By Dan Kennedy • The press, politics, technology, culture and other passions
POLK CITY, Florida (CNN) — At a boisterous Sarah Palin rally in Polk City, Florida on Saturday afternoon, one name was surprisingly absent from the campaign décor — John McCain’s…. [T]he GOP nominee’s name was literally nowhere to be found on any of the official campaign signage distributed to supporters at the event.
Literally! Oh, wait — never mind. (Via Jay Rosen’s Twitter feed.)
Jay Rosen got an answer out of Mother Jones’ Washington bureau chief, David Corn, as to why the magazine is asking the question “Is Barack Obama exaggerating when he compares his campaign to the great progressive moments in U.S. history?”
Corn points to a speech Obama gave earlier this year in which he conjured up visions of the American Revolution, Abolition, the Depression, World War II and other patriotic touchstones in order to drive home his campaign theme of “Yes we can.” MoJo has since added that in the form of a blog post from February unsubtly titled “Barack Obama’s Messiah Complex.”
I’m not going to reproduce the Obama speech excerpts here, because you can just follow the links. But I do want to consider Rosen’s three questions:
Which comes closest to your view?
1.) Sure enough, Obama in this except “compares his campaign to the great progressive moments in U.S. history” and Mother Jones caught him at it, puncturing the Obama hype. Good for them!
2.) No, Obama does not “claim that his campaign is comparable to the great progressive movements in U.S. history.” Not even close. Mother Jones is engaging in the kind of audacious hype it claims to be opposing. Bad move.
3.) It doesn’t matter whether Obama actually said anything like that because his supporters believe his campaign is a movement of transcendent historical importance, and that’s what Mother Jones really meant, it’s just that the editors phrased it badly, attributing to the candidate claims that have been made by others about him.
Jay thinks the correct answer is #2. Strictly on a factual, non-emotional basis, I agree. But it’s more complicated than that. I think the truth is #2 plus a strong dose of #3, along with at least a slight whiff of #1.
All politicians invoke great moments in American history, as Obama did. But Obama has gone farther by explicitly drawing parallels between his candidacy and those moments. It’s understandable — the election of an African-American as president would rank as a stunning achievement for our race-benighted culture. But it’s got nothing to do with Obama personally.
The thing is, I think Obama understands that, and I think David Corn and company understand it, too. So the question becomes why journalists would compress Obama’s argument into a shallow soundbite that makes it sounds like Obama thinks of himself as a combination of George Washington, Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King Jr.
It’s not so much that MoJo is completely wrong; it’s that the magazine is being reductionist and stupid. Why?
By the way, I know Corn and have a lot of respect for him. We spent part of the afternoon on Election Day 2004 at a Starbucks near Copley Square, picking out John Kerry’s cabinet for him. But to the extent that he agrees with this particular editorial decision, well, I think he’s wrong.
Mother Jones magazine asks: “Is Barack Obama exaggerating when he compares his campaign to the great progressive moments in U.S. history?”
Jay Rosen asks: “Has Obama compared his campaign to the great movements in progressive history (like civil rights?)”
Media Nation asks: Where is the evidence for Mother Jones’ premise? Perhaps Obama did say such a thing, but I don’t remember it. Let’s have the precise language.
Update: Welcome, Huffington Post and PressThink readers. Here’s my latest on the subject.
I’m debating Jay Rosen on the controversy over Mayhill Fowler, the citizen journalist who quoted Barack Obama on “bitter” white people who “cling” to religion and guns and, more recently, who prodded Bill Clinton into going off on Vanity Fair writer Todd Purdum.
The question: Are citizen journalists bound by the same ethical rules as mainstream reporters? Read the set-up, then see the comments. Feel free to weigh in.
For several years now, Jay Rosen has been advancing the theory that former White House press secretary Scott McClellan was not just unusually inept and uninformed; rather, he was part of a deliberate strategy on the part of the Bush administration to “de-certify” the press. Forcing journalists to rely on someone as buffoonish and out of the loop as McClellan, Rosen argued, was a way of underscoring the media’s unimportance in the Bush-Cheney worldview.
In the end, it didn’t work, and the White House was eventually compelled to hire a more conventional press secretary, Tony Snow, and grant him the kind of access and influence that press secretaries traditionally have. But when President Bush was at the height of his political powers, the McClellan strategy worked just fine.
Now Rosen — like McClellan — is back. And what Rosen finds stunning is that McClellan himself seems to have adopted Rosen’s analysis. That is, McClellan now understands that he was a mere pawn in a much larger game. And despite his still-evident shortcomings, he has come to realize that he doesn’t like it one damn bit. After all, it was he who was transformed into a fool, along with the media. Journalists still don’t understand that (or maybe they do, given their hostile response to Stephen Colbert’s epic performance at the White House Correspondents Dinner in 2006). McClellan, though, understands it all too well. Rosen writes:
I never expected McClellan to write a book about being the jerk at the podium for Bush, or to make connections between his experience and the larger wreckage of the Bush presidency. He’s not only done that; he’s clearly ready to hit the circuit and explain himself.
Watching Keith Olbermann interview McClellan last night about McClellan’s book, “What Happened: Inside the Bush White House and Washington’s Culture of Deception,” it was striking to see McClellan’s self-awareness, something you never would have imagined when he was working for Bush. He is clearly in the midst of a sea change in his political thinking, as he told Olbermann he may even support Barack Obama for president this fall.
I wish I’d caught all of Olbermann’s interview, but I’m not going to miss McClellan’s appearance on “Meet the Press” this Sunday. Memo to Tim: Ditch the slides showing he said one thing then and another thing now. We already know that. The man’s got a story to tell. Let him tell it.
Photo (cc) by Dave Winer and republished here under a Creative Commons license. Some rights reserved.
I got back from voting a little while ago. While I was there, I took a few pictures to upload to the Polling Place Photo Project, started by Jay Rosen’s NewAssignment.Net and now hosted by the New York Times.
I zipped off four photos to the project, which you can see here. (At right is Salem News reporter Ethan Forman, who’s interviewing a voter outside Danvers High School.) The idea is to supplement election coverage with a little citizen journalism, combining professional with amateur contributions. When it comes to photography, I certainly qualify as an amateur.
Here is Rosen’s original essay on the purpose of the project.
The site is slow today — no surprise, given that it’s Super Tuesday. I imagine things will be quite a bit busier later today, when people start getting out of work.
Rosen and the other folks behind the project hope this will somehow lead to a better voting experience. Perhaps. Certainly there’s a possibility that some real problems will be documented by camera-wielding citizens.
If nothing else, though, the project shows that professional and amateur journalists can work together to produce something that’s both interesting and worthwhile.
New York University journalism professor Jay Rosen is ambivalent about doing interviews, and Howard Kurtz of the Washington Post asks him why. Kurtz, though, seems to think that the institution of the journalistic interview is more firmly established than it is. He begins:
The humble interview, the linchpin of journalism for centuries, is under assault.
In fact, what is widely regarded as the first newspaper interview was conducted not centuries ago, but in 1836, by New York Herald publisher James Gordon Bennett, who talked with the proprietor of a brothel in the hopes of shedding light on the notorious murder of a prostitute.
It seems strange to realize that great American journalists from Benjamin Franklin to Isaiah Thomas never interviewed people, but such were the customs of the day.
