Lied about on Kos

Friends of Media Nation who are wondering about my sanity: not to worry. It’s kind of funny at this point. In that spirit, I want to share with you some casual slime that has been brought to my attention at the Daily Kos.

The Kos is one of several national blogs that are obsessed with the continuing fallout over the “Greater Boston” blogging episode of Dec. 8. I learned of this Kos post through Bob of Blue Mass Group, who thinks it absolutely kicks ass. After quoting from a few commenters, Bob ends with this: “And believe me there is plenty, plenty more, including a fair amount of back and forth about our very own frequent contributor Professor Kennedy.”

So I got myself over to the Kos and started reading. Soon I came across this, from one Jennifer Poole:

Dan Kennedy, media “critic” of the Boston Phoenix? one of the “liberal hawks” who totally believed Colin Powell’s speech about WMDs at the U.N.?

I remember emailing Kennedy at the time, telling him he hadn’t read the news he needed to understand that Powell’s “testimony” to the U.N. was not, in fact, all that convincing at all — with links.

I got a snarky email back re: “Oh you think there’s a cover-up?”

has Dan Kennedy admitted yet he was wrong to support the Iraq invasion, and to say that nobody serious could remain unconvinced by Powell’s testimony?

Not sure what the deal is with all those question marks, but I think a few of them are Firefox anomalies.

Anyway … did I write a snarky e-mail to Poole? Probably. Did I believe Colin Powell’s testimony at the United Nations? Yes, at least for a few days. Did I support the war in Iraq? No. Never. More in a moment. But first, a few words from Poole’s fellow commenters:

Chumley writes: “What a hack this Kennedy is. He should be cleaning toilets at Burger King, NOT a media critic. Better yet — get his ass over to serve in Iraq, and let him media criticize his way out of that.” (Make it Wendy’s, Chumley, and you’ve got a deal.)

Left in Lowell: “This Iraq lapse, I’d have to look back at what he said but he definitely has shown pigheadedness at times.” (Lynne! Come on! We survived the UMass Amherst cafeteria together last summer. Why not ask me where I stand on the war before making fun of my pigheadedness?)

Mogolori: “Kennedy’s self-correction seems to come in his April 16-24, 2004 Boston Phoenix book review of John Dean’s ‘Worse than Watergate,’ Ron Suskind’s ‘The Price of Loyalty,’ Hans Blix’s ‘Disarming Iraq’ and Richard Clarke’s ‘Against All Enemies.’ … [H]e sidesteps his own duping, which is so succinctly recounted in his email to you.” (Follow the logic: Because I was against the war in 2004, I must have been for it in 2002 and ’03.)

The truth, as I’ve already said, is that I’ve always been against the war. And I can prove it. Jennifer and friends, please pay attention:

Boston Phoenix, Nov. 28, 2002: “Yes, Iraq will fall if we invade. The gravest danger American troops may face is getting trampled by surrendering Iraqi soldiers. But after that, Iraq is ours, for a generation, if not longer. As a recent Atlantic Monthly cover story put it, Iraq will become, in effect, ‘the 51st state.’ Is that what we want? Can we really transform Iraq into another Japan or Germany? Or are we going to make the entire country — as opposed to just Saddam and his henchmen — despise us, and seek revenge for our arrogance and hubris?” (Gee, that stands up pretty well, doesn’t it?)

Boston Phoenix, Jan. 30, 2003: “More than anything, what Bush has failed to explain is why Iraq represents a real threat to us at a time when it is beleaguered by no-fly zones in the north and south, economic sanctions, and a couple of hundred weapons inspectors scurrying about the countryside. Containment has worked, but it’s not good enough for Bush, who is about to sacrifice the lives of Americans and Iraqis in order to accomplish his goal of regime change. With few exceptions, the media have let him get away with it.”

Boston Phoenix, March 20, 2003: “[A]fter the victory (raucous welcome from flower-tossing Iraqis optional) comes the hard part: the long occupation of a country whose people — no matter how happy they are to be rid of a dictator who models himself after Stalin but who seems equally inspired by Vlad the Impaler — will soon begin to resent us, then to hate us, then to demand that we get our hands off their land and their government and their oil and get out…. Just as the 1991 Gulf War led to the permanent US presence in Saudi Arabia that convinced the then-unknown Osama bin Laden to declare jihad against the United States, so will this war create monsters that don’t yet have a name.”

Boston Phoenix, July 25, 2003: “The Bush administration justified the rush to war by arguing that waiting was too dangerous — that Saddam’s terrorist ties and weapons of mass destruction represented an imminent threat. The result of Bush’s fear-mongering: chaos in Iraq; an open-ended commitment that is claiming American lives nearly every day, and that is costing some $1 billion a week; and no evidence of weapons.”

Jennifer, have you had enough? Can you bring yourself to take it back? To apologize? We’ll see.

Monday morning update: Sco08 put up a link to this item on the Kos last night, and Jennifer acknowledges her error, sort of, although she says her “main point stands.” Which is?

Former Phoenix political reporter Seth Gitell, who did support the war, weighs in with a reality check, and says it’s time for the media to start scrutinizing blogworld as closely as they do politics, business and sports. “I hope the bloggers enjoy this next stage of development,” Seth writes. I don’t think he means “enjoys” like, you know, “having a good time.”

The Outraged Liberal comes to my defense with a good old-fashioned “Quod erat demonstrandum.” Too bad I’m too stupid to know what it means. Oh, wait — it’s Q.E.D. spelled out, and I kind of know what that means.

Over on Blue Mass Group, Sabutai explains why I should be a blogger:

Bloggers don’t have to fact-check. While you’re expected to go over the New York Times and fact-check them, we can make stuff up about you in whole cloth. By the way, if you want to write again about the War in Iraq, we’d encourage you to fly over there to see for yourself that a war is actually happening, or indeed that such a place exists. Because if it turns out that you’re wrong about anything held to be common knowledge, it will nonetheless be your fault.

Funny stuff, but I am a blogger. I just think blogging ought to be about more than making stuff up about people.

Copy, right

Lisa Williams reports that GateHouse Media — the Fairport, N.Y.-based chain that bought more than 100 community newspapers in Eastern Massachusetts earlier this year — has jettisoned traditional copyright protection in favor of Creative Commons.

In a guest post on Jay Rosen’s PressThink blog, Williams writes that the Creative Commons model, which allows third parties such as bloggers to copy and paste content for nonprofit use as long as they provide proper credit, is part of GateHouse’s aggressive move into the post-print, mostly-Web future.

A big part of that is Wicked Local, whose aim is to combine professional and amateur content. Currently available only in the Plymouth area, Wicked Local is expected to be the model for all of GateHouse’s community Web sites. I find this both promising and dangerous — promising because building community journalism around the idea of a conversation between professional journalists and the public is a compelling model for What Comes Next; dangerous because it’s potentially a way for media corporations to build their Web sites on the cheap. Williams quotes me to that effect in her article.

GateHouse went public earlier this fall, and Williams says the run-up in its stock price has already been so impressive that it is now the most valuable newspaper company in the United States. Williams’ conclusion: “GateHouse’s move towards open source, open licensing, and open conversations is the biggest experiment to date in whether a media company with open source ambitions can walk hand in hand with Wall Street.”

“Greater Boston” update

Blue Mass Group’s Charley Blandy has posted a rather mild reaction to tonight’s “Greater Boston” discussion of the blog war. He also writes:

The usually sensible Dan Kennedy dug in his heels a bit, wondering how we could get anything done if we actually read the NY Times skeptically.

Good thing Charley didn’t use quotation marks, because that’s not what I said. I’ve challenged him to post a transcript.

Update: The transcript has been posted and I respond. I think that’s a wrap, even if Charley doesn’t.

Still more: The Outraged Liberal (or the Massachusetts Liberal or the Bay State Liberal, whichever you want to call him) hits the nail on the head again:

But there’s still a call for Dan Kennedy to offer a supine admission of error when he continues to insist (as do I) that the real culprit in this is a New York Times op-ed that was not (and should not) have been fact checked for the purposes of a five-minute segment….

It’s up to the New York Times to fact check their own stories and op-eds — not readers. It’s been part of the bargain that we can trust what’s in the media — or question them if they mess up too much.

We have not even come close to that level of trust with blogs and bloggers — and won’t for a long time as long as the attitude is I can whine but you can’t.

Sorry for the self-referential nature of this update. But I’ve been trying to say this for two days. Mr. Liberal says it better.

Scotto v. Eileen II

The Herald’s Messenger Blog updates the dust-up between Scott Allen Miller and Eileen McNamara. Two key points:

  • Scotto says the words he claims McNamara took from the WRKO Web site were not written by him, but, rather, were from a summary written by a producer. Credible? Yes. I’ve seen WRKO do this plenty of times.
  • Boston Globe spokesman Al Larkin tells the Messenger that there will be no correction. His reason: McNamara accurately represented Miller’s views, even if he didn’t actually speak the words she attributed to him.

Media Nation’s view: The Globe ought to run a clarification to make it clear that McNamara was quoting from the WRKO Web site, not from anything Miller said on the air. A paper that can run this can surely set the record straight on what Miller did and didn’t say.

The world according to Bob

Bob, the third member of the Blue Mass Group troika, has weighed in with his thoughts on the “Greater Boston” blogging piece. His contribution is clarifying, partly in a good way, partly not. Let me pull out what I think are the main points:

1. It all started with that New York Times piece. In Bob’s view, the Times op-ed on political bloggers who are paid by campaigns was “sloppy because it lumps all bloggers who have taken money from politicians together, even though what the bloggers have done, and what they have disclosed, is very different in many cases.”

Bob hails Charley’s analysis of same, but I think Bob’s summary is more useful. I thought it was hard to tell whether Charley believed the Times article was wrong, was accurate but misunderstood by John Carroll and company, or somewhere in between.

Any fair reading of the Times op-ed would lead one to conclude that some leading political bloggers were taking money from candidates to write favorable things about them on their own sites (as opposed, or in addition, to the candidates’ sites), and that some of them were disclosing that fact and some weren’t.

Now, if you think “Greater Boston” should not have used the Times piece as fodder for discussion without independently verifying every purported fact contained therein, then your view of the media-criticism world is very different from mine. Suffice it to say that it would take a month to put together a show if every single media report that’s used is treated as though it were wrong until proven right.

2. “Greater Boston” and Carroll made a mistake. Uh, I think that’s been established. And acknowledged. And corrected.

Like every working journalist, I’ve got a pile of corrections to my credit. If I can hang on until 2010, I’ll be able to say that I’ve had corrections published about my work over five decades. It happens. (OK, 2011 for those of you who think a new decade doesn’t begin until the end of the year ending in zero.)

3. BMG blogger David Kravitz was screwed. Kravitz has claimed that an interview “Greater Boston” did with him made it appear that he was directly speaking about Armstrong, and that his words were thus distorted and manipulated.

I disagree. I’ve watched the segment twice now, and it didn’t strike me that Kravitz was addressing Armstrong’s situation specifically, but, rather, conflicts of interest involving bloggers in general.

I heartily endorse the Massachusetts Liberal’s take on this. He writes:

I’m not troubled by how David Kravitz sounded, even if he believes he was cut and pasted inappropriately. He comes across as a strong believer in the value of blogging and in the ability of the blogosphere to police its own.

4. Bob undermines himself with an inflated sense of his own importance. Without a shred of irony, Bob writes about “bits of arrogance continu[ing] to fall from the sky.” No, he’s not talking about himself and his fellow bloggers.

Bob follows up with a ransom note demanding that Carroll take a leave of absence, that “Greater Boston” issue a public apology and that Kravitz be included as a panelist. Good grief. Actually, the third demand wouldn’t be a bad idea were it not for the absurdity of the first two.

And by the way, I’m not saying that Bob and company are being arrogant because they’re trying to place themselves on the same level as the mainstream media. No, they’re being arrogant in a way that I’ve never seen on the part of journalists I respect.

Media Nation on semi-hiatus

I am in a place called Grading Hell this week, and shall not ascend from the fiery depths until sometime Friday morning. So expect blogging to be light or non-existent. Yes, this requires me to sit out World War III for a few days. So be it. I’ve already said pretty much what I had to say, which isn’t much.

Meanwhile, I hope you enjoy Charley on the MTA’s comment on Blue Mass Group in which he says he doesn’t think it would be any big deal if a blogger signed a confidentiality agreement in return for taking part in the deliberations of, say, the incoming administration of Deval Patrick.

“Gary, we have conversations with people ‘off the record’ all the time,” Charley instructs his inquisitor. Me, too, Charley. But it doesn’t mean I jump into bed with them.

Caveat: If Charley is merely being satirical, my apologies in advance.

More: Yeah, what Massachusetts Liberal said.

Still more: Charley checks in, and I respond.

First thoughts on “Greater Boston”

I’ve received e-mails from several people today asking when I’m going to comment on John Carroll’s piece about paid political bloggers that appeared this past Friday on “Greater Boston with Emily Rooney.” I wasn’t on last Friday, and I’m just catching up. Here is the clip in question:

The “Beat the Press” panelists — including me — will talk about it this coming Friday, so I’m not going to say much until then. Of course, my conflict of interest is obvious. Carroll is a colleague. He’s an honest and ethical journalist, and he deserves the benefit of the doubt.

Carroll did make a mistake in believing this satirical post on MyDD.com claiming that several well-known bloggers were actually aliases used by yet another well-known blogger, Jerome Armstrong. But the first rule of satire is that lots of people won’t get it. Media Nation is known to be a land of high density, and if I had been in Carroll’s shoes, I can easily picture myself making the same mistake.

David Kravitz of Blue Mass Group, who was interviewed for Carroll’s piece, is unhappy, as he tells us here and here.

The bloggers seem to be notably unflustered about Carroll’s larger point, which is that some of them (not BMG) are on the take from political campaigns, and some of them don’t bother to disclose that.

Instant update: This post on the Weekly Dig blog is pretty amusing. But, Joe, watch out. The satirical post was by someone named Jonathan Singer, not Armstrong. Get ready for several dozen comments accusing you of being a clueless running dog for the MSM.