Some People Say

The Washington Post considers it a big news story that Republicans are criticizing SEIU for their ties to ACORN. The article says "some criticize," but here are the sum total of the critics in the story:

"Some Republicans", Republican Reps. Mark Steven Kirk and Peter Roskam of Illinois and Patrick T. McHenry of North Carolina, a guy named Herman Benson who appears to publicly hate SEIU for a living, and James "Buddy" Caldwell, the Democratic Attorney General of Louisiana, a state where the statewide Democrats are all Democrats in name only.

That seems like a broad cross-section of American opinion, worthy of the title "some".

Eric Boehlert traces this back to the media's touchiness with any criticism from the right that they are ignoring their issues. So they go completely in the other direction and dutifully type up guilt-by-association pieces like this, and they bury the truth about who is actually leading the crusade:

Today, with the GOP increasingly irrelevant and the right-wing media, and specifically Fox News, taking over as the Opposition Party, other journalists are now taking their cues in terms of partisan news from radio talk show hosts and cable TV hosts. It's unprecedented.

In today's "Some Criticize" era, all White House opponents have to do (regardless of who they are or what power they hold) is criticize Obama and the press corps snaps to attention and starts typing up the list of grievances. So today we have the Post furthering Fox News' attempted guilt-by-association with regards to ACORN and labor power SEIU, but the Post pretends it's really the GOP that's leading the charge:

"Last week, Republican Reps. Mark Steven Kirk and Peter Roskam of Illinois and Patrick T. McHenry of North Carolina urged the Census Bureau to stop allowing the SEIU to help recruit workers for its 2010 head count."

This utterly mundane partisan request suddenly qualifies as news in a Post article that's virtually barren of any actual revelations about ACORN or SEIU? Again, it's really Fox News and the GOP Noise Machine that are criticizing the "connections" between ACORN and SEIU, and it's the Post presenting that hodge-podge as news.

The article is really a ping-pong match of charges and random associations, like a written version of The Glenn Beck Show.

Meanwhile, Democrats in Congress, in a far more newsworthy story than what some Republicans are saying about whatever, have introduced a bill to hold defrauders of the government Treasury to the same standard to which the House held ACORN:

Top-ranking liberal lawmaker Rep. Betty McCollum (D-Minn.) pressed her colleagues to support a legislative counterpunch to the GOP’s effort to defund the controversial grass-roots organizing group ACORN.

McCollum, a senior Democratic Whip in her caucus, challenged the 172 Democrats who supported a measure to cut off federal funds for the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) to endorse a similar measure geared towards private companies in business with the government.

The appropriations committee member introduced the “ACORN Act,” or “Against Corporations Organizing to Rip-off the Nation Act,” last week; it is the first formal defense against the recent GOP success in Congress to defund the left-leaning activist organization.

Democratic Reps. Raul Grijalva (Ariz.), David Obey (Wis.), Pete Stark (Calif.), Keith Ellison (Minn.), Lynn Woolsey (Calif.), Jim McDermott (Wash.) and Barbara Lee (Calif.) have co-sponsored the bill that would cut off federal agreements with private companies, nonprofits and other groups that have been convicted of defrauding the government.

If we had a media capable of dealing in an actual even-handed manner instead of the fake even-handedness they currently peddle, every Republican in the country would be asked if they support holding all corporations convicted of defrauding the government to the same standard.

Instead, we get "Some people say SEIU has cooties because it played in the same sandbox as ACORN."

America's Next Great Dissembler

Bobby Jindal has an interesting op-ed today in the Washington Post - I guess he won that "America's Next Great Pundit" contest - claiming that nobody wants the Democratic plans for health care reform.

But memo to Washington: The debate on health care has moved on. Democratic plans for a government takeover are passé. The people don't want it. Believe the polls, the town halls, the voters. Only Democrats in Washington would propose new taxes on businesses and families in the middle of a recession, $900 billion in new spending at a time of record deficits, and increased taxes on health insurance and products to reduce health-care costs.

You'll notice that Jindal offers no numbers as proof that "the people don't want it," no actual polls to back up his claim. Chris Good has those numbers, and Jindal is wrong. In fact, more recent polls show that reform has grown stronger in September after bottoming out in August. The fact that Jindal doesn't give any proof for his assertion is what you would call a "tell".

Jindal then goes on to outline some Republican ideas for health care, but of course none of these are in any Republican bills for health care reform, because there is no such document. These are the Bobby Jindal ideas for health care, and half of them are already embedded in the Democratic effort - guaranteed issue for pre-existing conditions, aiding small businesses to buy insurance, portability through the exchanges, transparency in billing, delivery system reform, health IT, covering children up to age 25, rewarding healthy lifestyles and prevention.

The Washington Post has written enough about the health care debate to know that support is strengthening for reform, and that lots of Jindal's ideas have been adopted in the overall legislation. But their op-ed page allows anyone to print whatever lies they decide to forward that day, so they say nothing about the facts of Jindal's piece. They are intentionally misleading their readers, and they don't seem to care.

Requiem For A Public Option

The traditional media is certainly trying its best to bury the public option today, whether motivated by their corporate colleagues, the usual bipartisan fetishists or key figures inside the White House itself. Both major newspapers write essentially the same article about it today. The New York Times writes an elegy for the public option beginning with the line "It was just one line in a campaign manifesto, and it hardly seemed the most significant or contentious." The story goes on to claim that the public option's death is basically attributable to its probable success.

Champions of the public plan said it could save money by using Medicare rates and fee schedules to pay hospitals and doctors. In a book last year, one of Mr. Obama’s top advisers, former Senator Tom Daschle, said consumers should have the option of enrolling in “a government-run insurance program modeled after Medicare, a proven and popular program.”

That is exactly what worries health care providers, who say Medicare pays them less than market rates paid by private insurers. And they have pressed their concerns on Capitol Hill with a small army of lobbyists.

Conservatives have another concern. They see the public option as a step toward a single-payer system in which the government would pay most of the nation’s health care bill and could supplant private insurers.

Essentially, health care providers want to maximize their profits, and so they prefer an inefficient, profit-taking private insurance system. They are symbiotic to protect one another's profits.

The Washington Post's article gives yet another voice to White House officials' feigned surprise that the public option has become so outsized in the debate.

White House officials are somewhat baffled by House Democrats continuing to push for legislation that includes a robust public insurance option when it's clear the Senate will not embrace such a provision. In their view, the public option was never debated in the campaign, was never the center of a national debate and appears to lack the votes regardless of what public opinion polls show about its popularity.

In the opposite view, the public option may have not been debated in the campaign, but it's the center of a national debate right now, polls show it popular, and if it's such a minor part of the overall bill, why are Democratic moderates holding the legislation hostage to it? But for some reason, the dynamic never flows that way in Washington.

If there was ever a moment to get through to the White House, it happened yesterday. The President, at a rally in Minnesota, stated his support for a public option, and the crowd went wild. Absolutely nuts. So much so, the President seemed unnerved by it. He kept on with the same rhetoric from his Wendesday speech about how it's not a big deal and it wouldn't cover everybody. But efforts to rein that in just elicited confusion.



Like it or not, the public option has major grassroots support, and it's driving whatever energy exists around the bill. Kill it and you kill any attempt at leveraging that energy. And the prospects for a bill become remote. Maybe Obama figured this out yesterday in Minnesota.

Spitting Out The Mouthpiece

Where oh where will I get my weekly dose of horrendously bad comedy now?

The Washington Post has brought down the curtain on "Mouthpiece Theater."

Executive Editor Marcus Brauchli killed the satirical video series Wednesday after harsh criticism of a joke about Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, which had prompted him to pull the latest episode from the paper's Web site Friday night. The Post staffers who appeared in the videos, Dana Milbank and Chris Cillizza, agreed with the decision and apologized in separate interviews.

"I don't think the series worked as they intended," Brauchli said. "It was meant to be funny and insightful and translate the superb journalism Chris and Dana do in print and online into a new format."

"Mouthpiece Theater" was designed as a sendup of pompous punditry, with Milbank, the paper's Washington Sketch columnist, and Cillizza, a White House correspondent who writes The Fix blog, appearing with oversized pipes and smoking jackets.

Um, it wasn't a sendup of anything. It was exactly what it looked like - bitchy, self-regarding gossip from two inside-the-Beltway Villagers who accurately translated their feelings of entitlement into video form. They weren't sending up pompous punditry, they were EXHIBITING it.

By the way, you'll be excited to know that Brauchli praised Milbank and Cillizza effusively and welcomed them back to work on their regular assignments of spouting conventional wisdom and producing Mean Girl low-rent Maureen Dowd ripoffs (which is quite a feat).

Winners Of The Village Open Mike Comedy Award For "Outstanding Spirit!"

Chris Cillizza and Dana Milbank, after practicing in their basement for days, have a HIGH-larious response to criticism over their comedy gold of calling Hillary Clinton a bitch.

The proper lesson to have inferred would have been this: IF the Washington Post's website has a feature that only receives substantial attention for how bad it is, and that no one pays any mind to were it not for an awful, mean-spirited joke, THEN perhaps it is a feature that the website can do without. Or, alternately, they can ride the traffic generated by the world's outrage, which is what I gather Fred Hiatt does, on the op-ed page, where people just make stuff up.

Don't worry though! Nobody's learned a gollydarned thing! Today, Mouthpiece Theatre returns with a "response video," in which Cillizza and Milbank basically whine about having been criticized by the blogosphere.

Of course, the two never make any apology, or, indeed, any overt mention of the brouhaha to which they are referring, so if you weren't paying attention last week, you have no clue what they are even doing today. But that's all beside the important point that they are making: HOW DARE the blogosphere notice when two grown men act like jackasses, on web videos! Leave Britney alone!

The worst thing about this video, which isn't worth the effort to embed, is the Marriott hotels ad placed right before it. Is Marriott endorsing the naming of Hillary Clinton as a bitch? Is the hotel chain endorsing the most unfunny comedy since "East German Economist Night O' Yuks" back in the '80s?

Here's some actual humor, and I guess the best thing that can be said about Mouthpiece Theater is that without them, this biting satire wouldn't exist:

Crazy Dana

Probably because it's so unsuccessful, the Washington Post has kept throwing money at this horrific "Mouthpiece Theater" gossip show they do with Dana Milbank and Chris Cillizza while having to massively cut costs to return to profitability. Their investment in Milbank's comedy stylings yielded this gem today.

If I were on the board of directors of the Kaplan test prep company, and discovered that the people running a money-losing Kaplan subsidiary (better known as the Washington Post) had greenlighted a feature called "Mouthpiece Theater," I would demand that either they be fired, or that the Post itself be liquidated.

In today's episode, Dana Milbank suggests Hillary Clinton should drink "Mad Bitch" beer.

The episode starts with an ad for BP. So, is it time to boycott them and tell them the reason?

I've seen open mike nights with more comedy talent than Mouthpiece Theater.

...And WaPo takes down the clip. You can see it here.

Rove Tries To Wiggle Off The Hook

So you have the Washington Post headlining that E-Mails Show Larger White House Role in Prosecutor Firings and the New York Times stating Rove Says His Role in Prosecutor Firings Was Small. Somehow, I assume they're both right, and it all depends on your angle. I mean, I'm sure Rove said he had just a small role in the US Attorney firings. Rove says a lot of things, most of them untrue. I'd prefer to do as WaPo did, and look at the documentary evidence:

The e-mails and new interviews with key participants reflect contacts among Rove, aides in the Bush political affairs office and White House lawyers about the dismissal of three of the nine U.S. attorneys fired in 2006: New Mexico's David C. Iglesias, the focus of ire from GOP lawmakers; Missouri's Todd Graves, who had clashed with one of Rove's former clients; and Arkansas's Bud Cummins, who was pushed out to make way for a Rove protégé [...]

Complaints about Iglesias began at least a year before he was relieved of his job, according to documents reviewed by The Post. Then- Sen. Pete V. Domenici (R-N.M.), his chief of staff, Steve Bell, and GOP lawyers in the state lobbied aggressively to oust the prosecutor. But the activity accelerated in fall 2006.

Responding to questions about another little-understood event, Rove told reporters in the interview this month that he had not seen a letter that Justice Department officials prepared and sent to the Senate on Feb. 23, 2007. The letter stated that "the department is not aware of Karl Rove playing any role in the decision to appoint [protégé] Mr. Griffin" to a top job in Little Rock.

The Justice Department later retracted the statement, which the inspector general concluded was "misleading." [...]

But internal White House correspondence dating to two years earlier suggests that job prospects for Timothy Griffin, who had worked for Rove in the administration, were a hot topic of conversation. In a Feb. 11, 2005, e-mail, Rove wrote to deputy Sara Taylor: "Give him options. Keep pushing for Justice and let him decide. I want him on the team."

Then-White House counsel Miers e-mailed Taylor a month later, writing, "Sara, Karl asked me to forward you a list of locations where we may consider replacing the USAs."

Rove suggested Little Rock, where Cummins was U.S. attorney, as a post for Griffin, reminding Miers in March 2005 that "that's where he's from." The next day, Sara Taylor forwarded communications about Griffin to then-Republican National Committee Chairman Ken Mehlman, who wrote, "let me know his reaction," according to the e-mails.

It's interesting that we're just learning that Rove held an interview with the Times and the Post this month, where he tried to spin them both about his role in the scandal.

In an interview with The Post and the New York Times this month, Rove described himself as a "conduit" of grievances from lawmakers and others about the performance of home-state prosecutors. The e-mails and interview were provided on the condition that they not be released until Rove's House testimony concluded. He said he did not recall several events because of his busy job and asserted that he had done nothing to influence criminal cases, an allegation by Democrats that has dogged him for years. Luskin, Rove's attorney, asserted that "there was never any point where Karl was trying to get a particular prosecution advanced or retarded."

"Yes, I was a recipient of complaints, and I passed them on to the counsel's office to be passed onto Justice," Rove said. The complaints about weak enforcement of voter fraud laws and public corruption "had the sound of authenticity to me. If what I'm told is accurate, it's really troublesome."

The NYT article suggests that Rove selectively leaked emails to put himself in a peripheral role in the firings. I don't know how someone peripheral writes something like “Give me a report on what U.S. attorneys slots are vacant or expected to be open soon,” as Rove did in an email in November 2006.

This is classic Rove - pre-empting whatever leaks come out of the House Judiciary Committee with incriminating but less damaging material that he handpicks to send to the press, who dutifully writes it all up. But Rove appears to be so deep in the US Attorney purges that he cannot credibly spin this away.

Journamalism

Two pretty incredible scandals over the past couple weeks in the world of journalism really lay bare how corroded the Beltway media structure truly is. First we had the Washington Post Pay-2-Play scandal, which as their ombudsman reports was far more widespread than at first disclosed, with key editors in the newsroom knowing about it for months. And now, from South Carolina's flagship paper The State, we learn about how access drives everything inside the Beltway.

National media blitzed Gov. Mark Sanford’s staff, offering big ratings and, possibly, a sympathetic venue in an effort to land the first interview with the governor after his six-day trip to Argentina.

In addition, a blogger and state leaders reached out to Sanford’s office to try to coordinate a way to “push back” on the growing mystery surrounding Sanford’s absence.

The behind-the-scenes maneuvering is detailed in e-mails released by the governor’s office this week in response to The State’s request under the freedom of information act.

The e-mails show some outlets promised Sanford “friendly ground,” while others objected to early reports that questioned his disappearance.

“If you all want to speak on this publicly, you’re welcome to Washington Times Radio,” wrote staffer Joseph Deoudes to Sanford spokesman Joel Sawyer on June 23. “You know that you will be on friendly ground here!" [...]

Another reporter, Griff Jenkins of Fox News, invited Sanford on to set the record straight.

“Having known the Governor for years and even worked with him when he would host radio shows for me,” Jenkins wrote to Sawyer on June 23, “I find the story and the media frenzy surrounding it to be absolutely ridiculous!” [...]

“If he wants something more personal for the blog to push back, I’m happy to help,” wrote Erick Erickson, a writer for RedState.com. On June 23, Erickson ripped “media speculation” about Sanford’s whereabouts.

“I wasn’t trying to be a reporter. I wanted to curtail the story,” Erickson said by e-mail. “Well that didn’t work.” [...]

The media e-mails also illuminate the tactics of national outlets to land the big interview.

ABC News White House reporter Jake Tapper e-mailed Sawyer twice on June 23, both to note coverage of competitor NBC.

With a subject line of “NBC spot was slimy,” Tapper e-mailed Sawyer a “Today” show transcript of Sanford coverage, calling it “insulting.” Later, Tapper forwarded Sawyer a Twitter post by “Meet The Press” host David Gregory.

Jeff Schneider, a vice president at ABC News, said Tapper was “carrying some water for producers who knew he had a relationship with the governor’s office.”

My favorite is actually from "Governor" Stephen Colbert, although he actually comes off looking just as bad as the rest of the media - though he's not a member of it and thus looks a bit better.

The media really favors the "get" over the truth, and it took a paper like The State to actually do some reporting on this story. Good for them for publishing these emails, by the way, because it's quite illuminating. Now, a for-profit business like journalism could maybe be given a bit of slack for wanting to chase a popular story. But these are the same people who call for blogger ethics panels at every opportunity, who put themselves on some kind of pedestal where they are unassailable objectives observers, when that clearly isn't the case. They drive stories based on external events, access and ego-massaging, and it happens much more than anyone thinks.

Health Care, Lobbyists, and Journalism

Happy to be on the opposing side of a lobbyist/access scandal rather than in the middle of it, today the Washington Post writes about the hundreds of former politicians and staffers-turned-lobbyists for the health care industry, fighting tooth and nail against systemic reform.

The nation's largest insurers, hospitals and medical groups have hired more than 350 former government staff members and retired members of Congress in hopes of influencing their old bosses and colleagues, according to an analysis of lobbying disclosures and other records.

The tactic is so widespread that three of every four major health-care firms have at least one former insider on their lobbying payrolls, according to The Washington Post's analysis.

Did that analysis come from the newsroom or the guest list for one of Katherine Weymouth's salons?

Nearly half of the insiders previously worked for the key committees and lawmakers, including Sens. Max Baucus (D-Mont.) and Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa), debating whether to adopt a public insurance option opposed by major industry groups. At least 10 others have been members of Congress, such as former House majority leaders Richard K. Armey (R-Tex.) and Richard A. Gephardt (D-Mo.), both of whom represent a New Jersey pharmaceutical firm.

The hirings are part of a record-breaking influence campaign by the health-care industry, which is spending more than $1.4 million a day on lobbying in the current fight, according to disclosure records. And even in a city where lobbying is a part of life, the scale of the effort has drawn attention. For example, the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA) doubled its spending to nearly $7 million in the first quarter of 2009, followed by Pfizer, with more than $6 million.

This has turned lobbying sessions in the major committees into office reunions, where former staffer get together with the politicians for whom they once worked. It begs the question about those pay-to-play sessions: why would any health care company want to pay up to $250,000 for access to the lawmakers making the biggest decisions on health care, when they all have people on their lobbying staff who already know how that lawmaker takes their coffee, and can surely use the knowledge gained through work experience on Capitol Hill to further their employer's agenda? Aside from the unseemliness of it all, the "salon" idea seems like another bad business model.

The use of insiders who move from politics to K Street has a damaging effect on the whole debate, using the journalist/source model as an interesting parallel:

Suppressing your instinct to trust a former chief of staff and legislative director is a hard thing to do. Refusing to return the calls of favored staffers and colleagues goes against every social grain in our bodies. It should be easy to separate professional responsibilities and personal feelings. But it isn't.

Journalists consistently use this to our advantage: When you hear that someone is well-sourced, it generally means they have good personal relationships that make it more likely that insiders will tell them things. A big part of the job is leveraging social pressures to gain access to protected information. And, somewhat amazingly, it works. But the relationship between a journalist and a longtime source is nothing compared to the relationship between a senator and a longtime staffer. One of the secrets about lobbying in Washington is that money doesn't buy access. It buys people who already have access. And that makes it much more insidious.

Relating this to the pay-for-play scheme, I think we can surmise why corporate insiders would use the media as a pass-through for access, whether it's The Washington Post or The Atlantic (that's quite a good article from Zachary Roth about their long history of corporate-sponsored "salons"). The question lies with who is being bought - the politicians, the lobbyists, or the media itself. I would argue the latter. By facilitating the relationship, they become compromised within it. They start to hedge a bit. They adopt a worldview that aligns pretty perfectly with the forces of the status quo on which they are supposed to report. They interweave themselves into the system and become partners within it. And the establishment thus speaks with one voice.

The Village Is Very Sorry For Being The Village

In the Apology of the Week (all respect to Harry Shearer), Katherine Weymouth requests a mea culpa for trying to profit off of connecting insiders in government to the lobby community.

So what happened? Like other media companies, The Post hosts conferences and live events that bring together journalists, government officials and other leaders for discussions of important topics. These events make news and inform their audiences. We had planned to extend this business to include smaller gatherings, a practice that has become common at other media companies.

From the outset, we laid down firm parameters to ensure that these events would be consistent with The Post's values. If the events were to be sponsored by other companies, everything would be at arm's length -- sponsors would have no control over the content of the discussions, and no special access to our journalists.

If our reporters were to participate, there would be no limits on what they could ask. They would have full access to participants and be able to use any information or ideas to further their knowledge and understanding of any issues under discussion. They would not be asked to invite other participants and would serve only as moderators.

When the flier promoting our first planned event to potential sponsors was released, it overstepped all these lines. Neither I nor anyone in our news department would have approved any event such as the flier described.

The shorter version of this pretty much tracks with my assessment at the time the scandal broke and Weymouth cancelled the dinner: "Now the Post can go back to being influenced by lobbyists and setting conventional wisdom in Washington without all that dirty money changing hands."

The only difference between this proposed salon and the other "conferences and live events that bring together journalists, government officials and other leaders for discussions of important topics" is that the proceeds went more directly into the pockets of the Post in this case. As Marcy Wheeler notes, Weymouth never disavows the actual content of the salons or the even the exchange of money (as long as it's indirect) to set up meetings between lobbyists and politicians - just the fact that this particular salon would be off-the-record.

I don't suspect for a second that lobbyists have much trouble finding their way into the upper echelons of Washington to speak their peace, anyway. The Washington Post simply wanted to charge for drinks to this particular cocktail party. Other than that, they cannot imagine how any of this could be a problem.

One can hardly blame a struggling newspaper wanting to open up another revenue stream. The problem lies in the barely-discernible difference between essentially a pay-to-play scheme and the normal social and political transactions in Washington.

WaPo FAIL

I don't care about any of this, Nico Pitney is still such a dick:

For $25,000 to $250,000, The Washington Post has offered lobbyists and association executives off-the-record, nonconfrontational access to "those powerful few": Obama administration officials, members of Congress, and — at first — even the paper’s own reporters and editors.

The astonishing offer was detailed in a flier circulated Wednesday to a health care lobbyist, who provided it to a reporter because the lobbyist said he felt it was a conflict for the paper to charge for access to, as the flier says, its “health care reporting and editorial staff."

With the newsroom in an uproar after POLITICO reported the solicitation, Executive Editor Marcus Brauchli said in a staffwide e-mail that the newsroom would not participate in the first of the planned events — a dinner scheduled July 21 at the home of Publisher and Chief Executive Officer Katharine Weymouth.

The offer — which essentially turns a news organization into a facilitator for private lobbyist-official encounters — was a new sign of the lengths to which news organizations will go to find revenue at a time when most newspapers are struggling for survival.

I know that newspapers are having cash-flow problems, but this is absolutely beyond the pale. For all the stories about blogger ethics, I don't have access to anyone at the highest levels of government that I can sell.

Their explanation for this is pretty weasel-worded: "The flier circulated this morning came out of a business division for conferences and events, and the newsroom was unaware of such communication. It went out before it was properly vetted, and this draft does not represent what the company’s vision for these dinners are, which is meant to be an independent, policy-oriented event for newsmakers. As written, the newsroom could not participate in an event like this."

First of all, "the newsroom" members were not the only ones involved in this. Second, the "as written" addendum renders this explanation meaningless. A tweak here, a tweak there, and everyone's right back in business. But I'm sure the elites will tell us how this is perfectly normal, nothing to see here, etc.

There's a petition asking the Washington Post to publish a full list of all lobbyists who participate in these salons and trade dollars for access.

These "salons" have already been cancelled, and look what the Publisher says was the real problem:

"Absolutely, I'm disappointed," Weymouth, the chief executive of Washington Post Media, said in an interview. "This should never have happened. The fliers got out and weren't vetted. They didn't represent at all what we were attempting to do. We're not going to do any dinners that would impugn the integrity of the newsroom."

Translation: "And I would have got away with it, too, if it weren't for you meddling kids."

Well, I'm glad that whole mess is over. Now the Post can go back to being influenced by lobbyists and setting conventional wisdom in Washington without all that dirty money changing hands.

The Last Froomkin

Here's his final column for the Washington Post, a neat summary of his major themes throughout five-plus years. Obviously the WaPo has more important avenues for their money, like dressing up Dana Milbank and Chris Cillizza like fops. So we'll have to enjoy Froomkin elsewhere. Check this site for archives and an update as to where he'll go next.

The Aristocrats

I don't think you can find a more perfect summation of the traditional media inside Washington than this - Dana Milbank and Chris Cillizza dressed like fops in bowties and smoking jackets - or more likely, dressed like their own mental projection of themselves - smugly discoursing, with CHAMBER MUSIC in the background, about Beltway gossip. You would think they'd go ahead and use the British accents too.



Amazingly, this isn't a product of two You Tubers engaging in a parody of the Village mindset, but a video produced by two of the top political reporters at the Washington Post. Two respected figures inside the Beltway, who get all kinds of face time on major media.

I think at this point, we can stop asking "If only the media would cover such-and-such story in THIS way..." For that to be successful, we would have to get such a story covered by someone like these two. That's just not going to happen.

Froomkin Torched

I actually don't read a ton of punditry, which may sound odd to some people. I prefer primary sources, and I find the High Broderism so prevalent in the chattering class to be completely unworthy of the slog. If a pundit says something particularly egregious I'll probably find it from elsewhere. But to me, Dan Froomkin was quite a good pundit, always intellectually honest and worth reading. And so the Washington Post fired him today, according to Michael Calderon. Several things are notable about this. Glennzilla notes that Froomkin's columns are widely read and populat online. Second, far from being a house organ for the President as long as he had a D next to his name, of late Froomkin has shown himself completely willing to criticize the President from the left:

The Politico says the move is "sure to ignite the left-wing blogosphere," but Froomkin's departure, if true, should disappoint anyone concerned with insightful political analysis. Indeed, far-right complaints notwithstanding, Froomkin has spent months scrutinizing the Obama White House, cutting the Democratic president no slack at all. Just over the past couple of days, Froomkin offered critical takes on the president's proposed regulations of the financial industry, follow-through on gay rights, and foot-dragging on Bush-era torture revelations.

Froomkin was one of the media's most important critics of the Bush White House, and conservative bashing notwithstanding, was poised to be just as valuable holding the Obama White House accountable for its decisions.

The Post, a sea of arch-conservatives (Will, Krauthammer) and status-quo Broderists (Hiatt, Cohen, Broder) had an oasis with Froomkin, who did the work media should do - questioning power vigorously regardless of ideology. Now they fired him. Sad.

...Froomkin's statement:

I’m terribly disappointed. I was told that it had been determined that my White House Watch blog wasn’t "working" anymore. But from what I could tell, it was still working very well. I also thought White House Watch was a great fit with The Washington Post brand, and what its readers reasonably expect from the Post online.

As I’ve written elsewhere, I think that the future success of our business depends on journalists enthusiastically pursuing accountability and calling it like they see it. That’s what I tried to do every day. Now I guess I'll have to try to do it someplace else.

George Will: I Don't Know Anything About California Either!

I don't know the last time George Will has actually set foot in California, but his complete hash of a column about the state suggests he doesn't know a thing about it. Most of it is a rehash of the same tired, false conservative tropes - that job creators are fleeing the state (not, um, true), that state spending is out of control (not, um, true), that public employees and their unions are bankrupting the state (California has the second-lowest number of full-time government employees per capita among all states, so, wrong again, George). But putting that aside, it is simply astonishing that anyone could write an entire column about California budget issues without bothering to mention the inconvenient fact of the 2/3 requirement for budgets and taxes. Will's notion that the Democratic legislature has made the state "liberalism's laboratory" cannot be reconciled by the conservative veto over any tax hikes or budget solutions.

Unsurprisingly, Will (who probably got paid handsomely by the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association to write this drivel) rejects the May 19 ballot measures, as do Calitics. But he completely and totally misreads the issues facing the legislature, the structural constraints upon them, and the solutions necessary to move the state forward. Showing himself to know nothing about California, maybe Will should stick to lying about climate change repeatedly.

The Revolt At The Washington Post

This slow but growing rollout of frustration from inside the Washington Post at George Will's pig-ignorance on climate change has become very compelling to watch. I still think the problem resides with Editorial Board chief Fred Hiatt for printing not only the false op-ed, but the continued lies and distortions from Will, in the first place. He is not entitled by virtue of his editorial position to lie. The editors fail in their responsibility to inform the public in that scenario. And Eugene Robinson basically called them on it.

ROBINSON: What George Will did was cherry-pick a sentence in a report, you know, be very persnickety in the way he parsed his sentences, and end up making it sound as if the report had said the exact opposite of what it actually said. He was persnickety enough that his editors, who also happen to be my editors, felt he didn’t quite cross the line. I thought he did. And the ombudsman agreed with me, actually, and wrote about it in last Sunday’s paper.

In a related note, Tom Toles rocks.

The blame does indeed lie with the editors who allowed the lies to appear in print. And it taints not just the editorial page but the entire newspaper. And clearly the reporters there know that, which is why they're speaking out. Ultimately, the editors hold the cards, they can stop providing a platform for misinformation, and the passive-aggressive way they're going about "addressing" the issue speaks very low of them.

New Data Show George Will Is Full Of Crap

The Washington Post goes with the most passive-aggressive way possible to smack down their op-ed columnist.

The satellite data released by NASA and the National Snow and Ice Data Center show that the maximum extent of the 2008-2009 winter sea ice cover was the fifth-lowest since researchers began collecting such information 30 years ago. The past six years have produced the six lowest maximums in that record, and the new data show that the percentage of older, thicker and more persistent ice shrank to its lowest level ever, at just 9.8 percent of the winter ice cover.

"We're seeing an ice cover that's younger and that's thinner as we head into summer," Walt Meier, a scientist at the National Snow and Ice Data Center, said in a telephone news conference. "It's been a pretty sharp decline."

The new evidence -- including satellite data showing that the average multiyear wintertime sea ice cover in the Arctic in 2005 and 2006 was nine feet thick, a significant decline from the 1980s -- contradicts data cited in widely circulated reports by Washington Post columnist George F. Will that sea ice in the Arctic has not significantly declined since 1979.

The reference to Will appears in paragraph 9, by the way.

To the WaPo's credit, they also published a more extensive rebuke to Will on their website from Andrew Freedman. And they published a response in their paper from Chris Mooney a week or so ago. But all of this damage control, in the face of continued anti-science columns on the subject from Will, represents a real danger to the credibility of the newspaper. They can continue to gently contradict him throughout the paper, or they could, and this is just off the top of my head, not publish the guy if he keeps making demonstrably false claims.

Inside-Outside Movement On The Restoration Of Science

After some ridiculous obstructionism, John Holdren and Jane Lubchenco finally won confirmation to the Administration positions of science advisor and head of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), respectively. Lubchenco's agency conducts most of the federal government's research into climate change, and so an expanded policy role for her means better data and a better understanding of the overall challenges that accompany a warming planet. The stimulus gave the NOAA budget a 20% increase, and now that will be put to use in forming a National Climate Service.

One of her first initiatives, she added, will be to establish a National Climate Service, loosely modeled on the National Weather Service.

"NOAA has a key role to play in providing the fundamental knowledge about the climate system, providing data as to how the system is changing and taking all of that information and providing it in a way that's easy to understand in order to make decisions," she said.

Hopefully the increased data and better modeling can prove to policymakers that the costs of NOT dealing with climate change far outweigh the up-front costs. In fact, the cap and trade system proposed in the federal budget pays for itself through charging business for permits to pollute, and funnels much of that to Americans to offset increased energy prices. There is no fiscal and certainly no ecological reason to ignore climate change any longer. As Lubchenco notes, "long-term economic prosperity depends on a healthy environment."

While Lubchenco promises more institutional information on the impact of climate change, the lack of legitimate PUBLIC information poses a real danger to the political will to set policies to combat it. That's why Chris Mooney's op-ed refuting George Will's nonsensical denialism means a lot. The Washington Post didn't print Mooney's rebuttal out of an internal conscience, but because progressives and environmentalists placed real pressure on them. Getting the record on Will's lies in print at his own paper represents a big victory. We're not going to stamp out anti-science covering for industry polluters overnight, but the combination of bottom-up calls for change and a real commitment from the executive branch and the relevant agencies can be powerful.

Will Drags Down Journalism With Him

This week we have seen perhaps a tipping point in the decline of American newspapers. Hearst announced they may sell or close the San Francisco Chronicle, a month after they said the same about the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. The two newspapers in Philadelphia, the Inquirer and the Daily News, filed for bankruptcy, as did the Journal Register Company, which owns 20 papers in the Northeast. And the Rocky Mountain News in Denver ran its last edition yesterday.

As much as we don't want to admit it, some of this is inevitable. The medium of delivered print newspapers in an environment where anyone can hop online and read virtually any article around the nation or the world is going to be threatened. That advertising revenue is falling because of the economic meltdown is just accelerating this decline. While newspaper websites generally do quite well, they haven't been able to monetize the content to a degree that's economically feasible. And the overall threat here is the death of news reporting, not the physical newspapers themselves. At least that's the view of Gary Kamiya.

If newspapers die, so does reporting. That's because the majority of reporting originates at newspapers. Online journalism is essentially parasitic. Like most TV news, it derives or follows up on stories that first appeared in print. Former Los Angeles Times editor John Carroll has estimated that 80 percent of all online news originates in print. As a longtime editor of an online journal who has taken part in hundreds of editorial meetings in which story ideas are generated from pieces that appeared in print, that figure strikes me as low.

There's no reason to believe this is going to change. Currently there is no business model that makes online reporting financially viable. From a business perspective, reporting is a loser. There are good financial reasons why the biggest content-driven Web business success story of the last few years, the Huffington Post, does very little original reporting. Reported pieces take a lot of time, cost a lot of money, require specialized skills and don't usually generate as much traffic as an Op-Ed screed, preferably by a celebrity. It takes a facile writer an hour to write an 800-word rant. Very seldom can the best daily reporters and editors produce copy that fast.

But the story is more complicated than that. At the same time that newspapers are dying, blogging and "unofficial" types of journalism continue to expand, grow more sophisticated and take over some (but not all) of the reportorial functions once performed by newspapers. New technologies provide an infinitely more robust feed of raw data to the public, along with the accompanying range of filtering, interpreting and commenting mechanisms that the Internet excels in generating.

As these developments expand, our knowledge of the world will become much less broad. Document-based reporting and academic-style research will increasingly replace face-to-face reporting. And the ideal of journalistic objectivity and fairness will increasingly crumble, to be replaced by more tendentious and opinionated reports.

Paul Starr makes a similar argument in The New Republic, saying that the loss of newspapers will most impact local news coverage and lead to a rise in local corruption.

Now, I agree with this to an extent. The breadth of material presented in a newspaper is not entirely likely to be replicated online, at least not at any one place. More things would happen in the shadows in a post-newspaper world. And I hope for that not to happen. At the same time, there's a lot of redundancy in newspapers. Dozens if not hundreds of different writers across the country cover the exact same Obama address to Congress that I watched with my eyes as well, and can just as easily form an opinion on. There is an argument that local papers should focus on local reporting, and get their national news from national sources, which would probably still offer enough of a variety.

This breaks down when the papers that are able to weather the decline, the ones with the highest reputation and the broadest base of reporters, who could funnel news across the country and present themselves as an established brand, soil themselves with demonstrably mendacious columnists that call into question the editorial aptitude of the whole project.

Clearly, the main cause of the crisis is structural/technological shifts in the media and economic landscape. But a small number of news organizations are actually well-positioned, in principle, to benefit over the long run from these changes. Papers like The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post have strong brands and the possibility of becoming national news organizations that partially fill the space left empty by the receding metro dailies in Detroit, Seattle, San Francisco and elsewhere. But The Washington Post, by standing behind the claim that up is down if George Will says that is is, is pissing that brand away. Rather than complaining to me, people who work at, or care about, The Washington Post need to complain to Fred Hiatt and ensure that something gets done.

Meanwhile, one of the Post’s main competitors in the world of papers with potential to attract a national audience is The New York Times. So faced with a humiliating abrogation of basic responsibilities by its competitor, does the Times take the opportunity to pour some salt in the wounds? No! Instead, out comes Andrew Revkin with a false equivalence article painting Will with the same brush as Al Gore. Will’s sin is to say that the world is not getting warmer when, in fact, it is. Gore’s sin was to say that warming is happening (it is) and to illustrate the problems with this trend by referring to a chart that Revkin deems unduly alarmist but that Gore found in The New York Times. Hm.

And since this was written, George Will responded to that falsely equivalent NYT article with a pissy rant standing by the substance of his global warming denialist column of the week prior. In doing so he defends the substance of a data point he included about sea ice levels in Antarctica, despite the climate research center where Will got the data has publicly disavowed it. And then, Will's editor Fred Hiatt defends his writer in some of the weirdest ways possible.

Hiatt insists Will's entitled to his opinion about the global warming facts because those facts are just too complicated--too unknowable--and who the hell are readers to claim otherwise? Hiatt told CJR:

"If you want to start telling me that columnists can’t make inferences which you disagree with—and, you know, they want to run a campaign online to pressure newspapers into suppressing minority views on this subject—I think that’s really inappropriate. It may well be that he is drawing inferences from data that most scientists reject — so, you know, fine, I welcome anyone to make that point. But don’t make it by suggesting that George Will shouldn’t be allowed to make the contrary point. Debate him."

That sound you hear is Hiatt digging the Post an even deeper and more embarrassing hole.

I have two favorite parts. The first was Hiatt's insistence that Will has every right to draw inference--to make claims of fact in his column--based on data that most scientists reject. Good Lord, what is Will not allowed to do in a Post column? And does the Op-Ed page maintain any guidelines?

And second, I chuckled when Hiatt insisted that if people disagree with Will's published falsehoods, they shouldn't try to pressure the paper to publish corrections, they should, y'know, "debate him." Right, because Will and Post editors have been so open and willing to address--to debate--the controversy.

Now, to his credit, the Post's ombusdman will write tomorrow that Will was wrong on the science, and that the paper should have addressed this more quickly. But clearly there is a problem with accountability at the Post when it comes to their star columnists.

(By the way, good for John Kerry for trying to get some measure of accountability by himself.)

But this is a serious concern. With the viability of the newspaper model looking less clear, we will necessarily shrink the amount of reporters covering both local and national issues. Online sources cannot fill the gap without substantial resources (endowments, anyone?). Therefore we vest more power in the fourth estate in the hands of a number of established brands. And yet those brands are gradually proving themselves unworthy of the power. It shouldn't look unfavorably on the entire profession, and the many fine reporters working under these brands, but it inevitably does.

It would be nice to say that, after being trashed and abused by major media for so long, that we don't need journalism. But we clearly do. And when they damage their reputations, it actually affects all of us.

Piliing On Will

At some point, you have to take a stand against all the conservative misinformation that lands on America's doorstep every morning in the daily newspaper, and I agree that George Will's global cooling column is a great place to start. His column last week, with its false data and revisionist history, was but a symptom of media failure, and it calls into question everything they do. This very detailed PDF from Brad Johnson at The Wonk Room details all of the errors and provides a suggested correction:

George Will’s Feb. 15, 2009 column claimed that experts cited a 2008 decline in “global sea ice” as evidence of man-made global warming. Scientists cited the observed decline in Arctic, not global sea ice. Will’s column claimed that the University of Illinois’ Arctic Climate Research Center said that global sea ice levels are “now equal to those of 1979.” At the beginning of January, the center said that global sea ice levels were “near or slightly lower than those of late 1979,” but global sea ice levels are now 8 percent below their levels in February 1979. Will’s column claimed the U.N. World Meteorological Organization said, “there has been no recorded global warming for more than a decade.” According to the WMO, global warming is continuing, with the past decade the warmest on record. Will’s column argued that imminent global cooling was a predicted planetary catastrophe in the 1970s. There was no scientific consensus in the 1970s that the Earth was headed
into an imminent ice age. Will’s column cited articles from Science magazine and Science News to imply the authors expected an imminent ice age. The Science article instead predicted an ice age within several thousand years, “ignoring anthropogenic effects.” The Science News article described climatology as an “infant science” and discussed predictions of man-made global warming that have since proven to be accurate. The Washington Post and George Will regret the errors.

There's no question that Will and The Washington Post erred, yet there is no such thing as accountability in the Beltway. So people are using letters to the editor to express their outrage and disapproval. Will appears in syndication in local papers all over the country, and the readers are speaking out:

Lawrence Journal-World: Will off base (Letter, 2/19/09)

[Will] puts together apparently irreconcilable statements from the mid-1970s and today, apparently in an effort to show that climate scientists don’t know climate change from a hole in their hats. I suppose it didn’t suit his political purposes to consult a few climate scientists. He says that climate change is No. 20 of 20 concerns according to a public poll. He is apparently Will-ing to have it remain there.

The Advocate: Will erred about global warming (Letter, 2/21/09)

Like many pundits, Will's belief in his own omniscience leads him to assume instant expertise on any topic. It also results in his repeatedly misleading the public on important issues such as global warming.

The Advocate should employ a fact checker for the columns it runs, or share responsibility for their misrepresentations.

Austin American-Statesman: Warming ignorance (Letter, 2/22/09)

George Will showed ignorance and pulled out the tired straw man that those of us who care about stopping climate change are gloom-and-doomers when the opposite is true.

Many more at the link.

This is well worth continuing to push. Silence in front of discredited theories and lies is not an option. We need to see some accountability.