Month: March 2012

Don’t sell Scott Brown short

On March 6, 2012

Scott Brown

This commentary also appears at the Huffington Post.

Will Republican Sen. Scott Brown of Massachusetts win re-election this November? Or will he be defeated by his Democratic rival, Elizabeth Warren? The answer, clearly, is “yes.”

I’ve been thinking about writing this post for a while. Frank Phillips’ story in today’s Boston Globe on Democrats who are panicking over the latest polls seems like as good a hook as any, so here we go.

From the moment Warren announced her candidacy, I’ve been struck by the fever-pitch feel that has permeated the race. Not among ordinary voters, of course; they won’t tune in until after Labor Day. But political junkies are fully engaged, as you know if you dip into the Twitter streams at #masen and #mapoli.

It seems to me that we’ve got a race between two very good candidates. I think Warren is the best the Democrats could have hoped for — not just better than the unknowns and wannabes who were running before she got into the race, but better than any member of the state’s Democratic establishment, with the possible exception of Gov. Deval Patrick.

Warren is articulate, she’s an economic populist, she combines insider experience with outsider credentials (how many people have managed to piss off both Republicans and Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner?) and she’s almost as pretty as Brown.

Elizabeth Warren

Nor has she made any major missteps to this point. Brown supporters have tried to make hay of her endorsement of the Occupy movement, but that’s not going to play. The repeated references to her as “Professor” Warren are kind of pathetic. Anti-intellectualism does not have the sort of appeal in Massachusetts that it does in, say, Texas.

But some Democrats seem surprised, at the very least, that Brown didn’t topple like a rotten tree at the first sign that he’d have a serious opponent. Those sentiments vastly underestimate Brown’s strengths. In fact, I can think of two only first-class political talents to emerge in Massachusetts in the post-Michael Dukakis era: Patrick and Brown. (If Mitt Romney didn’t have a zillion dollars, I’m not sure he could win a seat on the Belmont Board of Selectmen.)

Democrats ignore the reality that no one is really angry at Brown other than liberal activists. He was elected just a little more than two years ago, and the glow from his startling victory over state Attorney General Martha Coakley has not fully faded. Massachusetts voters have traditionally liked having a Republican in a statewide position, and with the governor’s office now in Democratic hands, Brown has that working for him as well. My sense is that a lot of voters are still rather pleased with themselves for their role in Brown’s win, and it’s going to take more than Warren’s just showing up to get them to change their minds.

Nor should anyone discount Brown’s political instincts, which are superb. Brown has been a master of not taking strong stands on divisive issues, leaving himself free to bend when it’s necessary for his survival as a Republican in an overwhelmingly Democratic state. It took a while, but he eventually came around to voting for the repeal of “don’t ask, don’t tell.” He was among the very few Republicans who voted in favor of financial regulation, although he also loses points for his role in weakening those regulations.

The outlier in Brown’s record is his staunch support for the Blunt amendment, which would undo President Obama’s compromise on birth-control coverage at colleges, hospitals and other secular employers owned by religious institutions. Although Brown’s stand doesn’t seem to have hurt him in the polls so far, I think those who argue his rising poll numbers reflect public support for Blunt are wrong. Again, people just aren’t paying attention yet.

Why did Brown do it? Who knows? Maybe he’s acting on principle. Maybe the Senate leadership believes it has let Brown stray from the reservation too often and demanded his fealty on this one. In the long run, Brown’s support for Blunt will probably hurt him at the margins, but it’s not likely to determine the outcome of the race.

So what will determine the outcome? My guess is turnout. If this weren’t a presidential-election year, Brown would probably be a shoo-in for re-election. But with Obama on the ballot, a lot of people in Massachusetts are going to come out on Election Day looking to vote a straight Democratic ticket. The likelihood that Romney will be Obama’s Republican opponent only makes matters worse for Brown. Romney is not popular here except among the state’s tiny band of Republicans.

Predictions are futile. But I would imagine that whoever wins, it’s going to be extremely close. My advice: Don’t sell Brown short. And chill out. It’s only March.

Photo of Scott Brown by Dan Kennedy. Photo of Elizabeth Warren by the U.S. Treasury Department via Wikimedia Commons.

Proposed Mass. shield law appears to protect bloggers

By Dan Kennedy

On March 5, 2012

In Media

The Massachusetts Legislature this week will consider, once again, whether journalists should be protected from subpoenas ordering them to give up their confidential sources or turn over unused notes, video footage and the like.

According to Robert Ambrogi, executive director of the Massachusetts Newspaper Publishers Association, the bill, called the “Free Flow of Information Act,” will be the subject of a public hearing before the Joint Committee on the Judiciary on Tuesday at 1 p.m. The bill is being sponsored by state Rep. Alice Hanlon Peisch, D-Wellesley.

In an era defined by blogging, social media and citizen journalism, one of the key questions that comes up whenever shield laws are discussed is who should be covered. Many of us argue that it’s journalism, not journalists, that should be protected, and that if a lone blogger is able to convince a judge that she’s engaged in bona fide journalism, then she should be covered just as fully as someone who’s on staff at the Boston Globe.

Fortunately, the bill being considered this week appears to allow for exactly that. I’ve asked Ambrogi for clarification (he has since weighed in, below), but what I’m looking at is the definition of “news media,” which is described in the bill as follows (my emphasis):

[A]ny newspaper, magazine or other periodical, book publisher, news agency, wire service, radio or television station or network, cable or satellite station or network, or audio or audiovisual production company, or any entity that is in the regular business of news gathering and disseminating news or information to the public by any means, including, but not limited to, print, broadcast, photographic, mechanical, internet, or electronic distribution.

The bill specifies very strict protection for anonymous sources and less strict protection for unused notes, footage and other materials accumulated in the course of newsgathering but not actually used. That’s in accord with longstanding legal tradition, so no surprise there. There’s an exception “to prevent imminent and actual harm to public security from acts of terrorism” as well.

Ambrogi reports that Massachusetts is now just one of 10 states that does not have a shield law. But the state’s Supreme Judicial Court has recognized a limited right for reporters to protect their sources. In fact, the only state with no shield protection whatsoever is Wyoming.

By far the most significant gap is the lack of a federal shield law, compounded by the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1972 ruling in Branzburg v. Hayes that journalists do not have a constitutional right to protect their sources. That gap has been exploited by federal authorities in states where journalists would otherwise have shield protection — such as the cases of Jim Taricani in Rhode Island and Josh Wolf in California.

The bill being considered this week has come up before, and I don’t know whether there’s any more reason to think it will pass now than it has in previous years. Personally, I’m lukewarm on shield laws, since they can give an already-skeptical public reason to believe that the media are a privileged class.

But the Massachusetts bill appears to be carefully drafted, and would do no more than level the playing field with respect to most other states.

Instant update: I just heard from Ambrogi, who confirms that the bill would give citizen journalists a chance to argue that they should be entitled to shield-law protections as well — although he cautions that the word “business” might mean they have to be “at least trying to derive some income from the citizen journalism.”

Andrew Breitbart’s mixed legacy

By Dan Kennedy

On March 1, 2012

In Media, Politics

Andrew Breitbart at the CPAC conference in Washington last month.

It’s a tribute to Andrew Breitbart’s skill at media manipulation that when word of his death started spreading around Twitter this morning, the first reaction many people had was that it was a hoax. Only after confirmation from the Los Angeles Times and other news organizations did people believe it was really true.

Breitbart was someone I kept maybe half an eye on, at best, so I don’t have a fully developed take on his career as a media provocateur and what it meant. He seemed to be someone of endless energy and pugnacity, which served him well in bringing down Anthony Weiner, but which proved an embarrassment with the deceptively edited ACORN and Shirley Sherrod videos.

Two people asked me today if Breitbart was “a journalist.” I think it shows how much the media environment has changed over the past decade that the question didn’t strike me as making much sense. He was a conservative activist and a showman, and one of the things he did was journalism, both good and bad. If you do journalism, are you a journalist? Does it matter?

I ran across three pieces today that I think are worth sharing.

The first is a remembrance by Josh Marshall, editor of the liberal website Talking Points Memo, who gets at Breitbart’s dual nature. Despite being well to the right of someone like Marshall, and exceedingly unpleasant on occasion, Breitbart had a certain way about him that people found compelling. Marshall writes:

There are some people who live for the fight. It’s something I try not to be part of. Yet it’s a big, punchy, vivid and outrageously honorable tradition in the American public square. I cannot think of many people who lived more out loud than he did, more in primary colors.

The second, a 2010 profile by Rebecca Mead of the New Yorker, was pretty much definitive at the time and holds up well. Despite its warts-and-all depiction of Breitbart, it comes across as fair, and Breitbart emerges as a not-entirely-unsympathetic character driven mainly by resentment and disdain for those he considers to be liberal elitists. And if that’s not a good description of what the modern conservative movement is all about, I don’t know what is.

Finally, apostate Republican David Frum has written a very tough assessment for the Daily Beast that acknowledges Breitbart “was by all accounts generous with time and advice, a loving husband and father, and a loyal friend,” but that is unstinting in its criticism of Breitbart’s brand of media activism. Frum writes:

Breitbart sometimes got stories right (Anthony Weiner). More often he got them wrong (Sherrod). He did not much care either way. Just as all is fair in a shooting war, so manipulation and deception are legitimate tools in a culture war. Breitbart used those tools without qualm or regret, and he inspired a cohort of young conservative journalists to do likewise.

Like Frum, I wonder if Breitbart might have grown if given the chance. His Weiner takedown surely must have showed him that getting it right brings a completely different level of respect and influence than does faking a video and getting caught.

Breitbart was only 43 years old and leaves behind four young children. Was he on his way to media respectability, or is that just wishful thinking? We’ll never know.

Photo (cc) by Gage Skidmore and republished here under a Creative Commons license. Some rights reserved.