Category: Blogosphere

What Do They Think They’re Doing?

~ susie ~ 9 Comments

Really good piece on the chasm between progressives and the White House from Open Left’s Mike Lux:

The Obama team forgets that once the primary was over in 2008, the folks in the blogosphere and all the progressive groups were pretty united on helping Obama win the election. A pretty sizable share of the 13 million people on the Obama e-mail list were also reading blogs, getting e-mails from MoveOn.org or phone/mail from unions and other groups. Everyone had the same goal of defeating McCain and other right-wing Republicans, and we were all reinforcing (for the most part) what the campaign was doing and saying.

That sense of teamwork is pretty well gone, blown apart not only because of some policy decisions many progressives disagreed with, and not just by the series of insulting comments I spelled out in the first paragraph, but by a serious lack of outreach as well. The result is that Obama gets a steady stream of criticism from Markos, Arianna, Rachel, and many of the rest of us, and when good things happen, they rarely get played up positively as well as they should. I think that is one of the big reasons why online giving has been fairly weak on the Obama list (a person with knowledge of the list told me that the fundraising trend off their email list was “extremely worrisome”), why volunteer recruitment has been down, and why Democratic voter enthusiasm in the polling as been so consistently weak (obviously the bad economy has a lot to do with that as well, but don’t discount the bad relationship with progressive media and institutions).

Here’s the thing that drives me most crazy, though: the only thing making the Obama White House take the huge gamble of not reaching out to the professional left is their own arrogance. Engaging the “professional left” would be easy to do if they cared about it at all, and had a strategy to do it. In the Clinton White House, that presidency of NAFTA, failed health care, the 1994 election fiasco, and “triangulation”, the progressive community- the professional left as well as progressive voters- progressives never deserted Clinton. Through his two elections, special prosecutors, the Lewinsky mess and impeachment, the Democratic base stayed loyal to and enthusiastic about Bill Clinton (even when he didn’t always deserve it). Why? Because Bill Clinton cared about having a good relationship with progressives, and because we had a strategy for working effectively with them. President Clinton frequently asked me about who was happy with us and who was disgruntled in the progressive world, and we made sure to bring in everyone in the latter category for meetings and social events at the White House. At the height of the NAFTA fight, we organized a dinner for labor leaders where the President hung out with them for a long, social evening, telling them in his remarks “I know we are in a fight right now, but I want you to know that my White House will always be your house too, that we always will be friends.” We made sure progressives always had chances to have serious input into policy development. Whenever we had bad news to deliver to progressive groups on any issue big or small, we reached out to them before the announcement, talked about how to make the damage hurt less, and talked about what we could do to help them on other issues. And whenever there was good news, we made sure the folks who cared about it were part of the celebration.
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Grayson Is Right

~ susie ~ 2 Comments

Robert Gibbs should be fired. But please don’t confuse that goal with the larger problem, which is that the White House agrees with him. Punish Gibbs, by all means, but don’t stop there.

Gibbs is a weasel and always was, even back when he worked for John Kerry and was leaking attacks on Howard Dean. Don’t get distracted, it’s the guy at the top we need to watch. Personally, I think the poll numbers are so low, they’re going to have to appoint Elizabeth Warren in a frantic attempt to excite the base — but only after they fill up all the agency slots with Geithner minions, who will actively work to undermine her.

Google Lets Us Down

~ susie

Craig Aaron at the Huffington Post explores the gory details of the Google-Verizon agreement for internet service:

So Google and Verizon went public today with their “policy framework” — better known as the pact to end the Internet as we know it.

News of this deal broke this week, sparking a public outcry that’s seen hundreds of thousands of Internet users calling on Google to live up to its “Don’t Be Evil” pledge.

But cut through the platitudes the two companies (Googizon, anyone?) offered on today’s press call, and you’ll find this deal is even worse than advertised.

The proposal is one massive loophole that sets the stage for the corporate takeover of the Internet.Real Net Neutrality means that Internet service providers can’t discriminate between different kinds of online content and applications. It guarantees a level playing field for all Web sites and Internet technologies.

It’s what makes sure the next Google, out there in a garage somewhere, has just as good a chance as any giant corporate behemoth to find its audience and thrive online.

What Google and Verizon are proposing is fake Net Neutrality. You can read their framework for yourself here or go here to see Google twisting itself in knots about this suddenly “thorny issue.” But here are the basics of what the two companies are proposing:

1. Under their proposal, there would be no Net Neutrality on wireless networks — meaning anything goes, from blocking websites and applications to pay-for-priority treatment.

2. Their proposed standard for “non-discrimination” on wired networks is so weak that actions like Comcast’s widely denounced blocking of BitTorrent would be allowed.

3. The deal would let ISPs like Verizon — instead of Internet users like you — decide which applications deserve the best quality of service. That’s not the way the Internet has ever worked, and it threatens to close the door on tomorrow’s innovative applications. (If RealPlayer had been favored a few years ago, would we ever have gotten YouTube?)

4. The deal would allow ISPs to effectively split the Internet into “two pipes” — one of which would be reserved for “managed services,” a pay-for-play platform for content and applications. This is the proverbial toll road on the information superhighway, a fast lane reserved for the select few, while the rest of us are stuck on the cyber-equivalent of a winding dirt road.

5. The pact proposes to turn the Federal Communications Commission into a toothless watchdog, left fruitlessly chasing consumer complaints but unable to make rules of its own. Instead, it would leave it up to unaccountable (and almost surely industry-controlled) third parties to decide what the rules should be.

Improvements

~ susie ~ 4 Comments

Tech Sensei showed up after work and after we slammed down a sausage pizza, he went to work on importing the old archives. (See the tab at the top of the page if you want to see the older stuff. Yay!) Now he’s trying to figure out why all the mouses stopped working. His theory is that I have too many programs running when I start up, so he’s checking that now.

Plus, he’s going to move all my music files to the same folder, which will make it a lot easier for me to find my songs when I want to share them).

And if all goes well, he’ll be adding those Tweet/Digg/Facebook etc. buttons at the bottom of each post. Stay tuned!

UPDATE: Chris lied. He didn’t put the tab up yet, the worthless bastard. Here’s where you can access the archives for now.

Let me know if the “Follow Me On Twitter” button works on the sidebar. It works for me on the laptop but not the desktop.

You Kids Get Off My Lawn

~ susie ~ 5 Comments

Longtime political reporter Walter Shapiro thinks it’s time for another bloggers ethics panel. Because those horrible, horrible bloggers are posting erroneous stories just to beat the news cycle! (Bad, bad bloggers!)

Choosing bluster over blushing, Breitbart told Matt Lewis in a Politics Daily interview: “I couldn’t wait to get this story. I knew from past experience that I had a news cycle to get this out.” Later in the interview, Breitbart underscored his cavalier publish-or-perish approach to fact-checking: “It had to be done at the exact moment in time that the press would notice it.” A new report by the Project for Excellence in Journalism details how the Sherrod charade migrated from conservative blogs taking their cues from Breitbart to Fox News and then to CNN.

Breitbart is just a symbol of a larger problem that transcends the poison-pen politics of ideological warriors (of both the right and left) and the slippery ethics of the blogosphere. We have collectively blundered into a P.T. Barnum media age when being first trumps being accurate. The economic rewards of the Internet flow to those who win the search-engine wars by being fast and furious rather than to those laggards who wait to be accurate and comprehensive. It is as if the motto of today’s journalism has become: “He who dies with the most clicks wins.”

Every second, we are mentally assaulted by hyperbolic cable TV “breaking news” alerts, data bursts and Twitter trivia. Meaning and context disappear amid the bite-sized news nuggets. In the world of politics, every new poll, TV ad and opposition-research press release is treated as a game changer on par with Newt Gingrich handing down the Contract With America from Mount Sinai. If everything is equally important, then simultaneously everything is equally unimportant.

I have to wonder: Did Walter Shapiro simply sleep through the Whitewater “scandal” that was freshly fueled every single day by the New York Times? Yeah, I get his point. I think the news cycle does drive inaccuracy. But bloggers didn’t invent this “go-go” news mentality, they only learned to take advantage of it. Even the voracious cable networks didn’t invent it – they only sped it up.

Clutching your pearls and pointing to “ideological warriors” isn’t going to solve the problem. (I mean, you’re pointing to Newt’s Contract On America as a “game changer” when it was really a bunch of meaningless blather. What made it a “game changer” was the relentless repetition by the Beltway bobbleheads. They kept talking about it as if it were meaningful, and so people began to take it seriously.)

But the biggest factor is that the corporations that own and direct news organizations care only about the bottom line. It’s to their benefit to hype news as much as possible. That gets more viewers, more viewers means higher ratings, and higher ratings mean more lucrative ad sales.

As much as I can’t stand the man, Andrew Breitbart isn’t the problem. He’s only a symptom of this very sick corporate culture. If the news business weren’t so eager to chase every ad dollar (remember, once upon a time, network news operated at a loss and was considered to be a public service), they wouldn’t be so eager to bite at every juicy fabrication tossed their way by the likes of Breitbart.

Oh, and Walter? As a rule of thumb, liberal bloggers aren’t the ones with the “slippery ethics.” If you weren’t a lazy “he said, she said” journalist who throws false equivalence into a story to appear “fair,” you’d know that liberal bloggers, much like the corporate journalists, actually do attempt to get the facts straight. (Even though most of us aren’t getting paid to do so.) We don’t manufacture stories out of whole cloth, nor do we knowingly twist and distort the facts. (*cough* Judy Miller *cough*)

If you were doing your job, you wouldn’t need me to tell you that. You’d already know. Instead, you sound like Grandpa Simpson, yelling at those damned blogger kids to get the hell off your lawn.

All for the Best

~ susie

Even though one kind reader offered to send me, I’m really, really glad I didn’t make it to Netroots Nation this year. From what my friend tells me, it was really smoky and people were having a lot of trouble with sore throats, weepy eyes, etc.

Plus, the meetings rooms were all very far away from each other, worse than when they had it in Chicago. I couldn’t have walked all that distance.

So all’s well that ends well!

Next year it’s in Minnesota. I’ll see if I can make that one.