Jim Wolcott (fellow Hillary voter) dissects the feud — schism, actually — at Daily Kos and within the Democratic Party. Note well that the nasties in this story are the followers of Mr. Getalong.
The rancor was disproportionate in intensity and extravagant in invective, a fervor worthy of ancestral foes. Months-old grievances seethed and erupted as if they had been bubbling for centuries in a lake of bad blood. . . .
What chafed Hillary supporters was how many supposed liberal outposts chimed in with this chorus of abuse, from the op-ed pages of The New York Times (where only Paul Krugman seemed to have a kind word as Maureen Dowd kept reminding readers of Monica Lewinsky’s lipstick traces on the Clinton saga, and Gail Collins seemed to be putting on some sort of puppet show) to the studios of Air America (where hosts Randi Rhodes—who was suspended, then resigned, after calling Clinton a “whore†at a public appearance—and Thom Hartmann kept the hostility percolating), to progressive Internet mother ships such as Joshua Micah Marshall’s Talking Points Memo and the Huffington Post, where even a notable progressive such as Barbara Ehrenreich tried to tar Hillary with fascist associations. (The majority of Huffpo’s high-profile contributors were so over the rainbow about Obama that it was as if they had found rapture in the poppy fields and were rolling around on their backs like ladybugs.)
And quoting Kos himself over the departure/boycott of Hillary voters from his shrine:
“Clinton and her shrinking band of paranoid holdouts wail and scream about all those evil people who have ‘turned’ on Clinton and are no longer ‘honest power brokers’ or ‘respectable voices’ or whatnot, wearing blinders to reality, talking about silly little ‘strikes’ when in reality, Clinton is planning a far more drastic, destructive and debilitating civil war.â€
Obama may paint himself as Mr. Nice Guy but he certainly has a nasty bunch of friends.
Now I’m actually angrier about Obama and the Rev. Wright than before. When I complained about what Wright said the first times, I was told that I didn’t understand the history of the black church, I didn’t understand black liberationtheology, I didn’t listen to the whole context of what he said. Bull.
But now Obama repudiates Wright. And all Wright did was repeat the exact same crackpot crap that some of us had complained about before.
So before, I was as good as called racist or at least clueless for criticizing the not-so-good reverend. But now when Obama finally criticizes him, the New York Times editorial page — in a classic of doublespeak soft-headed mush from wimps — praises him for “the most forthright repudiation of an out-of-control supporter that we can remember.” Jesus.
Worse, the Times again implies that we’re all racists if we and candidates don’t criticize white crackpot crazy ministers as much as this one has been criticized. Well, I have my alibis: I’ve put in my time criticizing crackpots with white collars and white skins and protesting their bigotry. It’s the Times that is playing the race card here.
In the end, this isn’t about race at all — and I think it was a mistake, in the end, for Obama to put the needed discussion about race in America in the context of Wright.
No, this story is about a nutjob whom our potential president valued as an advisor. Obama would not repudiate Wright the first time he said all these hateful things; Obama did it only when they were repeated and when he realized that this could do him political damage.
You see, this is the problem I have with Obama. I’m still not sure what I think he is: a cynical politician who throws out empty rhetoric and makes these grand statements only when he needs to (that is, like every other cynical politician) or a mushy wimp who can’t make tough decisions because he thinks he can get along with everybody (Jimmy Carter).
Here’s the first example I’ve seen of a witness broadcasting live from a news event with a mobile phone on Flixwagon. It’s very rough — extremely rough thanks to a finger on the lens! — but it’s just a glimpse of what we’re going to see more and more as witnesses are equipped to share what they experience in news.
It’s no longer news that newspapers are reporting disastrous drops in circulation: “Apart from those two national dailies, which eked out gains of under 1 percent each, every other newspaper in the top 20 posted declines, according to figures released Monday by the Audit Bureau of Circulations.” It would be news if they figured out what to do about it.
Not that I expect a soul to watch but if you’re curious, here was my spiel about the interactive journalism program at the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism open house for our accepted students a week ago (this is where we convince them to come to use and not to go elsewhere).
It’s fascinating how new layers of Twitter as a platform for our thoughts keep emerging.
I saw Twitter-maker Ev Williams say today that he loves Twistori, which was inspired by friend Jonathan Harris’ WeFeelFine. It simply pulls out the tweets that have the words love, hate, think, believe, feel, and wish in them. It’s oddly compelling.
I’ve also seen work by the BBC and Reuters, among others, in trying to extract news from Twitter (and other us-created media) by looking for the hot words of news (explosion, evacuate…). This becomes a sort of canary in the news mine. People are writing about their lives and when news happens to or around them, they’ll surely tell their friends about it and now that is aggregated and searchable.
Next I expect someone to come up with a national mood index based on our tweets. Today, we’re feeling self-conscious.
Change in newspapers — upgrading, updating, inventing, innovating — should be celebrated, no matter what causes it. See the story of the Madison Capital Times shifting — “reluctantly,” says the NY Times copy editor — from print, 90 years after it was first printed, to the web. Bravo, I say. This is the kind of bold move the American newspaper industry should have made five years ago, when they easily could have foreseen this future. The public is online, the new means of gathering and sharing news is online, the medium is more efficient and cheaper to run, the old business model is shot. Why wait? Yes, I sympathize with the staffers who lost their jobs, just as I sympathize with those on other papers who’ve lost theirs because their managements have not been strategic and brave and have not retrained them (or to put the responsibility where it better belongs, they they haven’t retrained themselves). But every newspaper in America should be delighted this is happening and should be watching it closely to see what works and what doesn’t. I think Jay Rosen shares this view as he reports on the shift and gives good advice to the former paper’s editors:
* I know this isn’t how they’re thinking about it in Madison, but from my perspective Saturday marked the debut of a local newsblog and opinion site in Madison with an editorial staff of 40, and a web-to-print engine that is ready to start clicking. Those are basically good facts for the Cap Times. It’s up to the staff to bring journalistic imagination equal to them. . . .
* If I were Paul Fanlund, the editor of the Cap Times, I would set a first year goal of developing 400 solid contributors of news, expertise and opinion able to work with my 40 pros at headquarters, and I would calculate that to get the 400 I would need a to register about 4000 participants in various networked journalism projects.
I blame the adults around Miley Cyrus for exploiting her: Graydon Carter, editor of Vanity Fair, Annie Liebovitz, her agents, and her parents. She’s just a kid with a sweet show that millions more kids — including my daughter — love. She didn’t go out out on a Lindsay Lohan bender. She did was she was told. The photos are not the scandal that the press is making them out to be nor as shocking as various prudish parents’ associations will think as they, too, exploit young Miley. But Carter and Liebovitz knew damned well that they would cause this fuss. So they used a young girl to get attention. Liebovitz shouldn’t have taken the photos but more to the point, Carter shouldn’t have published them. Miley’s not the immature and irresponsible one here. Graydon is.
Eos, the great all-business (all-first, actually) airline to London is shutting down after something snagged its $50 million in financing, forcing it into bankruptcy. This pretty much leaves Silverjet, which I fly every time to London (and which offered Eos paassengers tickets at the same price). I can only hope that with the reasonably priced all-business market to London pretty much to itself — even though Virgin and BA are going to bring in all-biz flights, they are sure to be much more expensive — this will help Silverjet. If I had to fly one of the big, old guys at their big, old prices, I think I’d become an American isolationist. Man, the airline industry is a mess and with the price of fuel doing what it’s doing and the credit crunch, it’s only going to get messier. Damn.
Great discussion going on in the post about social insurance below. Please keep it coming there. This is very helpful in my thinking for my book. Thanks, all.
Some Norwegian journalists who visited CUNY on Friday emailed me to ask about definitions of quality in journalism today for a white paper they are writing. Here’s what I said. I’d like to hear what you say:
The first criteria for quality are obvious and timeless: accuracy, fairness, a compelling and efficient presentation, timeliness, relevance.
But I think it is also becoming important to be inventive and flexible. Too often, we defined quality according to the precepts of a priesthood: TV people, for example, who insisted that we had to do stand-ups and b-roll (is that an Americanism? it’s the extra footage gathered to make editing easier but it’s almost always faked: watch the person walk down the hall to nowhere) and noddies (that’s a Britishism, I believe: the cutaway reaction shots). That’s all silliness; worse, it’s fiction. But TV people defined quality by these elements.
I think it is vital for journalists today to reexamine all definitions of quality. For TV, isn’t it more important to tell the story well and efficiently and not bore us with visual cliches? We have learned in online video that the public often cares more about substance than style. For online journalism, fairness may be achieved not in quoting one person from column a and and one from column b in a simplistic exercise in balance but instead by having an open discussion.
We also add new definitions and ethics of quality: Transparency is overtaking objectivity as a standard in some quarters of journalism now. That could be defined by what we reporters reveal of our own perspectives and opinions. It could be achieved by revealing our sources and influences (every story should come with links to the materials we read and used). It could come from opening up the process of news judgment in an organization. Similarly, the ethic of the correction I have learned in blogs is more rigorous than in some old media; we do not erase our mistakes but cross them out to fess up to them; that, too, is a form of transparency.
I would add responsiveness as a mark of quality: Are we delivering to the public what it wants — and are we listening to find out what it wants? Do we open the means for our stories to be corrected and expanded? Do we have a way to hear the public’s definition of quality? Collaboration, I’d say, is the highest form of responsiveness.
Are these different in one medium vs. another? Not really. Yes, online opens new possibilities, such as links and interaction, but these really only become tools to learn new behaviors and ethics that can be carried to any medium, often with the help of online.
For my book, I’ve been thinking about a few industries that I think are impervious to social, Google-age, web-2.0, VRM goodness; we are bound to hate them.
Take insurance. I can’t see any way that I’m going to see insurance as a social experience. Jeremiah Owyang went looking and came up pretty much empty-handed.
The problem is, of course, that the insurance industry is built around getting us to take a sucker bet. Indeed, it’s a bet we want to lose. Nobody wants to have a legitimate reason to collect collision, fire, flood, health (apart from preventive care), or certainly life insurance. Worse than Vegas, we know that the industry stacks the odds against us; that’s the essence of its business and it is open about that. If we don’t collect, we are losers (we’ve lost our money) — and we we do collect, we’re still losers. The industry has to treat us like liars, only reluctantly giving us back the money we paid in. They make it all overcomplicated so we don’t know just how screwed we’re getting and so we make more safe (for them) bets. But we can’t afford to do without them. Insurance is our hedge.
So can you imagine what insurance 2.0 would look like? I can’t. I can imagine that we use social tools to gang up on the insurance industry, to, for example, create groups to take advantage of their rules or to decipher fine print for each other (but that’s really the antiinsurance). Could I imagine a truly cooperative, social insurance company where we insure each other — microinsurance? Frankly, no. There’s too much mistrust involved, too much suspicion of gaming and fraud; that negates the possibility of a system of social trust. Is there any point in having a MyAllstateIdeas, a la MyStarbucksIdeas, to work collaboratively with insurance companies? No. What am I going to suggest — make less and charge me less? Am I going to invent new products to give them money? (Gee, maybe I should insure my blog.)
No, I think our relationship with an insurance company is necessarily adversarial and one of mutual mistrust.
I come to the same conclusion about the law. Can you imagine the 2.0 lawyer? I can’t. They, too, are adversarial by definition.
So two questions: Could you imagine insurance 2.0?
And what other industries are similarly impervious to the possibility of our collaboration and affection?
