Other Stuff

Boy, restricting myself to 3-4 posts a day is HARD! That's only temporary, however, as the FDL News site is still pending. So in addition to the stuff I've got up at FDL today, here's a few other things on my mind:

• This Scarlet A law in Oklahoma is extremely disturbing. Probing details of every abortion would get posted on a PUBLIC website. This is deliberately designed to shame women and enact a de facto ban on reproductive choice.

• One big story on the left today was John Harwood's NBC Nightly News report quoting an anonymous staffer who reportedly said "Barack Obama is doing well with 90% or more of Democrats so the White House views this opposition as really part of the Internet left fringe [...] For a sign of how seriously the White House does or doesn't take this opposition, one adviser told me those bloggers need to take off the pajamas, get dressed, and realize that governing a closely divided country is complicated and difficult." This sounds more like John Harwood than anybody else, and significantly, the White House issued a denial that the quote "reflected White House thinking." Sam Stein and Glenn Greenwald have more. I can't get too worked up about this because, while I'm sure this quote reflects how some people in the Administration think, it's a big White House and there's probably no monolithic perspective on pretty much everything.

• Notably, just as the White House was taking heat for their perspective on bloggers, they decided to hand out exclusive interviews to three blogs. I wouldn't call these partisan media sites, however: The Motley Fool, Consumerist and The Motherhood, a mommy blog. In each case, the blogs are asking their readers for questions, so at least there's a preference for the general nature of the format.

• People who think Lindsey Graham is going to be some kind of helpful moderate for the White House needs to recall this story from the weekend:

Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., is trying to prevent the Obama administration from holding criminal trials in civilian courts for the alleged Sept. 11 plotters instead of bringing them before military commissions.

Graham, who helped craft the 2006 law that established the military commissions, said Friday that he'd attached an amendment to an appropriations bill that would prohibit the Obama administration from spending money on the prosecution and trial of the accused terrorists before U.S. civilian federal judges.

This came a day after Democrats basically agreed to allow Gitmo prisoners to be moved to the US for trial.

• This Joe Biden cover story in Newsweek is the big chatter piece of the day. I thought Jay Carney used to work for Time before joining Biden's staff, you'd think THAT magazine would publish this mash note.

Selective Amnesia

Over the weekend I got around to reading conservative reactions to our blogger conference call with President Obama last Monday, and Matt Lewis' response struck me:

... This is just like all the times President Bush hosted conservative blogger calls ... not.

Outside of the clever use of the 90s-era "not" joke (is "talk to the hand" next?), I would remind Mr. Lewis of this face to face meeting between the President and milbloggers, which resulted in positively gushing reviews, as did this meetup with talk radio hosts. Lewis actually went ahead and acknowledged this today.

The larger point is that conservatives tend to forget things when the forgetting serves them to make a point. Frequently, as in this case, that point is resentment.

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.

An Appreciation Of Hilzoy

This is very disappointing news - Hilzoy is retiring from blogging. Most people who say that don't always follow through, but for some reason I believe Hilzoy will. And that's a loss, as she has been one of the more brilliant bloggers among us, often adding unusual perspectives and unreported topics to our little corner of the world. I'll miss reading her.

Because there's virtually no money in this, and the work is incredibly labor-intensive, I can hardly blame anyone who, after a period of time, just burns out. Hilzoy wrote at Washington Monthly in addition to Obsidian Wings, so she was probably one of the few to actually draw a little cash, but I'm sure it didn't stretch very far. It's just not legitimate to expect everyone to keep going on forever.

But in honor of Hilzoy, let me call attention to one of her last posts, a powerful plea to President Obama to live up to the hopes of people around the world. An excerpt:

In thinking about this, I am reminded of conversations I had when I was in Pakistan. My first trip there was in 2007, when the campaigns were just kicking into gear. People asked who I supported; I said Obama. They asked: but can he possibly win? I said that while I was reluctant to judge, I thought that he could.

The most common reaction -- not uniform, but common -- was a combination of several things. On the one hand, I was American and they were not, so the people I talked to naturally assumed that I probably had a better grasp of US politics than they did. Besides, I was their guest, and they were wonderfully polite. On the other hand, however, they found the idea that Barack Obama -- an African-American who did not come from a privileged background, whose father was from a Kenyan village -- could possibly be elected President literally unbelievable.

It was fascinating to watch them trying to reconcile these conflicting impulses: I was talking about a country I lived in, which most of them had never been to, and I was not obviously insane, but I was saying something that could not possibly be true. And, as best I could tell, there were two reasons why it couldn't be true: first, whoever the Pakistani analog of Barack Obama might be, that person would never be elected President in Pakistan, and second, they had been disappointed in America's track record in living up to its ideals, and so were not inclined to believe that it would do so this time.

The last time I went, Barack Obama had secured the nomination. People in Pakistan were astonished, but they were also really inspired. And I don't think that this was mainly about Obama's policies. It was about us living up to our ideals: about the idea that in America, anyone really can grow up to be President, and about the idea that enough of us had managed to look past our long history of slavery and discrimination and bigotry that we might elect Barack Obama President.

It gave people hope: the hope that cynics are not always right, and that the fix is not always in.

If we're interested in our image abroad, we could do a lot worse than simply deciding to live up to our ideals: for instance, the rule of law. It's the right thing to do, but it's also the smart thing.

I'll miss that insight.

The Beltway Bubble

Just a coda to this "Nico Pitney asked a planted question" nonsense. I've never seen such an overt expression of jealousy in all my life. With the possible exception of Roger Cohen (who's great today, and will probably win a Pulitzer), nobody in America has had the kind of coverage on the Iran story that Nico has had. Certainly not Dana Milbank, who has spent the last few days embarrassing the entire profession of journalism with his foppish, bitchy gossip segment that summarized the Village's belief that politics is a game and they're the sportscasters covering it. So for him to dare to criticize the journalism of anyone else is completely nonsensical.

Asserting that President Obama's June 23 press conference included "prepackaged entertainment," Dana Milbank wrote in his June 24 Washington Post column that Huffington Post national editor Nico Pitney was "a planted questioner" who asked "a preplanned question." Milbank further wrote: "The use of planted questioners is a no-no at presidential news conferences, because it sends a message to the world -- Iran included -- that the American press isn't as free as advertised." But while Milbank noted that "Pitney said the White House" was "not aware of the question's wording," he did not quote or paraphrase the question itself, which Guardian America editor Michael Tomasky described as "an important and tough question that got right to the heart of the matter." The Washington Monthly's Steve Benen called it "a terrific question that the president wasn't anxious to answer," while Salon.com's Glenn Greenwald referred to it as "one of the toughest questions at the Press Conference."

Andrew Sullivan exposes this dichotomy further, with Nico writing about a fairly important struggle by millions of Iranians, and Milbank gossiping about JibJab videos. Never mind the fact that Milbank is simply lying to make this whole thing appear more insidious; his interest in journalistic integrity doesn't pass the laugh test.

...Ari Melber attacks this from a different angle.

Since Obama was inaugurated, many media critics, citizen journalists and web activists have been calling on him to answer meaningful, unfiltered questions from citizens. After watching the Obama Campaign in action, people saw the potential for deeper, direct engagement between wired citizens and a President who gets new media and believes in transparency [...]

Thus it was likely -- and hardly surprising -- that a citizen question would be posed at a presidential press conference. Given the news, it happened to come from Tehran, not Tennessee.

So the complaints of several Washington reporters are not only odd, but hard to take at face value. It is particularly rich for reporters to protest that the White House told Pitney he might be tapped for a question. Every day, a few top White House correspondents have special access in press briefings, while many reporters are never called on (seating charts are powerful). And many Washington reporters routinely, secretly grant the White House blind quotes and restrictive ground rules in exchange for access. By contrast, Pitney transparently told readers about his dealings with the White House, in real time, on his blog. The public would be better served if all media outlets took that tack, publishing any arrangements, restrictions or ground rules along with every article or interview. (Readers would be interested -- media criticism and scrutiny tends to draw traffic across the spectrum.)

Greenwald, too.

Memo to Calbuzz: Hey, right back atcha!

To: (insert fun and in no way dated Communist Party reference here) Comrades Phil Trounstine and Roberts
From: Dave

I read with interest your dripping-with-contempt response to my criticism of your reports on the Parsky Commission. Actually, 4/5 of the article concerned the Commission itself and not you, but I am reminded of the words of Carly Simon:

You’re so vain
You probably think this song is about you

As a regular reader of Calbuzz, I admire your sources, if not your willingness to string an entire article together based on two politicians standing next to one another smiling, as well as an over-emphasis on horse-race politics and narratives. But clearly, you have a bit of an inflated view of your clear-eyed mission of “journalism,” and the assumed objectivity that goes with it.

Allow me to be blunt: Calitics has been writing about the Parsky Commission since December of 2008, before there was such a thing as Calbuzz. We have followed up time and again, in particular when two weeks ago, Susan Kennedy tipped the hand of how this commission will go by stating that “Our revenue stream is way too progressive.” So it was not exactly some kind of amazing scoop to report on a commission that has open meetings and presents all their material in public, which is why plenty of contemporaneous reports were written, based on the documents posted on the Internet that the Parsky Commission presented in anticipation of their open meeting.

Unlike you, I don’t pretend to hide my opinions on the very clear economic and tax policy implications of the Commission’s report behind some false veil of objectivity. Most of my comments were directed at the report itself, and the way in which a flat tax would quite obviously shift the burden of taxation to the middle class and the poor; but I couldn’t help but notice clear language like...

the impending bankruptcy of state government should be sufficient to show players at every point of the political spectrum not only that sweeping change is needed, but also that everyone will have to compromise to keep California from sinking into the 9th Circle of Hell

...which certainly allows people, in my view, a window into how you determine the best policy, defined as the midpoint between whatever pleases those hateful hippies and the ranters on the right. That may be a nice and quick methodology, but it's anything but rigorous, and I'm pretty sure it's an apt description. After all, wasn’t one of you the communications director for Gray Davis, who was not above bold expressions of centrism and a fear of the spectre of “The Left”?

(How did pumping out that daily message for ol’ Gray turn out, by the way? What did that guy do after his two successful terms were up? Just curious.)

I mean, I’m very sorry for bringing up the inconvenient fact that so-called “objective” journalists can frame a story in such a way that they put their own thumbs on the ideological scale. You claim that your job is to “ferret out the facts” of the policymakers, you know, like hard-hitting reporting on an email to supporters and what one Republican said about another Republican in a press release, but it’s fairly clear from the above-mentioned article that you view flat taxes and eliminating corporate taxes as pretty sensible and down the middle, and it colored your coverage. I should probably just have shut up about it and gone back to my Communist Party self-criticism sessions, which by the way is a hilarious and timely joke. Here’s another one: In Soviet Russia, television watches you! You can use that!)

So this notion that I should just say thank you for illuminating a public document seems to be to be a bit too self-regarding, and your lashing out at me for pointing out the not-so-hidden biases in that particular article a bit to “the lady doth protest too much.” But of course, I have an infantile disorder.

Which brings us to this criticism about the Barbara Boxer press conference and certain bloggers clapping at the end of it, something of a hobby horse for you folks. I am not going to speak for anyone in the room but myself, but I know quite for certain that I didn’t clap, and I know what I asked. See, based on my notes (yes, I took them, just like a real live reporter) I know that I followed up a series of queries about torture (yours was some process question about how the Obama Administration "rolled out" the torture memos released a week before) with a specific question about a resolution before the state party seeking the impeachment of Jay Bybee for his role in authorizing torture, to which she answered “I’m very open to that,” reminding those assembled that she voted against Bybee’s confirmation as a federal judge. Now, at the time, I was involved in securing thousands of signatures from across the state endorsing this resolution, and when it came before the resolutions committee, I would argue that having Sen. Boxer’s agreement that calling for the impeachment of someone who helped authorize torture was a reasonable request actually helped get that resolution passed. In other words, it was a combination of what the netroots community does best – using citizen journalism and activism in tandem to effect progress on progressive issues.

Which I personally think is more of a relevant bit of work than asking a federal legislator about a state issue.

I’m just sayin’.

p.s. In the cited post, I used variations on the word “fetish” once, in a 1,400-word article. But it made for a smashing joke about therapists, so points for you!

Back

This blog will resume its regular posting schedule today, if anyone still comes back to read. There's so much going on, from Iran to health care to California's budget mess, and I suspect I'll be playing catch-up today. Thanks for hanging in there.

Dodging Parade Floats In Pittsburgh

Been kind of a whirlwind 24 hours, as I had a bunch of meetings in Pittsburgh today in the midst of the Penguins victory parade. Actually it wasn't entirely bad, though one location was closed, not for the parade, but FLAG DAY. Who closes for Flag Day anymore?

Anyway, I'm sure there's plenty going on that I can't get to at the moment. It'll have to keep.

We Had To Kill The Media In Order To Save It

The fact that the best reporting on the Iranian election crisis is coming from Twitter and random comments from students inside the country is not necessarily a testament to the expansive power of new media but to the irredeemable failure of the old media. Robert Farley has a pretty good roundup that matches my experience on vacation yesterday, trying to find a few scraps of information:

So, I'm trying to find out something about what's going on in Iran, and on CNN I can watch a rerun of Larry King interviewing several gentlemen without shirtsleeves who apparently assemble choppers. On Fox Mike Huckabee is trying to explain why Jesus hates credit card relief. MSNBC is rerunning something about a prison in New Mexico. CNBC is evaluating whether college students should be able to afford Chanel tote bags.

Media fail.

Sadly, if the elections were not a planned occurrence we wouldn't have any media in the country at all. The major TV networks have almost no international bureaus anymore, pooling their resources in London and sending out correspondents to act as individual news gathering machines, one-man or woman networks without the benefit of producers or editorial desks. This allows for a bit more flexibility, but also flattens the landscape so that the news-gathering capabilities of established media differ in no legitimate respect from a native speaker with a Twitter account or a Facebook page. It's not that the tweeters have ascended into the media stratosphere, it's that the traditional media has descended into the depths.

A few national newspapers do seem to have decent reporting on the ground. And thanks to the Internet, we can access a good deal of information about the world from local sources. And some bloggers, like those at the National Iranian American Council and Tehran Bureau (until they were shut down, allegedly by a denial of service attack from inside Iran), are doing heroic work. I would highly recommend this post by Brian Ulrich, positing the entire enterprise as a military coup, with the Revolutionary Guard consolidating power. However, I think we all remember how the networks would pull away from programming for hours to cover international crises as they unfolded. There's clearly an attitude of indifference this time around, but that is as much budgetary as it is cynical. Television simply cannot cover the story anymore. And that's to the great disservice of the still-overwhelming mass of people around the world who depend on it for news and information. The triumphalism of those who would see the sorry spectacle of TV news shoved aside fails to account for the remaining digital divide in the country as well as the tendencies of a mass of people who are not likely to otherwise be reached. And they become more closed off to the world, more uncomfortable with opposing points of view, more clueless about international relations or foreign affairs. And there are clear dangers to such an environment of mass ignorance.

I don't really have a solution to this, but the paucity of the Fourth Estate in this international crisis just leaves me sad.

...To balance out this post with some respect for the organizing capability of Twitter, please wear green tomorrow in support of the reformers in Iran. Maybe Abbi Tatton will report on it!

Give It Up For Not Blogging!

I must say it has its advantages over blogging, at times. Anyway, this will be a good break away from the grind.

As far as I can ascertain, a white supremacist shot up the Holocaust Museum, conservatives are completely defensive about it, that right-wing domestic terrorism report from the DHS was pretty prescient, moderate wankers are wanking on health care reform, and California remains two clicks from the gutter.

Did I get everything?

As for me, allow me to recommend Pappy and Harriet's Pioneertown Palace. Pretty awesome little BBQ and juke joint in the Yucca Valley area that had Eagles of Death Metal and Peaches out for concerts in the last few days.

On Pseudonyms

I haven't given this any space, but Ed Whelan, a guy who runs something called the Ethics and Public Policy Center, outed the Obsidian Wings blogger Publius because he criticized him. After a couple days of criticism from the left and the right, Whelan apologized and publius accepted.

I run a pseudonym on this site but my name is pretty readily apparent, and for me it's just what I happened to come up with when I started the site, so I kept it. At Calitics we were constantly getting criticism about hiding behind anonymous handles - as if that degrades the quality of the content somehow - so we defused that critique by using our real names. But I completely understand the desire for someone - for professional or personal reasons - to conceal their identity online, and the last thing I would ever think to do is to run down that information and report it to the world. The mentality of someone who immediately thinks that does not compute to me.

For hundreds of years, writers who wished to impact the political debate used pseudonyms - publius is names after one! - for whatever reason, sometimes just to allow the words to take precedence over the personality. If you look at the preening subjects of the Village these days, I think you'd only wish for pseudonyms.

Hopefully this sorry episode reveals an understanding about respecting other people's wishes, on the Internet or off.

Taking His Ball Blog And Going Home

I actually ran across the NPR report about Jeffrey Rosen's gossip piece and the impact of it on the debate over Sonia Sotomayor on Sunday morning, and when I heard this I nearly broke my radio:

But its author, the noted legal writer Jeffrey Rosen, says he's been burned by the episode, too — enough that he's swearing off blogging for good.

"It was a short Web piece," Rosen says now, sounding a little shell-shocked. "I basically thought of it as a blog entry". . . .

Above all, Rosen says he's drawn a lesson from how his initial essay was treated by people of both ideological stripes. He won't be blogging any more. He wants to spend more time with the material before hitting "send."

Yes, the medium of blogging made him use anonymous sources to smear a qualified Supreme Court nominee. The darn macros in the publishing tool just cross out all of the named sources, at least on Blogger and Wordpress. It's just like my friend Steve an associate of mine once said: "Jeffrey Rosen wants to slander people after thoughtful consideration, but the publishing tools he uses just force him into rash decision-making!"

Everyone knows the difference between Jeffrey Rosen the lowly blogger and Jeffrey Rosen the self-evidently esteemed writer on legal issues. The former engages in character assassination; the latter, in very deliberate and keen-eyed character assassination. Good to be rid of the former.

As Glenn points out, Rosen actually published the hit piece on Sotomayor not as a blog, but as a stand-alone article, much like writers do on the websites of major publications every single day. Maybe if we're lucky, Rosen will vow not to write on the Internet ever again! Or write, period!

...Meanwhile, Jon Chait's defense of his colleague Rosen is pathetic.

I'd Scratch Probably

Nancy Pelosi bascially signaled she's done with the controversy over her comments on the CIA and torture.

I have made the statement I'm going to make about this. I don't have anything more to say about it... what we are doing is staying on our course and not being distracted from it and this is a distraction... moving forward in a bipartisan way for jobs, health care, energy for our country.

Because Pelosi got the pile-on treatment from the press, largely for no reason, this is probably the right move. But it comes at a time when the traditional media is finally realizing how wrong they were at every point of this debate. Jay Newton-Small, about a week or so behind the blogs, lists all the problems with the CIA's story, the endlessly parsed statements from Republicans, and the corroboration from other Democrats who were briefed, and comes to the conclusion that Pelosi was "probably" right about all this. See the title.

I've said that I'm not all that sanguine about the motives of the press on this, considering that they dropped the subject and went after Republicans at precisely the moment when talk of investigations heated up. But I suppose I can grant some thanks that the media is finally catching up to the facts here - and more so, that they are clearly paying attention to the work of writers like Marcy Wheeler. That will be valuable down the road.

Richie Riches In The Blogosphere

I think just about every blogger has taken a hack at this today, but Mark Penn has no idea what he's talking about. The income I make on this blog, and I would assume I'm in the vast majority, pays for one dinner, in a good week. Maybe there are a hundred or so in the liberal blogosphere making a living. Penn's numbers are simply wrong.

Now, gentle readers, you can prove me wrong by donating to my blograiser. But you could be quite sure that I wouldn't be spending time blograising if the ad sales was doing the job. I think the ad to your right is the only one I've had all year. Blogads has fallen off the cliff, especially out here in the long tail. If there are 452,000 people blogging as their primary source of income, that basically equals 452,000 unemployed people.

Lane Hudson takes this a bit further. The world where there are a half a million working bloggers must be the same world where Hillary Clinton has locked up the Democratic nomination because all the states are winner-take-all.

That said, I think it's a noble goal. I'd certainly welcome a world with a bunch of paid bloggers. In fact, the only way to do that now is with low-dollar community donations. Firedoglake has a funding drive up to support Marcy Wheeler in her investigative reporting. I've found Marcy's work invaluable and well worth supporting, so I recommend the effort. Not to mention my own, of course... :)

AP: Still Wankin'

Markos Moulitsas has been writing a series of articles about the Associated Press' desperate attempt to squeeze out a new revenue stream through intimidation and threats. He links to this fantastic takedown:

Let's go on up to Rupert Murdoch, who says Google's stealing his copyright in a recent Forbes article:

"Should we be allowing Google to steal all our copyrights?" asked the News Corp. chief at a cable industry confab in Washington, D.C., Thursday. The answer, said Murdoch, should be, " 'Thanks, but no thanks.' "

Let me help you with that, Rupert. I'm going to save you all those potential legal fees plus needing to even speak further about the evil of the Big G with two simple lines. Get your tech person to change your robots.txt file to say this:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /

Done. Do that, you're outta Google. All your pages will be removed, and you needn't worry about Google listing the Wall St. Journal at all.

Oh, but you won't do that. You want the traffic, but you also want to be like the AP and hope you can scare Google into paying you. Maybe that will work. Or maybe you'll be like all those Belgian papers that tried the same thing and watched their traffic sadly dry up.

Perhaps all the papers should get together like Anthony Moor of the Dallas Morning News suggests in the same article:

"I wish newspapers could act together to negotiate better terms with companies like Google. Better yet, what would happen if we all turned our sites off to search engines for a week? By creating scarcity, we might finally get fair value for the work we do."

Please do this, Anthony. Please get all your newspaper colleagues to agree to a national "Just say no to Google" week. I beg you, please do it. Then I can see if these things I think will happen do happen:

• Papers go "oh shit," we really get a lot of traffic from Google for free, and we actually do earn something off those page views

• Papers go "oh shit," turns out people can find news from other sources

• Papers go "oh shit," being out of Google didn't magically solve all our other problems overnight, but now we have no one else to blame.

In a similar fasion, the AP got all pissy yesterday because people were embedding video from their YouTube channel, apparently unaware (or deliberately unaware) that they could turn off the embed function themselves.

The AP wants to feel victimized by Google and other aggregators while conveniently overlooking the value they bring to their business. Their real anger should be directed at themselves. Here's Markos:

Newspapers like to see themselves as "essential to democracy" or some other such bullshit, but they've long been part of a much broader media landscape, in which broadcast and the internet have become the most efficient delivery mechanisms. And pretty soon, with convergence, they'll be one and the same. Newspapers have refused to adapt, or they've pissed away money buying baseball teams, or they've squeezed the value out of their product by demanding 30 percent profit margins, or they've expanded at unsustainable rates, or all of the above.

But they aren't the only player in town, and there are plenty of other media operations that are already mimicking the content they product, or can quickly rush in to fill the void if a true market need exists. And while we may miss having all that disparate information packaged into one convenient portable (and disposable) product, fact is that we can get just about everything newspapers provided elsewhere, and no trees have to die in the process.

This is a challenging business environment for all publishers, and the downturn accelerated newspapers' decline. But they seem to have this ridiculous sense of entitlement instead of a recognition that their business model has to change. And just up and deciding that they'll have to raise online ad rates is, um, not a plan.

Ha ha ha ha ha ha. First of all, let them all decide this in collusion. Doesn't matter. It'll be equally stupid and unworkable. First of all, people won't pay for what they can get elsewhere for free, and most of what papers offer can be gotten for free elsewhere. Furthermore, the reason that online advertising is cheaper than offline advertising is that 1) offline advertising was overpriced, and 2) there's more than enough inventory online that advertisers can reach their intended audience for very little. That reality sucks, and it's one that this (advertiser supported) site has to deal with on a regular basis, but it is what it is. Advertisers have realized that they no longer need to be gouged by newspapers, and there are plenty of deals to be had online.

I mean, did this genius consultant think that newspapers weren't already trying to charge the same for online and offline advertising? That they were all waiting for his genius suggestion to slap themselves on the forehead and say, "Egads! Why didn't we think of that???" Online ad CPMs are plummeting, and in a bad economy, with desperate publishers everywhere willing to undercut the competition's rates, things are going from bad to worse. These things happen in recessions/depressions.

Throw in the fact that this stupid plan would require hundreds of newspapers to band together to shut off their content, it's clearly unworkable. Many (if not most) would balk, mindful that the local TV sites and other local and national news outlets would soak up that readership rendering them instantaneously irrelevant. Not every newspaper exec is arrogant enough to think their product is irreplaceable or so unique that people couldn't live without.

So the solution isn't to simply say, "we're going to charge more -- both advertisers and our readers." Well, it's a solution, it just won't be the winning one.

Rosa Brooks, a columnist who herself is leaving the business to work in the Defense Department, had further thoughts, mainly focusing on the idea that the government needs to "bail out" journalism. And yet the desire for information is at a record high. So the answer lies in a more creative modeling of how to get readers to pay for a physical product and/or increase traffic, not some monopolistic practice where the line between welfare and scraps is whether you get to wear the hallowed crown of journalism. I don't want to see journalism go. But the executives need to get a lot smarter.

That Mighty Liberal Blog Power Made Manifest

A couple weeks ago, the Justice Department had planned to release a set of internal DoJ memos that, perhaps more than anything previously released, describe in great detail the exact types of interrogation procedures that were approved for use in secret CIA prisons. We know what was done, of course, but the memos would further provide evidence to the authorization and direction of torture at the highest levels. Some inside the White House would rather not see that happen.

As reported by NEWSWEEK, the White House last month had accepted a recommendation from Attorney General Eric Holder to declassify and publicly release three 2005 memos that graphically describe harsh interrogation techniques approved for the CIA to use against Al Qaeda suspects. But after the story, U.S. intelligence officials, led by senior national-security aide John Brennan, mounted an intense campaign to get the decision reversed, according to a senior administration official familiar with the debate. "Holy hell has broken loose over this," said the official, who asked not to be identified because of political sensitivities [...]

Brennan, who now oversees intelligence issues at the National Security Council, argued that release of the memos could embarrass foreign intelligence services who cooperated with the CIA, either by participating in overseas "extraordinary renditions" of high-level detainees or housing them in overseas "black site" prisons.

Brennan succeeded in persuading CIA Director Leon Panetta to become "engaged" in his efforts to block release, according to the senior official. Their joint arguments stalled plans to declassify the memos even though White House counsel Gregory Craig had already signed off on Holder's recommendation that they should be disclosed, according to an official and another government source familiar with the debate. No final decision has been made, and it is likely Obama will have to resolve the matter, according to the sources who spoke to NEWSWEEK.

Brennan, Brennan, hmm, I can't put my finger on where I've heard that name... oh, wait, he was the guy who "liberal bloggers" supposedly defeated for the post of CIA Director. Here was part of his withdrawal letter:

"It has been immaterial to the critics that I have been a strong opponent of many of the policies of the Bush administration such as the pre-emptive war in Iraq and coercive interrogation tactics, to include waterboarding," he wrote. "It is with profound regret that I respectfully ask that my name be withdrawn from consideration for a position within the intelligence community. The challenges ahead of our nation are too daunting, and the role of the CIA too critical, for there to be any distraction from the vital work that lays ahead," Brennan wrote.

Yes, and those credentials as a "strong opponent" are certainly showing now. And it's fantastic that he's not proving a "distraction" in his role as a national security aide, by, say, pitching a fit and using institutional allies to undermine Justice Department directives.

Forget about Brennan's specific views, which are problematic enough. Clearly he's protecting his friends in the intelligence community and sparing them the embarrassment of having to face up to their actions, to say nothing of the criminal liability. The cover story that Brennan wants to protect foreign intelligence services who cooperated with the CIA is ridiculous, as Hilzoy notes:

Fear of embarrassing countries who cooperated with us cannot possibly be the reason for not releasing the memos. The solution is too simple: just redact their names and any identifying details. Are we supposed to believe that this has not occurred to Panetta or Holder? Or that there is some identifying detail that is so thoroughly intertwined with the legal arguments that it cannot possibly be edited out?

Give me a break.

If foreign countries are so embarrassed by participating in torture, naming and shaming them would maybe stop them from doing it in the future?

Clearly, Brennan wants to keep open the option of torturing in secret, or at the least save his pals some heartburn.

Boy, I know I'm sure glad liberal bloggers fought the good fight and denied Brennan an important voice inside the Administration. We sure showed him, right?

Friday Random Ten

A housekeeping update: I'll be filling in for the incomparable Steve Benen at The Washington Monthly starting tomorrow and through Monday. I'll probably cross-post everything over here, but please stop by and show your support in the comments if you can. Should be fun, though I'm already biting my fingernails wondering how I'll keep up with Steve's normally prodigious output.

Some music while I mull this over.

M'Lady - Sly & The Family Stone
Desiree - Neil Diamond
Maybe Sparrow - Neko Case
Snail Shell - They Might Be Giants
And It Rained All Night - Thom Yorke
Moon Sammy - Soul Coughing
Lake Of Fire - Nirvana
CMYK - Ladytron
Stronger - Kanye West
All I Need - Radiohead

The Great Nationalization Debate

I've been reading a whole heck of a lot the past couple days on the nationalization debate (or pre-privatization, or temporary receivership, or whatever sounds people-friendly enough for you). It started with an Alan Blinder column pushing back on the growing consensus that the banks are insolvent and need to be taken over temporarily. He thinks that it would be hard to stop the ball rolling downhill once you start nationalizing, and the short sellers would be out in force to crumble everyone in the private market, and that confidence would be undermined. And so he argued for what amounts to a taxpayer bailout.

Let’s first at least explore what is called the “good bank, bad bank” approach.

What’s that? While there are many variants, the basic idea is to break each sick institution into two. The “good bank” gets the good assets, presumably all the deposits and a share of the bank’s remaining capital. As a healthy institution, it can presumably raise fresh capital and go on its merry way as a private company.

The “bad bank” inherits the bad assets and the rest of the capital — which, after appropriate markdowns of the assets, will not be enough. So, again, someone must fill the hole. And, realistically, given the mess we’re in, much of that new capital would likely come from the taxpayers.

Yves Smith called the piece amazingly disingenuous, particularly when Blinder warned against nationalizing 8,300 banks; nobody's talking about that, and the top 5 hold 45% of all deposits. Paul Krugman doesn't understand what Alan Blinder is talking about, because he's basically arguing for massive taxpayer outlays.

You might say, why can’t a bank just split itself, giving the bad stuff to one piece and the good stuff to the other? Because it has to divvy up the liabilities as well as the assets. And if it gives the bad bank (which isn’t solvent) a bunch of the liabilities, this amounts to defaulting on its debts — and the bondholders will sue. So the good bank-bad bank thing seems to implicitly carry the assumption that someone, namely you and me in our capacity as taxpayers, guarantees the bad bank’s liabilities. In which case we are in fact nationalizing the losses, but privatizing the gains.

And yet there may be some trouble with a Swedish-style solution, and nationalization proponents shouldn't paint a completely rosy picture (not do they, for the most part - I think most are resigned to it). For one, it would also be extremely expensive. If the government takes over bank debts in a nationalization scenario, they're on the hook for over a trillion dollars, at least at the start before the upside kicks in. This is probably why Obama's team wants to bring in private money to offset the costs. Then there is the possibility of contagion, where one bank is affected by the nationalization of others, particularly because of the interconnected nature of the lending (as Kevin Drum says, this can be addressed with swift and effective action). And there's the question of how to deal with the bondholders, which is really more of a political question.

If you've got a big insolvent bank and you need to make up a big hole on the balance sheet you've got, broadly speaking, four groups of people you can get the money from, or put a different way, who can take the hit: shareholders, depositors, bondholders and taxpayers.

Now, for most of these banks the stock price has essentially fallen to zero. So they're pretty much already wiped out. Not much to be accomplished there, although those folks want to hold on to their equity in the hopes that they may recover on the upside. Then you have the depositors. But in FDIC insured accounts, they've got a federal guarantee up to $250,000. And presumably those with really big sums on deposit have been proactive enough to spread their money around several institutions. So not much luck there either.

Which leaves you with bondholders (the companies creditors rather owners) and taxpayers. Now, on the one hand, this sounds like a no-brainer. If you lend money to a company that goes bankrupt, that's tough luck. Maybe you recover a percentage on the dollar of what you were owed. But too bad. Why taxpayers should cover those loses is really hard to answer. But let's try it.

The counter-argument is that if bondholders, especially the most 'senior creditors', take a big hit it, will create a big shock to the financial system worldwide, making bond-investing money extremely risk-averse for a long time and making the credit markets seize up again on far worse a scale than happened last fall in the wake of the Lehman bankruptcy.

A second issue is that a lot of these bondholders are other financial institutions, so you create a cascade of failure.

(ed.note: as I spoke to economists who are extremely knowledgeable and I think not at all inclined to be carrying the water of the bondholders, what became clear to me is that it's not just a question of our having no good theory of how to unwind a crisis like this, 'we' also don't have a good handle on the facts of the situation, which makes everything much more perilous. Sort of like defusing the time bomb without having put the bomber on the rack long enough to have him tell you how it works. As one of them told me a few moments ago, the only people who really know where the bodies are buried are the folks who buried them. So as we're trying to come up with some global fix, the people who screwed everything up won't tell us where they put everything or what's connected to what.)

That would be a systemic risk to the greater economy, and on a more personal level it could mean the wipeout of every insurance company, every public pension fund, etc.

These are big questions, and they deserve a serious debate. Not the "let the banks fail" debate that Republicans are having with themselves, but a serious debate where the costs and benefits are weighed. Ultimately, I give a lot of weight to Simon Johnson, late of the IMF, because he's actually done this in other countries before, and knows the prescriptions, without the patina of American exceptionalism or the biases of "too big to fail," and he can actually reach a sober judgment. And he says that the normal process would be receivership. For those who don't have the time to listen at the link, Ezra Klein summarizes:

The problem in America, he says, is that the regulatory apparatus is largely made up of bankers and people who are sympathetic to bankers. "On [Geithner's] board, for example, back in the spring was Jami Dimon, head of JP Morgan. And the way, of course, in which Bear Stearns was rescued back in the spring was being sold, at what many thought was a very low price, to JP Morgan. It's a very strange world in which you can sell, over a weekend, such a valuable asset to someone who's on your board of directors, and nobody even raised an eyebrow about that."

Terry Gross goes on to ask if Johnson has ever advised a country that successfully solved a banking crisis by buying the troubled assets. "No," laughs Johnson, "I don't think anyone has ever bought troubled assets like that. It's a terrible idea, by the way. If you look at what Sweden did and talked to the people who managed their bank takeovers, they will tell you it was very hard to value the main assets held by the banks. it was real estate, and real estate always does what it's doing now. It becomes very illiquid. It's very hard to know what is the market price. That's the problem.

"But Mr. Paulson and Mr. Bernanke have presented this as 'oh my goodness, we've never seen this before, the markets have dried up, it's crazy and temporary and will only go away if we pay top dollar for these assets.' That's not true. This happens all the time in financial crises. You always get illiquidity. You always get the value of assets becoming questionable. What you do is the takeover and the nationalization and the re-privatization of banks and while you're doing that you take the really bad assets off the balance sheets and create an asset management company -- now being called a 'bad bank' -- that's a separate entity and does loss minimization. And that was done by the people who ran the Resolution Trust Company in the 80s. They did a great job, by the way."

There's actually not a lot of difference, interestingly, between Blinder's "good bank/bad bank" scenario and receivership. The main difference is that in receivership, taxpayers are cut in on the upside. And I can't see how you would then be able to do anything else. It's just, as Johnson says, a question of political will, to stare down the bankers and the wealthy equity holders. There are also the above-mentioned concerns about available funds and which banks to put into receivership that could be a cause for the current dithering. But this is a pretty robust argument being had out here in the blogosphere. Indeed, it's a core competence of the medium. And as Simon Johnson - yes, the same Simon Johnson - argues, maybe the President shouldn't be so quick to dismiss it.

In Sunday’s NYT, the President is quoted as saying (at the end of the story),

"Part of the reason we don’t spend a lot of time looking at blogs is because if you haven’t looked at it very carefully, then you may be under the impression that somehow there’s a clean answer one way or another - well, you just nationalize all the banks, or you just leave them alone and they’ll be fine."

Blogs relax previous format restrictions. Length can vary, as can technical content. Comments allow immediate feedback, clarification; debate is healthy for ideas. Experts can now express a view or an endorsement immediately to a broader audience - and get pushback, as appropriate.

And, on the President’s point, experts can now talk directly to other experts at a very detailed operational level, and the results of that conversation are now public - and again attract public content (let’s be honest: sometimes experts are way off-base and they need to be told). This is very threatening to official technocrats, both because their monopoly on expertise crumbles and because a broader set of people become skilled at criticizing their ideas. These technocrats would much rather have their boss read newspapers and weekly magazines.

I think most people are pretty clear about our options and none of them are entirely appealing. Some think we're generally screwed no matter what we do, given how much money is tied up in the derivative market. Some think taxpayers will be paying through the nose for a long time and the real action to get right is the financial re-regulation afterwards, to ensure these same clowns don't break capitalism again. Some others are just pissed that the world is going to end over something as mundane as credit default swaps and not something cool like an ape revolution. But there is a conversation, a knowledgeable one, that recognizes you can't just keep tossing money down the gaping maw of the financial system and somehow expect different results.

We need to rip off the band-aid and do it quickly. The conversation is great, the arguments and counter-arguments illuminating, but if we're screwed, we're screwed. Let's not wait on it, and let's at least have some minimal equanimity in who gets the bill at the end of the day.

While I am pretty happy with Obama in many respects, I have to give him a D for how he's handling the banks, and in particular the debate over the banks.

pluginspage="http://www.adobe.com/go/getflashplayer"
src="http://www.yourminis.com/Dir/GetContainer.api?uri=yourminis/AOL/min
i:obamareportcard" width="349" height="483" wmode="transparent"
FlashVars="height=435&statshostname=stats.yourminis.com&width=314&color=
0&hostname=www.yourminis.com&uri=yourminis/AOL/mini%3Aobamareportcard&sw
fhost=ct.yourminis.com&" type="application/x-shockwave-flash"
allowScriptAccess="always" >

You Kids Just Don't Understand

Barack Obama, the President of the United States, with about 10,000 things to do, doesn't read blogs. That's not a big deal - he's a busy man and can have whatever reading list he wants. What may be a big deal is the almost fetishistic desire to reject certain solutions based solely on their perceived ideological moorings.

Q: Sir, we’re landing here, but what are you reading these days? What kind of newspapers do you read, do you read the clips, do you read actual papers, do you watch television?

A: Other than The New York Times?

Q: Other than The New York Times. Do you read Web sites? What Web sites do you look at?

A: I read most of the big national papers.

Q. Do you read them in clips or do you read them in the paper?

A. No, I read the paper. I like the feel of a newspaper. I read most of the weekly newsmagazines. I may not read them from cover to cover but I’ll thumb through them. You know, I spend most of my time these days reading a lot of briefings.

Q: And television? Do you watch? Web sites?

A: I don’t watch much television, I confess.

Q: And Web sites?

Q: No blogs?

A: I rarely read blogs [...]

Q: Has anybody said to you, No, sir, you can’t do that? Has there been a moment in these last six weeks where you tried to do something and somebody said, Sorry, sir, it doesn’t work that way?

A: Well, I mean, I think what we were talking about earlier in terms of Guantanamo. People didn’t have to tell me, No you can’t do that. It was simply, Well, sir, here are the challenges that we face in terms of making a decision about that. In the entire banking sector – we spend every day, myself, Rahm Emanuel, Tim Geithner, Larry Summers, Christina Romer, every single day, we will spend at least an hour of my time just talking through how we are approaching the financial markets.

And part of the reason we don’t spend a lot of time looking at blogs is because if you haven’t looked at it very carefully then you may be under the impression that somehow there’s a clean answer one way or another – well, you just nationalize all the banks, or you just leave them alone and they’ll be fine, or this or that or the other. The truth is this is a very complex set of problems and bad decisions can result in huge taxpayer expenditures and poor results.

Part of the reason I don't spend a lot of time looking at Obama's opinion on blogs is because if you haven't looked at them very carefully, you may be under the impression that somehow they all advocate a clean answer one way or another. The truth is they have offered a very complex set of opinions across the spectrum, and bad impressions can result in mass stereotyping and poor analysis.

What's at issue here is that he's not really talking about blogs, per se, so much as he is talking about critics, from the right to an extent but particularly from the left, the financial bloggers who are disappointed at the Administration's halting efforts thus far. What this suggests is that any point of view with goes ideological on the liberal side of the ledger is dismissed because of extenuating circumstances. That is a recipe for groupthink, a feedback loop where only the opinions of Geithner and Summers are respected. In particular, he namechecks blogs in relation to the banking situation, the one area where he is getting the most criticism. The reaction to criticism here is to reject the perspective of the critics because they lack information. That's just not good. Especially when the critics are experts in the field.

I've heard quite a lot of this in my time - veterans of the political scene telling me that I just don't understand the complexities and settle for simple-minded solutions. They're frequently wrong when the full accounting is done. This is a dangerous mindset, almost a bunker mentality, for the Administration to have.

Also, um, bloggers are individuals, lots of them on the left voted for the President, they have opinions, and there's simply no reason for them to be insulted by their chief executive.

Talking Points Memo After Dark

Nice headline by Josh Marshall on David Vitter's efforts to take family planning money out of the omnibus spending bill: "Angling For Bareback?"

Quote of the Day material.

...by the way, two thumbs up to the New York Times for taking TPM's lead and reporting the exact same story about banks trying to get grieving mourners to pay their loved one's posthumous debts, without citing them whatsoever. The list of traditional news stories plucked from the blogosphere just got longer.