A Text Ad By Any Other Name

Zephyr Teachout on politics:

It's the most imperfect art, and you really have to get down in the gutter. I love how, at the same time that it's just this ugly sport, at the core its aspirations are so high. Listening to so many different people express their political views is very moving. We're political animals. I like that -- 'political animals' -- it expresses it in one phrase. The highest and the lowest.

To call attention to yesterday's entry on Teachout, I bought a Google text ad keyed to her name:

Zephyr Blows
Fact-checking the claim that Dean
bribed two liberal bloggers
cadenhead.org/workbench

A few people think this is a low blow, so I'm bringing it up for discussion here.

I bought the ad to redress a libel. People who search Google for her name this weekend are highly likely to be looking for one thing: The dirt on her inflammatory claim to have explicitly bought good press for the Dean campaign from Markos Moulitsas and Jerome Armstrong. I think the facts deserve as wide an airing as possible.

Right-wing ideologues will be riding this smear for days. First Bill O'Reilly, Robert Novak, and Hugh Hewitt this weekend; next Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity on their radio shows tomorrow.

No other search terms are as directly associated with this controversy as her name. When it blows over in a few days, the ad will of course be dropped.

I'll admit that the choice of headline, which I also used here, is playing hardball. Jeff Jarvis might even say that it's (gasp) uncivilized.

But I think it's time that liberals learned from the Swift Boat veterans and their amphibious assault on Kerry's war record. The Dukakis doctrine doesn't work: If you ignore scurrilous and irresponsible attacks in the belief that people are too reasonable to give them credence, you're going to get beaten like a drum.

Politics · 2005/01/16 · 9 COMMENTS · Link

The breakup of Brad Pitt and Jennifer Anniston is no longer Kent Brownridge's tsunami.

After his remark spanned the globe, the Us Weekly parent company exec has issued a mea stupida:

I used an inappropriate metaphor and I'm sorry that I in any way compared a monumental tragedy in human life to this. ... I wish I'd said that this was our equivalent of covering the presidential election.

2005/01/14 · Comment · Link

Blogger Payments No Kos for Alarm

A Wall Street Journal story and the invisible backhand of the blogosphere are attempting to make the publishers of Daily Kos and MyDD the liberal versions of Armstrong "No Bribe Left Behind" Williams:

Howard Dean's presidential campaign hired two Internet political "bloggers" as consultants so that they would say positive things about the former governor's campaign in their online journals, according to a former high-profile Dean aide.

There's no comparison between these situations. Jerome Armstrong stopped weblogging during the contract. Daily Kos publisher Markos Moulitsas disclosed his professional relationship with the Dean campaign from the moment it began, and did so prominently: Take a look at Daily Kos from June 2003 to see the disclaimer directly below the site's logo.

When the Journal declares breathlessly that the issue "shook the confidence of many people in the blogosphere," I wish they had named some of these delicate flowers.

Surely there aren't many people precocious enough to believe, as Jeff Jarvis apparently does, that webloggers are completely blind to the persuasive power of money.

(What other troubling revelations lie in store for such naifs? My employees laugh at my jokes even when they aren't funny. These pants make me look fat, but everyone is afraid to tell me. Size does matter.)

Political campaigns threw a lot of money at webloggers last year, mostly in the form of ads -- of course they were hoping to get a little editorial appreciation as a two-fer.

Taking ethical correctness to the point of ridiculousness, Roger L. Simon calls Moulitsas a hack for taking campaign money:

I never would accept money from any party or candidate to front for them on this blog. Of course that's easy to say because nobody ever asked me. Nevertheless, I thought the whole point of blogging is not selling out to anyone on your blog, not even an editor or a publisher. The minute you do that you might as well chuck it in.

Simon makes his living outside of politics and writes for National Review (describing its editor as an articulate spokeswoman). I can see why he defines integrity by his refusal to accept money from political entities, just as Bill Bennett defines immorality as every vice other than gambling.

Many webloggers write about subjects that relate to their professional careers. That's one of the best reasons to read them: Someone who spends 60 hours a week yoked to a compiler is a go-to source for coding insight. An NBA owner knows how the ball bounces.

A weblogger who works as a political consultant should not be expected to quit his job to prove his editorial integrity. Though as it turns out, Moulitsas did -- he doesn't need consulting gigs now that BlogAds drives a money truck to his house every month.

Unless you believe that an ethical weblog requires that its author stop making a living, the standard should be to disclose financially entangling relationships, not avoid them entirely. Let the readers decide if the dollars lining your pockets have turned you into a walking, talking infomercial.

Speaking of which, I give all of my books four stars.

Publishing · Politics · Journalism · 2005/01/14 · 14 COMMENTS · Link

Kent Brownridge, general manager of Us Weekly parent company Wenner Media, on the breakup of Brad Pitt and Jennifer Aniston:

For a celebrity weekly, this is our tsunami.

It's a good thing he didn't describe it as "our 9/11." That would be in poor taste.

Publishing · 2005/01/12 · 3 COMMENTS · Link

Remove the Blog from Thine Eye

In a letter to the media news site Romenesko, Rob Walsh pops the hype balloon of weblogs, describing them as "nothing more than the Web's version of talk radio."

If weblogs are talk radio, as Walsh derides, they are talk radio in which every caller has his own show. The global reach and lack of barriers set them apart.

Unlike every other mass medium, the Web doesn't let giant corporations hog the mike. A former CBS gift shop employee who never went to college has a bigger online audience than CBS News. An obscure reporter from Wisconsin is now a media institution.

Journalists should be paying attention to weblogs, if for no other reason than enlightened self-interest. A cloud of webloggers can descend upon questionable reporting like locusts, leaving nothing but devastation and droppings behind in their wake.

Last March, Tim Blair, a weblogger in Sydney, Australia, read a quote in a Chicago Tribune piece he thought was too good to be true:

"These people always complain," said Graham Thorn, a psychiatrist. "They want it both ways: their way and our way. They want to live in our society and be respected, yet they won't work. They steal, they rob and they get drunk. And they don't respect the laws."

As the Tribune later admitted, reporter Uli Schmetzer fabricated the name and occupation of the source. They ended his nearly 20-year association with the paper.

In announcing Schmetzer's fabrication, Tribune Public Editor Don Wycliff noted wryly that Blair "seems to have set himself up as a kind of independent monitor of the press."

The experience with Schmetzer convinced Wycliff that weblogs represent a new check on the media: "In the past, national and foreign correspondents could roam the country or the world writing stories about people who would never see their work. In the Internet age, there are fewer and fewer places where the Chicago Tribune -- or the Waxahachie Daily Light, for that matter -- cannot be accessed and read critically by people about whom we write."

Could "Tim in Sydney" call a talk radio show in Australia and get a reporter fired in Chicago?

Journalism · 2005/01/11 · 6 COMMENTS · Link

Weblog Update Notification in PHP

With help from Dave Sifry of Technorati, I have released Weblog_Pinger, a weblog notification class library for PHP that sends update pings over XML-RPC to services such as Weblogs.Com, Blo.gs, Ping-o-Matic and Technorati.

The code has been released as open source under the GNU General Public License.

Dave's going to be writing about this code on the Technorati Developers Wiki, which has an extensive section devoted to how to ping the site with weblogging software.

Xml-rpc · Wordzilla · Php · 2005/01/10 · 3 COMMENTS · Link

Democratic Podcast: Social Security Works

The first attempt at public affairs podcasting on Workbench appears to have been popular last week. The audio file of the Democratic response to the presidential radio address was requested 8,400 times.

I'm beginning to appreciate the bandwidth requirements of podcasting. One 2.38 megabyte podcast consumed more than 18 gigabytes of traffic. That's not an issue, because I have a great dedicated server on ServerMatrix that allows 1,200 gigabytes a month, but it could become one as listeners discover this weekly feature.

Saturday's Democratic response was delivered by New York Rep. Charles Rangel, and like last week the emphasis is on President Bush's plan to privatize Social Security.

A transcript of Rangel's remarks:

This is Congressman Charles Rangel of New York.

Terrible tragedies such as the tsunami in Southeast Asia and its aftermath remind us of how fragile life is. One week ago, we in the Congress lost one of our own, a Congressman named Robert Matsui, who was one of the greatest champions of Social Security in American history.

Bob Matsui was fiercely committed to protecting the guaranteed bedrock protection of Social Security. He believed in the program and fought to strengthen it for all Americans, because its promise of retirement security acknowledges that Americans are best off if we face the challenges of life together.

Bob Matsui cared more than just about making sure that Social Security is here for his generation or even the next one. He wanted to make certain that his year-old granddaughter Anna, and all of the generations to come, are blessed by Social Security as past generations have been. Bob was passionate about what he knew was right, while at the same time working to find common ground in order to get things done for the good of the nation. He knew that any significant change in Social Security must be done in a bipartisan way.

Last month, President Bush called Congressional leaders to the White House and asked us not to criticize his plan or to push alternatives until he had a chance to formulate it. That's fair enough. We must respect that. As President, he has the responsibility to come up with a plan. So far, he has not done so, but at the same time his staff has planned a public relations campaign aimed at undermining confidence in the Social Security system. The White House wants Americans to believe that Social Security is heading for an iceberg. They think by scaring people, they would help increase support for privatization.

But the facts prove that there is no imminent crisis with Social Security. The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office says that Social Security can pay full benefits for nearly 50 years. So, there is no crisis. But there is a challenge, because people are living longer.

Unfortunately, the President's proposal for privatized accounts makes Social Security weaker and not stronger. It drains $2 trillion from the trust fund, leading to drastic cuts in benefits of more than 40 percent.

Those who support private accounts claim that a miracle will occur in the stock market and these benefit cuts will be made up. That's just not true. Even nonpartisan experts have determined that private accounts will never meet or surpass the currently proposed benefit, even under the most optimistic assumptions. In addition to these cuts, the Administration is talking about borrowing an additional $2 trillion just in the next 10 years to pay the transition costs to privatization. Running up the debt in this way will squeeze future programs and further pressure interest rates to rise and slow our economy.

I truly believe that Americans want Democrats and Republicans to work together, especially on matters as important as Social Security, and we want to work with the President, but to do so, we need his Administration to be open minded to the idea that Social Security works for millions of Americans and it needs to be strengthened, but not radically changed into something that is not social and not security.

Social Security is something we all paid into. Social Security is not about dependency on big government, it's about how we rely on each other. We believe it should not be 'every man for himself' but that America takes care of its own. With the memory of our dear friend Bob Matsui close to our hearts, we Democrats will continue to fight to keep the trust of Social Security, now and in the future.

This is Congressman Charles Rangel. Thank you so much for listening.

Politics · Podcasts · 2005/01/09 · 3 COMMENTS · Link

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