Get yer agitprop on: By way of DCoE (and with a tip of the hat to Shepard Fairey), Paste Magazine gives you the chance to make your own “Obamacon” posters. I could waste a lot of time with this.
TRANSFORM.
Tag: Blog Nation
No. 9, No. 9, No. 9, No. 9…
As of this weekend, Ghost in the Machine is now nine years old. [0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8.] With an incoming Obama administration, an expanded Democratic Congress, and, perhaps most startling, the Knickerbockers actually two games over 500, it’s looking harder than usual to find things to complain about around here. Even amid the twilight realm of the ABD, that faint orange glow in the distance is looking less like troubling fires ahead and more and more like an approaching dawn. Nevertheless, whatever the future holds, GitM (hopefully) rolls on. As always, whether you’re a longtime reader or just a lost/adventurous Googler, thanks for stopping by.
Unfair, but Balanced!
“Of all the shortcomings of the establishment press today, none is more central to the corruption of the profession than the decision to prioritize balance over accuracy. That corruption is visibly on display in the current coverage of the McCain campaign’s policy of deliberate lies…This is what gives liars a clear strategic advantage over non-liars. And it’s an open question whether McCain’s level of dishonesty turns out to be so great that it overwhelms reporters’ unwillingness to report accurately on it.” Over at TPM, Josh Marshall rails against media complicity in the McCain campaign’s recent embrace of blatant falsehood as a political strategy. (You know it’s bad when even the Post‘s Richard Cohen is renouncing his McCain-love.)
The other night, I caught the tail end of Bob Schieffer, Jonathan Alter, and Paul Begala on Charlie Rose, and Alter, Schieffer et al were blaming the pathetic, pathetic job by the mainstream media in this election on, of course, the blogosphere (much as Schieffer did in the interview here.) “We can’t be responsible for all these bloggers. The Internet is the only vehicle to convey news…that has no editor. Even the worst newspaper has an editor.” (Schieffer, 44:30) Uh, Judith Miller wasn’t writing a blog, nor was the Gray Lady bereft of editors, when the NYT and the rest of the mainstream media basically inhaled the Dubya administration’s lies about the Iraq war without complaint. And the same goes for the MSM’s dancing around the obvious tripe emanating from the McCain campaign here in 2008.
Look, blogs aren’t the problem right now. As Marshall and many others have noted, the problem is that all too much of the MSM, once again using “balance” as a cover for its cowardice, spends the majority of its time trying to ascertain — and then straddle — the exact middle point between the facts as they stand and McCain-Palin’s recent spate of ridiculous deceptions. To paraphrase Colbert: If, as it has in recent weeks, the truth has a definite Obama bias, then it befalls the Fourth Estate, as the self-appointed referees of the political ballgame, to set the record straight. And if televised poobahs like Candy Crowley refuse to do their jobs, and even talking heads who should know better, such as my old employer, roll over like puppies in the name of McCain’s presumed maverickness, then it’s definitely up to the blogs out there to fill the void. (See for example, Andrew Sullivan, who’s been compiling a sadly expansive list of the lies of Sarah Palin.)
The depressing slide of our major media institutions into frightened, ratings-fueled irrelevance didn’t start with this election, or course. But the stakes are too high right now to sit back and let their abysmal erosion pay any more dividends for the McCain campaign. We need to fight back, and hard. (Ad below via Ted at the Late Adopter.)
Those Crazy Bloggers.
While I’m getting all the “look at me — I’m embedded!” links out of the way, here’s a Conde Nast Portfolio report on the Big Tent, filmed Monday, that features me briefly. Judging from the questions I keep getting asked, numerous mainstream media groups seem to be doing variations on this same sorta puff-piece story (“Who are these crazy “bloggers,” and (gasp) will they take over everything?), although — at least so far — I’ve spent most of my own interview-time talking to foreign press.
Also, whatever Drudge is currently saying about “Google massaging journalists,” they’re in fact massaging bloggers. Yes, there’s still a difference (and, no, I still haven’t partaken — big line.)
The D.C. Rules.
In any case, it’s good to refortify in here before venturing forth for another day of the “DC RoE.” For, however hospitable Denver has been thus far (and so far LoDo seems like a great place — I wasn’t expecting such a walking-friendly downtown), it’s clear the most aggravating tendencies of District life have thoroughly infected this entire municipal area for the week. Like I said yesterday, having spent the past several years ensconced in academia (which has its own occasionally exasperating mores to navigate), I’d forgotten how fundamentally irritating the DC ratrace can be. Consider this full-immersion therapy.
Rule #1 of the DC life: Access — and thus the appearance, if not the fact, of exclusivity — is everything. For example: Yesterday evening, a friend of mine from CQ and I looked to catch a drink somewhere nearby. We eventually found one, thank goodness, but not before having to negotiate with doormen, list-bearing aides, and sundry other “boundary mavens” in front of many, many bars, restaurants, and hotel lobbies. Everything was cordoned off, invites and VIPS only, unworthies please move along. Now, I understand the lobbyists gotta do their thing — If only this sort of thing was restricted to private parties. Alas, DC life, I have since been reminded, is basically one big rope-line. Every doorway involves a plethora of multi-colored passes, even those that lead nowhere particularly important. Every event here, even ungodly boring ones they can barely fill, have byzantine rules for crossing the threshold, and strange, unspoken hierarchies which determine who gets in and in what order. Get three people together in the District and one of ’em will start working on setting up the cordon. Frankly, it all gets a bit exhausting. (I’d like to say the special dKos couch I was joking about yesterday is a parody of this impulse, but it’s really just another sad manifestation of it.)
Which brings me to Rule #2 of Washington: You’re only as interesting as your status in The Hive. The District being a company town, the main thrust of virtually every social encounter in DC is “Hi-Hello-Who-do-you-work-for?” (I’ve heard LA operates much the same way, which makes sense, given that politics is basically showbiz for short and/or ugly people.) I can’t tell you the number of times during my Washington days when people I’d recently met would “switch on” once they ascertained I had a moderately important-sounding job. (It wasn’t really, of course, but Carville occupied his own unique tangent in Clinton-era Washington, so the rabid political climbers always assumed I had more pull than I ever in fact did.)
As such, people tend to accord you respect only in direct relation to your perceived clout, and if you don’t have any, you’re just not worth talking to. In DC, the most remorseless practitioners of the political arts — and thus often the most successful — will be endlessly scanning the room around you during your conversation, looking to see if there’s someone more important they should be talking to at that moment. It’s a peculiarly virulent form of douchebaggery that you really can’t escape if you venture into the politics business, and it, sad to say, has been very much in evidence here in Denver.
Like I said, I found this endless reducing of people to their places of employ tremendously irritating even when I occupied a relatively privileged position in “The Game.” Now that I’ve been out of the scene for awhile — having cashed in my chits, so to speak, to pursue the PhD during the Dubya years — and my hive status is lower than even drone, it’s that much worse. Now, here in the blogger tent, everyone — give or take a few e-celebrities, of course — seems very friendly, down-to-earth folk, and journalists, I’ve found, rarely traffick as baldly in this sort of behavior as the politicos (which is a lot of the reason I tended to hang with reporters and non-profit types while in DC.) But, get around the actual honest-to-goodness political people, who are obviously everywhere right now, and hoo boy. After an hour or two of being constantly Sized Up and Found Wanting by weaselly-looking guys in suits, it’s enough to send you screaming into the streets.
Ok, had to get that off my chest. I am having a great time here, honest! Still, it was a bit of a shock on my first day to be resubmerged so quickly and so thoroughly into the DC-politico culture. Oh yeah, it’s like that.
From a Dead Man…Greetings.
“What I have wanted most to do…is to make political writing into an art.” By way of Return of the Reluctant, it seems George Orwell’s diary entries will be posted online in blog form beginning August 9, seventy years after he initially wrote them. Welcome to the political blogosphere, George! (And good luck breaking into the TNR-Politico-Atlantic-TPM mutual-regard society.)
A Categorical Imperative.
FYI: As you may or may not have noticed, the list of categories to the right has been growing considerably over the past few days. This is because, [a] to take advantage of the usual summer lull, [b] in true bored historian form, I’m indulging my penchant for archiving, [c] since 90-95% of GitM‘s hits are Google searches anyway, and [d] since I didn’t really think through how long it was going to take when I started, I’ve decided to go back through the archives and tag up the old posts with more detailed categories.
After several hours of work, I’m only to December 2007, so this should take a few weeks to complete, on and off. (And the Geocities era (1999-2002) will remain untouched for now.) But, hopefully, the backlog of posts will be more useful in the future.
The Real World Beckons.
You may have noticed it’s been quieter than usual around here over the past week. This is partly because I’ve come around to the opinion that blogging every minor twist in the Obama-Clinton primary saga has become redundant. We all know Sen. Obama is our nominee, and many of us have known it since Wisconsin back in February. (The most recent evidence of this assertion: Obama picked up a +2 delegate swing in Miss. on Thursday.) So, my inclination to cover this extended garbagetime as closely as I would an actually tight contest has grown more attentuated over the past few weeks. This isn’t to say I won’t be covering the primary anymore, just that I doubt I’ll be spending as much time on it.
More to the point, it’s also been quiet around here because I’ve been busier than usual in meatspace this week. To wit, I’ve been stripping down my apartment, throwing out all the useless junk, as per the spring cleaning norm, but also putting all but really necessary items in boxes, to prepare for my imminent departure from the Columbia environs in two months. I’m still writing at the moment, and don’t plan to defend until the fall term. Still, it’s soon time to leave this place, in preparation for either a return to writerly-type ventures in DC or an academic job search, which I plan to embark on after knowing the electoral lay of the land in November. (Or perhaps I’ll just spend a few years walking the earth like Tom Joad, ’cause you never know.)
Either way, the bills don’t pay themselves, so my non-dissertating, non-blogging time is now mostly spent looking for remunerative employ — if not a full-time gig then at least enough freelance projects to swing the summer months. We’ll see how that goes. Early feelers to Team Obama in Chicago came up blank, unfortunately (they seem more than fine in the speechwriting department anyway), and applications to some higher-profile political blog-jobs didn’t even merit a rejection letter. (Which reminds me, I have a rant about the current state of the paid political blogosphere on broil at the moment — short version: it’s effectively become as insular and echo-chambery as the Weblog Jr. High/”blogger cabal” of the early days — but I’ll save it for another post so it doesn’t come across totally as pique.) But, I’m working on other leads too, so hopefully something will shake out. (Of course, if y’all hear of anything, do let me know — the resume is over here.) In any event, if you’re wondering why it’s quieter than usual here for now, that’s why.
Crafty like a Firefox. (Macs for Clinton?)
In the past week, two friends and readers have informed me that GitM is acting somewhat squirrelly in the latest version of Firefox for Mac. Now, I’m a PC guy (by usage and by temperament), so I can’t troubleshoot the problem on my computers here. But, is anyone else out there having issues recently? My guess it probably has something to do with embedded videos, since that’s the only “new” thing around here lately, and most likely I’m betting the problem is either this St. Patrick’s Day post from last week or the Tracey Morgan SNL one right before it. Does anyone know if Firefox (on a Mac) hiccups with certain types of embedded videos, or am I barking up the wrong tree? Any help is greatly appreciated.
Update: Raza at High Industrial informed me that the offending party was likely the Tracy Morgan post. I’ve now removed the embedded video…Mac Firefoxers, is everything back to normal?
So that explains it…
“Despite the attention blogs can get, the poll said 56 percent of Americans say they never read blogs that discuss politics. Another 23 percent read them several times a year, the survey showed. While blogs are largely considered the realm of young people who are most Internet-savvy, only 19 percent of people ages 18 to 31, and 17 percent of those ages 32 to 43, regularly read a political blog, the poll said.” A new Harris Interactive poll finds that most people don’t read political blogs. Believe me, I’ve noticed. :s