, or not, Boehlert uses the lack of reporting on Stephen Colbert’s recent performance in front of Bush to say this (my emphasis)…

…if we have all these independent news organizations, how can they routinely come to almost the exact same editorial decisions? A quick point about liberal bias I stay away from it, too. I mean, if you think about liberal bias, what — the argument is that essentially all reporters are essentially Democratic operatives who purposely spin the news in order to achieve a political agenda. That is probably one of the most far reaching conspiracy theories ever hatched, and yet people take it seriously. So thankfully, most people on the left do not ascribe to any sort of conspiracy. It’s not a bias. People don’t do this purposely because they’re all trying to advance the Republican agenda.

My argument, and I think, other people, is there’s a mindset, and there’s this group thing. And I understand it’s dangerous to, describe all media outlets as the same, and you can’t. And yet you come back to the same thing. Downing Street Memo. How could literally every news organization in America know that that memo was out there? And every news organization in America, for six weeks decide we’re not going to print and we’re not going to talk about it.

And Kiely’s response?

I think one thing that a lot of people don’t understand who are in politics who are advocates for a cause, which is wonderful. Reporters generally aren’t like that. Reporters are people who psychologically have a problem with commitment, and we love being sort of in the middle, and looking at the one side and on the other side…

…I’m going to let Dick talk about the Downing Street Memo, because I personally haven’t — that’s not my area of coverage and I don’t know that much about it.

Boehlert responds…

The — Stephen Colbert and the Downing Street Memo may in fact be two symptoms of the same thing. Which is that in both cases I said it was part of I think the problem is that he made fun of the reporters, and that may have made people a little unhappy. With the Downing Street Memo, when you go back now and look at — do a critique of some of the things that the Bush administration said in order to bring us into Iraq, you are also doing a critique implicitly if nothing else, of the press’s performance during that time. And I don’t think there are a lot of reporters who are very proud of the — of their profession in general regardless of what they wrote their organization did, who are all that proud of how the press performed in the run up to the Iraq war. And so when you start to go back and look at things like the Downing Street Memo, or look at things like what Tyler Drumheller was saying, I think it makes a lot of people uncomfortable because you’re naturally raising those sorts of questions about why the press didn’t do its job.

So besides the groupthink, what’s really at play here? Paul Waldman speculates on what might be a bit of self-loathing and projection by members of the news media concerning the idea of Democratic elitism.

Eric talked about this whole liberal bias critique that the right has thrown at the media for a few decades now. What you hear them say is that reporters are a bunch of out-of-touch liberal northeastern elitists. Now, as it happens, that’s largely true. The irony though is that that doesn’t mean that Democrats get better coverage, and progressives get better coverage. In fact, a lot of the times it’s just the opposite, and to illustrate that I’m going to tell you a little story that Media Matters uncovered a while back.

As a reporter I may as well say who she is — Candy Crowley from CNN was giving a speech right after the 2004 election, talking about the election and her coverage. And she told a story about how she was in Iowa in the early part of the campaign with John Kerry, and they sat down at a diner to have lunch, and the waitress came over and asked him what he wanted. And Kerry asked if they had green tea, and the waitress said no, we only have Lipton’s. And he said okay, I’ll have Lipton’s. And as Crowley told her audience she informed the Senator that if he wanted green tea, he was going to have to bring his own to Iowa. And probably a lot of other places in the — in the country. And she said that she remembered this, it stuck with her because it just showed what an out-of-touch elitist Kerry really was.

Well, when Media Matters checked this out, they found out that she was a little bit mistaken. First of all, green tea accounts for about 20% of Lipton’s sales in the United States. And if you’re in Dubuque, and you want some green tea, you can get it at that snobby elitist grocery known as K-Mart. (Laughing)

So what does this tell us? Well, first of all, it tells us that the out-of-touch elitist in this case was the reporter. But that didn’t mean that it manifested itself in scorn for the people of Iowa. No. It manifested itself in scorn for John Kerry, because he supposedly was the out-of-touch elitist. And so what do you see kind of running through so much coverage of social issues and politics when it comes to these sorts of questions? It’s the idea that places here there are a lot of Republicans are truly American. Places where there are lot of Democrats, are not so much.

So, what does this mean for Vermont? Does the same kind of elitist clubbiness exist here?

Since odum’s “Vermont’s Own Tony Snow?“, I’ve been trying to answer this for myself. But, because there is so little political reporting in Vermont — from so few reporters — I’m not sure I’ll be able to. (Though I am keeping score on Darren Allen’s snark to see if it is more commonly directed left or right. Jury’s still out.)

But, I thought the exchange I had with Peter Welch during some live-blogging on Blog for America, was interesting…

I asked this question:

In your view, how does Vermont media compare to the national media in terms of these kinds of hurdles to getting a Democrats message out? (It seemed to be a major problem for Peter Clavelle.)

His response was simply: “Governor Dean is the guy to ask how the Vermont media compares to the national media!!”

Reading way more into that comment than perhaps is warranted, I took his comment to mean a few things…

One, it was a way to say ~Hey Dean supporter person, I’m on your side… Dean was railroaded!~ But I also felt that it reflected the small town civility (or perhaps arguably small town clubiness?) that likely exists in the tight circle of Vermont politics. Or maybe the same concern national Democrats seem to have; that directly confronting the mechanisms of press coverage is political suicide. Or both.

Anyway, there’s lots and lots more great comments in this discussion. And though my obvious bias is for the critics, the reporters are quite honest about how the day to day operations of a news organization. If you get a chance, you would be well-served to read the whole thing.

[Crossposted at Green Mountain Daily]

Anyone remember the graffiti at the top of the Church Street in Burlington that said “Upstreet makes me want to UpChurch?”

Rumsfeld, from an Iraqi perspective…

Picnic by Iraqi artist, Muayad Muhsin

MSNBC has this…

The oil-on-canvas, 5-by-3-foot work shows Rumsfeld in a blue jacket, tie, khaki pants and army boots reading from briefing papers. His boots are resting on what appears to be an ancient stone.

While Rumsfeld’s image is true to life, he sits next to a partially damaged statue of a lion standing over a human — a traditional image of strength during the ancient Babylon civilization. The statue’s stone base is ripped open, revealing shelves from which white piece of papers are flying away, later turning into birds soaring high into an ominously gray sky.

Muhsin said the symbolism has to do with Washington’s repeated assertions in the months before the March 2003 U.S.-led invasion of Iraq that Saddam’s regime had weapons of mass destruction, the cornerstone in the Bush administration’s argument for going to war.

No such weapons turned up, but the Bush administration maintained that removing Saddam’s regime alone justified the decision to invade Iraq.

“They did not find the weapons and, instead, found the annals of an ancient civilization that turned into birds of love, peace and knowledge,” said Muhsin, himself a native of the area around the central Iraqi city of Babil, or Babylon, south of Baghdad.

“Rumsfeld’s boots deliver a message from America: ‘We rule the world,”’ Muhsin, 41, told The Associated Press in an interview. “It speaks of America’s total indifference to what the rest of the world thinks.”

Rumsfeld actually had the nerve this morning to refer to al-Zarqawi as one of Qaeda’s top 3 senior members. And that he had provided safe haven for al Qaeda to operate in Iraq…

But, of course, before Iraq, al-Zarqawi was just one of many terrorist leaders around the globe. It’s not clear that he had any substantive relationship with bin Laden before the chaos and lawlessness that ensued after the U.S. invasion. And the chaos we created is what allowed al-Zarqawi and al Qaeda to operate within this “safe haven.”

And now, with al-Zarqawi’s death, the likely leadership vacuum will help create a half-dozen more al-Zarqawis.

Feh.

James Boyce, skipping the expected Bowers’ profile for his Meet the Blogger series, writes up Jerome Armstrong…

And what about now? Have you seen any estimates that you think might be right? Some say there are a million people out there - some say more, others less? What’s it like being a blogger in this sort of landscape?

A recent Gallup poll showed that nearly 30% of people that go onto the internet have read blogs. So blogging is becoming more of a part of society. In the past year, at least as concerns politics, there’s been tremendous growth of blog readers at the local level. I don’t know the exact number, I’d estimate that there’s about 3-5 million in the blog community on the progressive side, and we’ve got an agenda to change the direction of this country, so hopefully we’ll be able to grow that number a few fold this decade.

With the increased growth, there’s been more exposure and legitimacy to individual bloggers, blogads have helped pay a bit for the work, and some bloggers have been able to work on campaigns. However, the political establishment in power wants to stop things like transparency and accountability from happening, so it’s not going to be easy to change the system. I’m just a voice among the millions that realizes the direction of this nation must change. I don’t always get it right, and certainly have made my mistakes, but I’m willing to listen, learn, and change. And God knows there’s always a critic out there willing to step up to that task.

That dynamic feedback is loop one of the great things about the open blogosphere that makes the community authentic. One of the things that you find as a blogger is that not everyone is going to like every move you make, and there will be those that are always looking for an opportunity to criticize–you get thick skin in this world.

Mary Mapes, the CBS producer fired for her role in the Bush National Guard documents story, discusses the very important fact that those documents have never been proven to be forgeries, despite what you read in the press…

The laundry list of problems that critics claimed they saw in the memos has turned out to be bunk. There never has been any definitive proof that they were forged or falsified in any way, despite a multi-million dollar investigation into the story by Viacom. The reasons we put them on the air remain valid: the content of the memos was corroborated by people familiar with Bush, his unit and his commander; the dates, times and details intricately matched what we know of the record; and two experienced and respected document analysts, who examined copies that had not been faxed or digitally recreated, concluded that the papers showed every indication of being real.

I don’t believe we will know the truth about the memos until after the Bush team is out of office and people with information are no longer afraid to come forward.

Viacom, CBS’s parent company, never did care whether the story was true or not. They just wanted rid of it. Among other things, they had multiple issues pending before the FCC and various other arms of the administration and our story was no help to the company in its quest to squeeze every last dime out of what used to be the public airwaves. Firing longtime employees in an attempt to get back into the administration’s good graces was simply a business decision. It had nothing to do with journalism or the crucial role that critical reporting is supposed to play in American democracy.

Clicked featured a link yesterday to Pajama Market, which is the “Small Business Blog of the Day” blog.

This new blog, just launched this past March, is run by Brian Brown, editor of iBurlington.com, and a quick look at some of the other links on the Technorati profile shows that it’s been getting lots of attention.

Like this reference at Naked Conversations, a blog by the authors of one of the first books on corporate blogging.

They write…

That is why I just love PajamaMarket, a blog that presents one small business blog a day. The site is showing the depth, the breath, and the success little, independent entrepreneurs and merchants are having with blogs to increase their place in local communities or to market globally through the internet.

Kudos, Brian!

But, why didn’t I think of that? Nuts.

James Boyce has begun a great series on who bloggers really are. He started with his own bio and for installment #2 he interviews Peter Daou…

Obviously, the online political transformation that was in its infancy in 2003 is now full-blown and intensifying, what do you see as the online community’s impact on 2006 and 2008?

The online community is now an important incubator of ideas, a place where a relatively small, dedicated group of people get together and flesh out every possible twist and turn of an issue or a story, feeding their ideas into the bloodstream of American thought and helping drive the national debate.

I know you share the belief that unless both the online and offline worlds start working together, we’re in trouble. You’ve taken that a step further and written about THE TRIANGLE OF POWER - give us the highlights of that theory.

It’s simply a way to understand the scope of blog influence. In essence, I argue that the power of the blogs is a function of the relationship of the netroots to the media and the political establishment (thus, the triangle). I don’t think bloggers alone have the public penetration to alter conventional wisdom on their own, at least not yet, but they can put targeted pressure on the media and on political operatives and work with those two power centers to shape public opinion.

Looking ahead to 2008, if you had the chance to give each potential Democratic candidate one piece of advice - what would it be?

Read blogs and find out how people really feel. Then look at the media landscape and understand that without fixing the media problem, you’re hopelessly disadvantaged…. I guess that’s two pieces of advice.

Speaking of the media, I know that one of your passions is holding them accountable for misleading reporting, how did you get started on this?

I’ve gradually come to the realization that the single biggest obstacle facing the left is the pervasiveness of anti-left and pro-right narratives in the media. What’s the point of your message if it’s filtered through a media lens that’s unfavorable to your position? You know, ‘weak’ Dems and ’strong’ Republicans, ‘un-American’ left and ‘patriotic’ right, and so on.

Until the left gets its act together to address this imbalance, we’ll have more Gore-ing of Gore and Swift-Boating of Kerry. And more anti-Hillary tabloid journalism like the kind we’ve seen recently from the New York Times, David Broder, Tim Russert and others. The astonishing thing is that the “liberal media” absurdity is so entrenched that arguments about pro-right narratives are still met with suspicion, if not outright derision. The standard reply from rightwing bloggers is not a factual rebuttal, but simply “you must be crazy.” Jamison Foser recently posted a great piece about the media problem.

Next up, Boyce says he’ll profile Chris Bowers.

This, I believe…

Jamison Foser, ‘nuff said…

And still, reporters and pundits and progressive activists and Democratic leaders — people who should have known better — chalked it all up to Gore being a lousy candidate. Sure, they said, the media exaggerated about Gore’s exaggerations, but they wouldn’t have if he wasn’t such an exaggerator. Never mind that every example given fell apart under scrutiny: each lie told about Gore being a liar reinforced the others. It was Gore’s fault the media went overboard, just as it had been Clinton’s. And his consultants’ fault, too — there were too many of them, or too few, or too inside, or they weren’t good enough. And so people who should have known better thought it wouldn’t happen again; not when there was a new candidate with new consultants.

Then Howard Dean emerged as the front-runner for the 2004 Democratic presidential nomination. And the media depicted him as a crazy man, a wild-eyed hippie liberal freak — despite the fact that he had won the endorsement of the National Rifle Association during his career as governor of Vermont, during which time he was widely regarded as a moderate.

And still, reporters and pundits and progressive activists and Democratic leaders — people who should have known better — chalked it all up to Dean being a little crazy: How could he not be a little crazy: Remember that scream in Iowa? Sure, some reporters eventually acknowledged that they overplayed it. Sure, some eventually reported that audio and video clips of the “scream” were wildly misleading. Still: he must have brought the ridiculous coverage on himself. The same press corps that swoons daily over the notoriously ill-tempered John McCain relentlessly attacked Howard Dean for being “angry.” And people who should have known better blamed Dean. And his staff — they were too young, too inexperienced, too outside, too liberal.

Jaron Lanier, at the stunningly self-satisfied Edge.org, writes a very good piece titled “Digital Maoism: The Hazards of the New Online Collectivism,” that tries to bring some common sense into the discussion of the “collective wisdom of the masses” triumphalism that I myself engage in…

Using Wikipedia as an example, and embracing a bit of the Tyranny of the Or, his main thesis rests on the subtle straw man that the hive mentality of the Web is often kind of stupid…

No, the problem is in the way the Wikipedia has come to be regarded and used; how it’s been elevated to such importance so quickly. And that is part of the larger pattern of the appeal of a new online collectivism that is nothing less than a resurgence of the idea that the collective is all-wise, that it is desirable to have influence concentrated in a bottleneck that can channel the collective with the most verity and force. This is different from representative democracy, or meritocracy. This idea has had dreadful consequences when thrust upon us from the extreme Right or the extreme Left in various historical periods. The fact that it’s now being re-introduced today by prominent technologists and futurists, people who in many cases I know and like, doesn’t make it any less dangerous.

There was a well-publicized study in Nature last year comparing the accuracy of the Wikipedia to Encyclopedia Britannica. The results were a toss up. While there is a lingering debate about the validity of the study. The items selected for the comparison were just the sort that Wikipedia would do well on: Science topics that the collective at large doesn’t care much about. “Kinetic isotope effect” or “Vesalius, Andreas” are examples of topics that make the Britannica hard to maintain, because it takes work to find the right authors to research and review a multitude of diverse topics. But they are perfect for the Wikipedia. There is little controversy around these items, plus the Net provides ready access to a reasonably small number of competent specialist graduate student types possessing the manic motivation of youth.

A core belief of the wiki world is that whatever problems exist in the wiki will be incrementally corrected as the process unfolds. This is analogous to the claims of Hyper-Libertarians who put infinite faith in a free market, or the Hyper-Lefties who are somehow able to sit through consensus decision-making processes. In all these cases, it seems to me that empirical evidence has yielded mixed results. Sometimes loosely structured collective activities yield continuous improvements and sometimes they don’t. Often we don’t live long enough to find out. Later in this essay I’ll point out what constraints make a collective smart. But first, it’s important to not lose sight of values just because the question of whether a collective can be smart is so fascinating. Accuracy in a text is not enough. A desirable text is more than a collection of accurate references. It is also an expression of personality.

[via Clicked, a very useful almost daily run-down of what’s interesting in the Web, for those of us too obsessed with politics to find it on our own.]

Just got an email from TrueMajority.org alerting me to the Vermont Speaks Up Rally to Stop the Genocide in Darfur.

Date: Sunday, June 11, 2006
Time: 2:00 - 4:00 p.m.
Place: City Hall Park in Burlington

Speakers will include Suliman Giddo, co-founder and president of Darfur Peace and Development, Ben Cohen, and members of Burlington’s faith community, among others.

Politicians on hand will be: Matt Dunne, Pat Leahy, Bernie Sanders, Rich Tarrant, and Peter Welch.

And featuring entertainment by Ethan West & Company Green, Jeh Kulu Dance & Drum Theater, and Phil Cohen.