On building better suburbs.
This journolist stuff is insane. I can't believe we're still talking about it. Henry Farrell outed himself this week. He's taking it with a better sense of humor than I would.
Loved Rob Farley's post about the soft bigotry of low expectations problem and being a parent of twins.
If you can stomach another depressing chart on the economy, check out this one on the percentage of Americans experiencing a major economic loss. (More from Sullivan. Is it possible to put a Palin filter on my RSS feed of the Daily Dish?)
Apt. 11d 
“This journolist stuff is insane. I can’t believe we’re still talking about it.”
I expect the Daily Caller has lots more archive left to roll around in.
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Re Journolist: I have been in their situation, except in tv fandom. Ticked off someone on a private list, who then made our archives available to lots of people. Sucked big time.
I loved the suburbs article, though you know, Levitt actually designed walkable neighborhoods to begin with. In fact, I find my mom’s neighborhood (Levitt-built) to be much more conducive to walking than my current neighborhood. Don’t you remember those days hanging out at the village green? Most Levitt neighborhoods are still built around those village greens, with a little green space, a public pool, and some small stores. The idea then was that families had 1 car, and the SAHMs needed a place they could walk to with the kids to pick up milk, bread and jello for their jello molds.
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Is it possible to put a Palin filter on my RSS feed of the Daily Dish?
I read the man for something like five or six years and now I just can’t. Sometimes I’ll see a headline I like when I’m at the Atlantic for another blog, so I click over. But, down two or three posts, you’ve got him smashing his head into a brick wall and thinking he’s raising “issues.”
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In the suburbs piece it says, “only one in 10 take public transit,” referring to Long Island commuters. My neighborhood does better than that. I’m not technically in a suburb, but we don’t have our own railway either.
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“I read the man for something like five or six years and now I just can’t.”
Ditto, except I didn’t read him that long. There was even a time (long before the Atlantic gig) when I actually emailed him occasionally. He seemed like somebody you could actually talk to. However, looking back, it seems clearer now that whichever side he was on, he wasn’t fair to the other.
I’ve come to think that we Americans are a bit imposed on by that beautiful English style (how do you people do it, harry b?).
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I would put a Palin filter on my entire computer, if I could. Not because I find her more distasteful than the average politician, but because she seems to bring out stupid, distasteful reactions in so many others.
Actually, there would be a lot of people I would filter out, if I could. Eliot Spitzer, for instance. I could go on, but I won’t.
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I clicked over on the Farrell link and am utterly confused. I think you’re having a weird tempest in a teapot I don’t care about (a similar one has broken out at scienceblogs, and I don’t care about that one, either). Is that OK? Or do I have to go figure out everything?
I’ll admit that this is one of the things i think of as a effect of the internet, local communities that think they’re not so local erupting over some fervor or another (and some people staying up all night over the fact that someone is wrong on the internet).
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“I’ll admit that this is one of the things i think of as a effect of the internet, local communities that think they’re not so local erupting over some fervor or another (and some people staying up all night over the fact that someone is wrong on the internet).”
Actually, not so much. What we are getting to look at is the behind-the-scenes story of how the 2008 election coverage sausage got made, which is pretty interesting.
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What we are getting to look at is the behind-the-scenes story of how the 2008 election coverage sausage got made, which is pretty interesting.
Maybe, but possibly not. To pull numbers from the air, about 2/3 of the people won’t give a rat’s ass because they don’t follow politics or the news. About 1/6 of the people assume that you cannot honestly present information impartially without having it clearly support the Democrats, so they’ll regard this as a non-issue. About 1/6 of the people assume the mainstream media has always conspired to elect Democrats and they won’t regard this as new information except to the extent that it might be an “I told you so” to the rest of the country. Except the rest of the country isn’t paying attention for the reasons I put above.
The non-partisan media is clearly dying and I don’t think this slows or speeds the process.
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Yeah, I think not.
The people on that list weren’t covert liberals. They were open liberals who had already expressed their views on their blogs and on opinion pages. Stop the press! Lindsay Beyerstein is a liberal and doesn’t like the Tea Party! Who knew?
Is it a shocker that they were chatting on a private listserv? They were chatting in the comment sections of blogs for ages. The list wasn’t a secret. I knew about it.
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I don’t see why they couldn’t figure out a way to chat without sticking their names to it quite so clearly, but then I don’t see why anybody would use a listserv in 2010.
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I mean, it could still cause problems for individuals who were on the list, like that one Weigel guy, based on what they said.
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Still confused. Is there somewhere I can read the 15 sentence summary, rather than the afterparty stuff?
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On a marginally related issue, I’m unconvinced that there ever was a “impartial media” that’s dying. What’s the evidence for a changing trend?
I’m gleaning (though I really don’t want to know very much) that there’s some argument that media sources discussed personal opinions on a listserv that has now been made public. But, presumably, those same people would have been having personal conversation switch each other anyway, in the “good old days”, no?
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media sources discussed personal opinions on a listserv that has now been made public.
Yes, but compared to what Sullivan has been hatching out of his isolated brain….
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I think that, formerly, a combination of (i) more political diversity among reporters and (ii) an ideology that valorized objectivity and detachment resulted in a less partisan media. The law, for example, still have both of these things, but journalism has lost them.
I’m curious, what has supposedly replaced listservs? I am on a few law-related ones, though they are different form journolist in that (i) anyone can sign up and (ii) they stay very much on-topic, whereas Prof. Farrell and others have claimed that journolist had lots of irrelevant conversation about baseball and such.
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Is there evidence for more political diversity among journalists in the past? The only cites I can find in google doesn’t report any significant trends over the last 30+ years.
I have always thought the American journalist ethic of “valorizing” neutrality somewhat mistaken, that it would be better to be open about one’s own leanings. I can’t remember which columnist wrote that he doesn’t vote, because he doesn’t want to make a decision, that he fears will bias his reporting. Since I don’t believe that most people are “neutral”, I’d rather know where their lack of neutrality lies, rather than pretending they are neutral. I also think lack of neutrality doesn’t mean that one can’t report information objectively, when there’s objective info to report.
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bj,
Among other things (like Weigel’s trying to coordinate to kill inconvenient stories), you have stuff like Spencer Ackerman urging the Journolisters to accuse any conservative of racism who is inconvenient to the cause. Ackerman wrote (during the Jeremiah Wright thing):
“I do not endorse a Popular Front, nor do I think you need to. It’s not necessary to jump to Wright-qua-Wright’s defense. What is necessary is to raise the cost on the right of going after the left. In other words, find a rightwinger’s [sic] and smash it through a plate-glass window. Take a snapshot of the bleeding mess and send it out in a Christmas card to let the right know that it needs to live in a state of constant fear. Obviously I mean this rhetorically.
“And I think this threads the needle. If the right forces us all to either defend Wright or tear him down, no matter what we choose, we lose the game they’ve put upon us. Instead, take one of them — Fred Barnes, Karl Rove, who cares — and call them racists. Ask: why do they have such a deep-seated problem with a black politician who unites the country? What lurks behind those problems? This makes *them* sputter with rage, which in turn leads to overreaction and self-destruction.”
http://dailycaller.com/2010/07/20/documents-show-media-plotting-to-kill-stories-about-rev-jeremiah-wright/3/
Note that Ackerman didn’t mean choose a racist and accuse them of racism, he meant choose a single inconvenient conservative, put them under the spotlight, and accuse them of racism. Ackerman did not apparently have a lot of takers on his strategy, but I note that his approach (criticism of Obama is inherently racist) has been a very popular one over the last couple of years.
I think there are a lot of shoes yet to drop as the archive gets combed through. There have been some rather odd things in the press over the past few years, obvious stories (like the Edwards thing and perhaps Gore’s alleged serial masseuse-manhandling) that got very, very slow and half-hearted attention. The newspapers (NYT, WaPo, etc.) were purposely avoiding news. When the story gets to be written of the death of the major media, mass coordination to make the major media less timely and less full of actual news may well turn out to be one of the many causes of death.
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I’m curious, what has supposedly replaced listservs?
Not getting your inbox clogged-up.
If I wanted to conspire to alter media coverage, I’d use a wiki.
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Well, it went from Usenet to listservs to Yahoo Groups to Google Groups to online forums to blogs, I think. Now it’s dispersed into FB and Twitter.
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I’m on several exclusive listservs, but nothing as cool as Journolist.
The Journolist scandal in two minutes… Journolist was a listserv of a group of bloggers, young journalists, and a few professors who chatted about politics and got ideas for stories. Nearly all the members were very open about being liberal. Nobody is surprised that Matt Ygelsias is liberal. Someone hacked into the account and got all their discussions. 99.9% of the discussions were really boring. They found some messages by one young guy, who covered the conservative beat for the WaPo, saying some juvenile shit. Look, most of these guys were under 30 and felt super cool being part of this group and were a little immature. No big deal. The guy got fired from the WaPo and got a ton of followers on Twitter and got a better job. Now, the Daily Caller is trying to milk more out of this list by exposing liberal bloggers for being liberal. It’s like outing Sean Hannity for being conservative. So stupid, it’s unbelievable.
Most reporters were not part of this list. Journolist was not responsible for any slow coverage of Gore or Edwards. If the conservative bloggers are making those claims, they’re either stupid or liars or both.
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“Someone hacked into the account…”
I don’t think we know that at this point. Cite?
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In response to the charge that the only revelation here is “that liberal journalists have liberal views”, Tucker Carlson responds this way:
To be clear: We’re not contesting the right of anyone, journalist or not, to have political opinions. (I, for one, have made a pretty good living expressing mine.) What we object to is partisanship, which is by its nature dishonest, a species of intellectual corruption. Again and again, we discovered members of Journolist working to coordinate talking points on behalf of Democratic politicians, principally Barack Obama. That is not journalism, and those who engage in it are not journalists. They should stop pretending to be. The news organizations they work for should stop pretending, too.
http://dailycaller.com/2010/07/22/letter-from-editor-in-chief-tucker-carlson-on-the-daily-callers-journolist-coverage/
I don’t think Journolist critics believe the definition of “being liberal” includes deliberately and falsely accusing conservatives of racism.
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Most of the members of journolist weren’t traditional media types. They were bloggers. Bloggers aren’t typical media. They are a blend of activists and journalist. It is entirely appropriate for activists to talk strategy. The journolist member who was talking about using “racism” as a tactic was an activist/blogger. Just because that one member of the journolist was talking strategy doesn’t mean that other members of the listserv approved or participated in that behavior. People joined the list for very different reasons and had different levels of participation. My guess is that other members of the list rolled their virtual eye roll at that comment.
Tucker Carlson is an ass.
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I’ve seldom seen a clearer description of Carlson’s modus operandi.
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There was one guy on journolist who was an administration figure, no? I get confused by different reports, but that is a bit out of the ordinary.
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“Most of the members of journolist weren’t traditional media types. They were bloggers. Bloggers aren’t typical media. They are a blend of activists and journalist. It is entirely appropriate for activists to talk strategy.”
Maybe they should have called it “Actolist”?
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Ezra Klein wrote that he wouldn’t allow any government officials on the list, though of course, it’s not impossible.
Parker (I guess she’s a conservative columnist?) has a summary of the “tempest in a Barbie cup.”
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/07/23/AR2010072304131.html?hpid=opinionsbox1
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Do you take recommendations? If so, via Go Fug Yourself, Catalog Living:
http://catalogliving.tumblr.com/
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yes, that was hilarious. I think megan mccardle linked to it on her blog — that’s where I found it.
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It might have been better if other Journolist members had pushed back strongly on the race baiting suggestion instead of silently disagreeing.
It seems that some of the more active members were Washington Post employees.
Jared Bernstein was a list member. Interesting picture at this link. http://legalinsurrection.blogspot.com/2010/07/obama-journolist-operative-invited.html
Not sure how many voters are paying attention to this story. It will be interesting to see if it gets much play on the Sunday morning talk shows.
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Here’s another oddity from the 2008 campaign–the discrepancy between the major media’s obvious infatuation with Obama and their refusal to research his past at all thoroughly. Obama had written at length about himself in his memoirs, and it would seem a very natural thing to go over them and do an in-depth analysis of discrepancies between the books and other people’s memories of the same events. I remember one stand-out piece where someone (a blogger or reporter) actually did go back and find the firm where Obama had said he had been some sort of corporate type with a briefcase, feeling that he was an agent behind enemy lines. Interestingly, it turned out that the firm (which produced some sort of financial newsletter) was actually a very seedy, chummy, bohemian place where the management drank with the janitorial staff, and a number of alumni from that office chimed in in the comment thread. I haven’t read the memoirs (just seen a lot of quotes), but I also wonder about the treatment that Obama’s admitted drug use got in the media. That was a dog that didn’t bark. Possibly connected was that Obama seems to have had a couple of lost years where there aren’t a lot of people who can tell you where he was or what he was doing. I’ve seen quite a few people (including one or two here) who treat Dreams from My Father as some sort of impeccable primary source, rather than as a book written by a guy who needs to neaten up the narrative flow to make the story interesting and who is thinking of higher office. A skeptical major media treatment of Dreams from My Father would have been a very interesting long, investigative piece. Everybody would have read it (or at least quotes from it) and it would have been linked like crazy, and yet it wasn’t done. Odd, that.
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“Everybody would have read it (or at least quotes from it) and it would have been linked like crazy, and yet it wasn’t done. Odd, that.”
You mean kind of like the stories about Bush’s drug use & the fact that Laura has actually killed a person? I didn’t learn about the story about the head on collision that killed a friend (do we really have any idea whether there were drugs or alcohol involved in that) until Bush was well out of office. Odd, that.
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“Compare the ratings of Shep Smith with the ratings for Glenn Beck. Compare the traffic numbers for Hot Air, Drudge, and Instapundit with those of FrumForum, The American Scene, and Eunomia. And note that the Daily Caller traffic went way up with when they started in with the JournoList silliness (whatever one thinks of JournoList, the way that Daily Caller is presenting the story is extremely dishonest).
“Given the choice, conservatives as a group will go for the dumber, more dishonest, more insane option. There’s a market for good-faith conservative media, but that market is liberals. Who watches/reads the faux-good faith propaganda of David Brooks? Totebaggers. Who reads The American Scene and Eunomia? People like me.
“Conservatives, by and large, have no interest in what you or I or actual journalists consider journalism. It’s telling that when Clark Hoyt and Andy Alexander muse about pleasing conservative readers, they don’t talk about covering legitimate stories that conservative readers are interested in, they talk (exclusively) about following ginned-up Breitbart controversies.
“Yglesias has it backwards: the problem isn’t that conservative media lies to conservatives, it’s that conservatives seek out media that tells lies. ”
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Speaking of major economic losses, here’s Martin Wolf of the
well-known socialist ragFinancial Times on which US party is best for the country’s long-term economic health:My reading of contemporary Republican thinking is that there is no chance of any attempt to arrest adverse long-term fiscal trends should they return to power. Moreover, since the Republicans have no interest in doing anything sensible, the Democrats will gain nothing from trying to do much either. That is the lesson Democrats have to draw from the Clinton era’s successful frugality, which merely gave George W. Bush the opportunity to make massive (irresponsible and unsustainable) tax cuts. In practice, then, nothing will be done.
Indeed, nothing may be done even if a genuine fiscal crisis were to emerge. According to my friend, Bruce Bartlett, a highly informed, if jaundiced, observer, some “conservatives” (in truth, extreme radicals) think a federal default would be an effective way to bring public spending they detest under control. It should be noted, in passing, that a federal default would surely create the biggest financial crisis in world economic history. …
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My reading of contemporary Republican thinking is …. In practice, then, nothing will be done.
I agree with nearly all of this paragraph, except it implies that one party did, by itself, push frugality. What actually produced the Clinton era’s frugality was divided government. Most of the Democrats were very angry about the frugality at the time. The Republicans of the time were widely denounced as being unreasonable when they shut down the government.
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“What actually produced the Clinton era’s frugality was divided government. Most of the Democrats were very angry about the frugality at the time. The Republicans of the time were widely denounced as being unreasonable when they shut down the government.”
Right. At the time, it was widely felt that Clinton was pretty irrelevant to what is now described as “the Clinton era.” There was a Clinton quote (which I can’t quite remember exactly) about how he was still relevant, which is not what you say when you’re actually in the driver’s seat. There was also a Time cover story (June 1993, I think) with the title “The Incredible Shrinking President” with a picture of a tiny Bill Clinton. I remembered the cover story, but before I looked it up, I had no idea that Clinton had such a hard time so early in his presidency.
Here’s the story:
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,978663,00.html
Here’s the cover:
http://www.hughhewitt.com/blog/print.aspx?guid=15a83931-e9aa-4fd7-9fac-4e463fad847d
I’m thinking that there was another maor news magazine cover that showed a tiny Bill Clinton sitting on a giant’s shoulder, but I can’t seem to find it.
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At the time, it was widely felt that Clinton was pretty irrelevant to what is now described as “the Clinton era.”
That seems a bit too much as it was a negotiated compromise that set the budget. I’m mostly trying to express the view that Madison’s “faction vs. faction” seems a better source of hope for economic policy than “everybody will agree that we need to do X.”
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