Osborne Ink ::

We’ve seen this pattern before. A non-sourced, anonymous story enters the right-wing blogosphere and gets picked up by mainstream media, allowing the right to stovepipe their insanity. This one began with a post at the Chicago Tribune Swamp page:

One Democratic strategist said that shortly after an appearance on Fox he got a phone call from a White House official telling him not to be a guest on the show again. The call had an intimidating tone, he said.

The message was, “We better not see you on again,” said the strategist, who spoke on condition of anonymity so as not to run afoul of the White House. An implicit suggestion, he said, was that “clients might stop using you if you continue.” (Emphasis mine)

Administration officials immediately denied the report:

“While we have our disagreements with FOX, administration officials appear on the network and we have no issue with others who choose to do so,” White House senior communications adviser Dan Pfeiffer emails me.

[...]

Needless to say, such a claim is gold for those looking to paint the White House pushback against Fox as a Nixonian campaign of intimidation designed to squelch Fox’s legitimate journalistic scrutiny of the administration. Right wing bloggers have been all over the story.

But Pfeiffer argues that the evidence proves the story false. “This is simply not true,” he emails. “At the same time the reporter was writing this story, David Plouffe was appearing on FOX and David Axelrod was on the day before.” (Emphasis mine)

But on Sunday, the LA Times was a willing patsy for Teh Wacky™, complete with a misleading source:

White House Communications Director Anita Dunn said that she had checked with colleagues who “deal with TV issues” and that they had not told people to avoid Fox. On the contrary, they had urged people to appear on the network, Dunn wrote in an e-mail.

But Patrick Caddell, a Fox News contributor and former pollster for President Carter, said he had spoken to Democratic consultants who said they were told by the White House to avoid appearances on Fox. He declined to give their names.

Caddell said he had not gotten that message himself from the White House. (Emphasis mine)

“Former pollster for President Carter” sounds alright until you know Caddell’s long history of pissing off Democrats, channeling talk-radio memes about Bill Clinton, adopting conservative talking points, calling the New York Times “the czar’s secret police” and supporting Swift Boat Veterans, accusing Obama of “gangster politics,” and going on Glenn Beck’s show to promote a bizarre theory that George Soros runs the White House:

Caddell is hyping his own role on Faux Noise. Beck can introduce him as ‘the Democrat Obama doesn’t want you to see.’ His career has never been about Democrats or a progressive agenda; it has always been about Patrick Caddell. None of that matters, however, as long as the LA Times can print “former pollster for President Carter” and pass him off as an unbiased respondent.

The Times’ utter failure to do even cursory source-checking turns his exercise in self-promotion into fodder for the wingnutosphere. It adds to the delusion of a president gone bad. None of it is true, but it has all the truthiness needed to infect the minds of millions.

Mark Bowden, author of Blackhawk Down, investigated the strange coincidence of all the TV networks having Sonya Sotomayor’s “wise Latina” speech cued up the instant her nomination was announced, finding that:

The reporting we saw on TV and on the Internet that day was the work not of journalists, but of political hit men. The snippets about Sotomayor had been circulating on conservative Web sites and shown on some TV channels for weeks. They were new only to the vast majority of us who have better things to do than vet the record of every person on Obama’s list. But this is precisely what activists and bloggers on both sides of the political spectrum do, and what a conservative organization like the Judicial Confirmation Network exists to promote. The JCN had gathered an attack dossier on each of the prospective Supreme Court nominees, and had fed them all to the networks in advance. (Emphasis mine)

Bowden focuses on the rise of web-based partisan journalism and the MSM’s new habit of stovepiping propaganda, but what I find interesting is his identification of the 24-7 news cycle as “post journalistic. It sees democracy, by definition, as perpetual political battle.” He’s talking about the permanent campaign:

Who created this state of affairs? Risking Bowden’s wrath for taking a partisan position, I have to say that after studying American politics for a quarter-century it’s clearly the doing of Culture Warriors. The reactionary right has been making this happen since 1973 through direct mail, talk radio, and the evangelist-political complex. Scrutinizing every detail of every politician they disagree with, a vast field of right-wing propaganda has radicalized the conservative movement and made American politics toxic to democracy. In the age of the blog, that propaganda machine has been de-professionalized by the Michelle Malkins of the world — who have, if anything, heated up the rhetoric.

It’s only in the age of the internet that we’ve seen anything like that from the left. Bowden’s article comes just as a right-wing meme emerges about Obama as the “perpetual candidate” — which is ironic, since only a community-organizer-in-chief could possibly counter the perpetual smear machine of the right. We’re seeing that right now with health care and the public option; we’ve had a farcical object-lesson in Obama’s back-to-school speech. He is the candidate the right created.

They made it this way, and want to complain about the way things are.

I want some help figuring out why I keep getting mysterious forwards from a gun club in Atlanta, Georgia. Maybe Faux Noise can figure out what dire conspiracy keeps filling my inbox with the latest evidence of Obama’s secret, evil plan to take away our guns. Via David Neiwart at Crooks & Liars:

Funny thing: I was at Netroots Nation last week, but I don’t recall a panel discussion on Teh Evil Plan™ to help the White House collect a ginormous database of conservatives one email address at a time. In fact, I’ve still got my copy of the events schedule, and try as I might I cannot find the session I must have missed.

Faux Noise is playing a truly pernicious fear card. I’m not the first to point out that Breitbart and company were not inclined to don their tinfoil hats when Bush was collecting massive amounts of electronic data on Americans and infiltrating anti-war groups, but I’ll point it out anyway — because, once again, what we’re seeing here is psychological projection.

If Faux Noise wants to talk about spying, they could give me a call. While at Netroots Nation, I came across a pair of pasty, black-clad infiltrators with badges reading: “RIGHT ONLINE.” One had theirs turned around, but it didn’t help; they both stuck out like sore thumbs. Observing their movements, it became clear they were checking out the Westin Hotel to see if they could access the event center across the street through the elevated walkway between the buildings. (They couldn’t.)

After a few queries, I learned that Right Online is a conference of conservative bloggers and activists, and has been shadowing the Netroots Nation conference for a long time. Every year, they hold their convention simultaneously in a nearby location.

Disturbing? Yes. There’s a word for this kind of behavior; it’s the word you use for a person who obsesses over your schedule, follows you around, and tries to sneak into your house: STALKER.

This shadow conference is put together by Americans For Prosperity, a nonprofit with a $3.4 million annual budget (PDF) whose stated aims are “to mobilize citizens to achieve fiscal and regulatory restraint by state governments, and a return of the Federal government to its Constitutional limits” — in other words, they work for the oil industry.

I’ve been blogging consistently for a year, but I have yet to see my first check from George Soros. What am I doing wrong? Maybe I’d make the big bucks if I switched sides and went to hear this kind of nonsense (via Heather at C&L):

As for Brietbart’s specific charge — that the White House is spying on us with spam emails — there are probably several explanations, one of which is that there weren’t enough filters on petitions sent to the White House. That’s not good enough for Faux Noise, of course, which has dug its teeth into this nontroversy like a pit bull and won’t quit stovepiping the Crazy™ through it.

As long as Breitbart is investigating mysterious emails, I’d like to know why my repeated attempts to get off that gun club mailing list have not succeeded. Is the NRA spying on me? Inquiring minds want to know!

Blogger Ben Cohen’s Thursday piece in the Huffington Post has drawn a lot of criticism — not because he calls the birthers racist, which they are; but because he claims the birthers and 9/11 “truth” conspiracy nuts are connected, which they are. Cohen says the truther “movement” was

enormously helpful to the Bush Administration as it provided a giant distraction from the colossal crimes they committed in Iraq and Afghanistan. If their energies had been directed in a positive way, there’s a good chance Bush would have been impeached and Dick Cheney thrown in jail.

Within minutes of the post, Ben started getting angry emails from truthers. He’s reprinted a couple at his website. Writers question his motives and intelligence:

Dear Sir: Are you really uniformed about the facts or part of a criminal element? …Or maybe you believe in some higher purpose for lying, pesonally (sic) I don’t really care. You are either a fool for talking about something you know nothing about or are a traitor to the human race. (Emphasis mine)

As always, those who speak out against conspiracy theory face accusations of being part of the conspiracy; but the comments on Cohen’s work mostly take umbrage at his mention of the truther-birther nexus.

They learned to do this from arch-tinfoil hatter Alex Jones, who picked up the 9/11 conspiracy thread the day after the attacks and immediately worked it into his narrative about a vast global conspiracy for world domination.

Jones has been spreading this special blend of Crazy™ far and wide ever since. Even when thoroughly and systematically debunked, Jones never loses because he can just lump the debunkers into his insane narrative as “enemies of truth.”

Here’s how Jones introduces himself in a video titled “The Road to Tyranny:”

Hello, I’m Alex Jones, a syndicated radio and television host based in Austin, TX and for many years I have been exposing the criminal activities of the global elite also known as the “New World Order.” And this collection of power-mad megalomaniacs has been using a successive string of terrorist events to usher in their corrupt world government. A world government where populations, their own documents show, will be herded into compact cities; will be issued national ID cards, and yes — even implantable microchips. (Emphasis mine)

Jones offers a detailed fantasy-revision of world history in which every significant event traces to the single ulterior purpose of global domination and mind-control. His “evidence” is conjecture. Occam’s Razor is nowhere to be seen.

Nowadays, Jones is pushing birther nonsense and extolling the “virtues” of legal challanges to the Obama presidency. Phil Berg, filer of the original birther-lawsuit, has been a frequent guest on Jones’s show for many years. Berg is a longtime propagator of 9/11 conspiracy theory.

The connection is irrefutable. Moreover, it’s only the tip of Teh Crazy™ iceberg.

Another Jones guest is David Icke, a British conspiracy nut best-known for his belief that alien reptiles rule the world from ancient, secret underground facilities and hide among us by shape-shifting into human form. Yes, it’s a plot right out of bad 80s television that even includes the British Royal Family.

Like Jones, Icke describes the New World Order as part of this fantasy universe. Jones used to rail against Icke’s reptile theories as harmful to the “cause” of truth — until that magical day when Icke became Jones’ guest:

Birtherism and 9/11 truth get promoted by the same sources over and over again. It’s a demonstrable pattern Cohen calls

another example of a scared, confused population unable to rationalize why their jobs are being shipped abroad, their health care costs are spiraling out of control, and the prospect of putting their kids through college is moving rapidly from slim to none.

On Friday, Harry Shearer postulated that birtherism is due to the deterioration of legitimacy in the last two presidencies:

The opposition, in both cases, was fueled, energized, and supercharged to a point of near mania by the whiff of illegitimacy. Both the opposition to Clinton and the opposition to Bush drew power, endurance, and bile from the feeling that the incumbent was a rank usurper.

[...]

Republicans, dependent on consultants to advise them on the exquisite variety of methods of nay-saying, gaze longingly at the emotional power of a charge of illegitimacy. The birthers are their wind turbines.

Questioning the legitimacy of a president, like questioning the legitimacy of your best friend’s children, is a sure-fire way to get sparks going, to fire up the base, to turn a torpid opposition into a pitchfork brigade. We’ve twice tasted this heady brew, and both enjoyed and recoiled at its bitter high. In this light, it’s easy to understand why some opponents to a still-popular president would be drawn to a cause that once again allows the suggestion of illegitimacy to trump disagreement with policy. (Emphasis mine)

I don’t think Cohen and Shearer are wrong, but Bob Cesca hit closest to the mark last week when he told birther and frequent Glenn Beck doom-bunker guest Michelle Malkin to “just blurt out the n-word already and get it over with.” As I said last week,

Birtherism invites all the ugliness of race and red-baiting into political discussion. Far from being an extreme idea of a rare fringe, birtherism is the stovepipe by which the right seeks to inject that ugliness into the public discussion.

For whatever reasons birtherism exists — economic fear, apocalyptic paranoia, or just plain mental illness — it has become that stovepipe. We cannot excuse it for being born of ignorance. Crhis Matthews’s takedown of G. Gordon Liddy was sweet, but incomplete; the primary sources of birtherism need to be interviewed, examined, and held to account for the totality of their Crazy™.

Michelle Malkin has gone birther:

Has anyone seen it? Why shouldn’t the record be in the public domain for presidential candidates?

It’s a real winner of an argument, isn’t it? “Why not show his birth certificate?” Of course, this is never a problem for white men named John. Malkin winds up with this gem:

Lest the Obama campaign start whining about this issue being an unfair “distraction,” John McCain underwent intense scrutiny of his citizenship status because of his birth in the Panama Canal zone, leading the Senate to declare him a natural-born citizen in April.

Sure they did, in April…of 2008. But the date doesn’t fit the narrative, does it? And as for narratives, here’s the one she prefers:

Rumor Three: His mother did not want to name him after his father, and his birth certificate says “Barry.” Perhaps the most plausible of the rumors, as Obama was known by that name through much of his childhood and young adulthood. If true, this would spur a new round of “When Barry Became Barack” stories – a minor headache for the campaign, but hardly a major scandal.

In other words, she admits there’s no mystery to this at all. And includes the link.

Wingnuts are smart! With history!

Via DailyBanter.com:

Sadly, I have to agree with Zandar Versus The Stupid: the Republicans now openly and deliberately promote birther conspiracy. For those of you who missed Cheney’s virtuoso play to the fringe, here it is:

Cheney backs away from birtherism when pressed. But she doesn’t debunk it; indeed, she actively tries to insinuate her neocon message into the birther nonsense with scare-words:

“People are fundamentally uncomfortable, and they’re fundamentally increasingly uncomfortable with an American president who seems to be afraid to defend America…The kind of thing you saw on this video is indicative of sort of a general feeling of discomfort.”

Ben Smith of Politico.com followed up with Cheney, who stayed on message with the same scary language and passive denial:

I don’t have any question about Barack Obama’s right to be President of the United States.

My concern is with his policies. I am deeply troubled about the path he is taking this country down — massively expanding the size of government, weakening our national defenses, increasing taxes on all Americans and nationalizing health care. These are dangerous policies for the nation.

Troubled, dangerous, weak, afraid, and…oh, yeah, foreign. These are dog whistles for wacknuts and Liz Cheney knows it. And it’s not the first time she has played to the fringe:

Never one to be left out, Rush Limbaugh has gotten into the act: “Barack Obama has yet to have to prove that he’s a citizen. All he has to do is show a birth certificate. He has yet to have to prove he’s a citizen.” Listen:

As I’ve written before, Limbaugh had a bad experience with the fringe in the late 1990s when he refused to air Vince Foster conspiracy theories. The lesson he took from those dark days of MonicaGate is to never again be out-fringed by his rivals on right-wing radio. He knows exactly what he’s doing with a comment like this: earning notice on birther website WorldNetDaily and credibility with the credulous.

Birtherism is just one part of a larger campaign to whip up fringe sentiment and stovepipe racist nonsense. Via Oliver Willis, listen as Glenn Beck connects health care reform to slavery reparations:

Obama has always sidestepped divisive issues, like reparations, by channeling the impetus for them into more general reform. A public option would help black Americans, as it would necessarily help white/ brown/ yellow/ red Americans, too. But Beck twists that appeal until it is unrecognizable, inculcating the zero-sum thinking of racial politics into his audience: a victory for blacks is a blow against whites. White people should oppose reform because it helps black people.

Birtherism invites all the ugliness of race and red-baiting into political discussion. Far from being an extreme idea of a rare fringe, birtherism is the stovepipe by which the right seeks to inject that ugliness into the public discussion.

Maddow invited David Weigel onto her show last night to attempt a corrective. It’s good, but incomplete, beginning about the 2:40 mark:

Weigel should know exactly what the Lou Dobbses of the media want. By channeling birtherism, they promote fringe thinking into the mainstream. By questioning the legitimacy of a popular president, they undermine his agenda. The Republican House bill is just a stovepipe; the credulous talk from Dobbs is just a stovepipe. The purpose is to create a nontroversy that simply will not die.

For no matter what the State of Hawaii does, and no matter how often Obama’s birth certificate is reexamined, birtherism will not go away. The whole point of birtherism is to NOT find final proof — of anything. The point is to continue doubting and to spread that doubt in mainstream culture.

They want to derail progressive change, and don’t care how many ignoble lies they must tell. Or how often they must repeat them.

When Mark Sanford got back from Argentina, he had lots of messages waiting from reporters. Here are a couple from David Gregory, inheritor of that televisual institution known as Meet The Press:

Left you a message. Wanted you to hear directly from me that I want to have the Gov on Sunday on Meet The Press. I think it’s exactly the right forum to answer the questions about his trip as well as giving him a platform to discuss the economy/stimulus and the future of the party. You know he will get a fair shake from me and coming on MTP puts all of this to rest.

[...]

…So coming on Meet The Press allows you to frame the conversation how you really want to…and then move on. You can see (sic) you have done your interview and then move on. Consider it.

[...]

Look, you guys have a lot of pitches .. I get it and I know this is a tough situation … Let me just say this is the place to have a wider conversation with some context about not just the personal but also the future for him and the party … This situation only exacerbates the issue of how the GOP recovers when another national leader suffers a setback like this. So coming on Meet The Press allows you to frame the conversation how you really want to…and then move on. You can see you have done your interview and then move on. Consider it. (Emphasis mine)

Gregory is not the only reporter with embarrassing emails. Jessica Gibadlo of MSNBC actually gave them an idea for positive spin on the story:

(T)he tone in the news room is that Mark could spin this favorably if he talks it up as the outdoors man in the woods etc. For all we know he’s contemplating the last year of his term and thinking through his priorities before he goes on his family vacation. (Emphasis mine)

Many more reporters are quoted online at HuffPo; they make illuminating reading. But let’s step back a couple of news cycles and remember this:

The White House press corps lost their shit over that moment, and it wasn’t even a softball. For this, Helen Thomas went on her rant about Obama “controlling the press” and being “worse than Nixon.” Conservative pundits and bloggers used the opening to stovepipe their Crazy™ into the mainstream.

Why would Gregory offer to trade his journalistic integrity for access? Because the Village works that way. Because it became a habit long before he took over Meet the Press. And because his ratings are the worst MTP has had in years.

Gregory can stand in for most of Big News anymore. The entire industry seems to have developed a Village perspective. Today, Bob Cesca notes how cable news coverage projects a

general vibe that healthcare is in trouble — you know, for some reason no one in the corporate media can quite pinpoint… No reasons given. No polls or preliminary whip counts. Nothing.

Cenk Uygur sees the same thing happening at Washington Post and the website Politico.com:

When you read the articles, however, you don’t get any reason why these assumptions are made or these questions asked. There are no poll numbers to indicate that the American people want healthcare reform any less – or that they are more skeptical about Obama’s version. (Emphasis mine)

So far, David Shuster and Ed Schultz are the only Big Media figures who think it’s important to tell us the insurance lobby spends $1.4 million every day to kill health care legislation. In the Village, that sort of thing is known to all and described by none. It is just the background noise of Villagers feeding from the trough.

Nor is the Village willing to challenge its own, even when the hypocrisy is naked. When The Gang of Six asked their Democratic and Republican leaders (PDF) to slow down the momentum of health care reform last week, it was Paul Krugman — in his blog! — and not the New York Times that reminded us their interest in fiscal prudence was a late development.

Case in point: the Medicare Modernization Act of 2003, which denied Medicare the right to bargain for lower drug prices, locked in overpayments to private insurance companies, and did nothing, nothing at all, to pay for its proposed outlays. How many of these six self-proclaimed defenders of solvency voted no on the crucial procedural vote? One. (Joe Lieberman, to my surprise.)

And let’s not forget that Ben Nelson, who appears to be the ringleader, has fought tooth and nail against competition from a public option — which would almost certainly save a significant amount of money, as well as providing much-needed competition.

I’ve been posting lately on the failures of Big Media and their consequent resentment and jealousy of new media. Not only does this lead the MSM to manufacture controversy, it enables the right wing media machine to stovepipe their insanity. But this moment is about more than the relevance and prerogatives of newspapers and TV — the very business model of news is at stake.

Newswire services and newspapers are at war with Google and other websites that aggregate and link to their content. The chief of the Associated Press wants to cut them off, the editor of The Wall Street Journal calls them “parasites in the intestines of the Internet,” and at least one legal scholar says the copyright laws should change. The argument goes that few, if any, readers will click to read the original article once they’ve read the headline and the digest.

But Simon Owens over at Bloggasm has some interesting evidence to the contrary. After one of his blog posts was linked that way at Huffington Post,

For the first three hours I received approximately 4,000 unique visitors an hour to just that one article. Traffic for the rest of the day remained strong, not once dipping below 2,000 uniques an hour as the link began traveling down the front page. By midnight that night, Huffington Post had sent approximately 30,000 unique visitors to that one article.

[...]

All together, I’ve received a grand total of 37,739 unique visitors from a prominent link on the Huffington Post over a three day period, and even now I’m still seeing relatively strong traffic from there.

That’s mighty strong results from a single link for a mere blog. Multiply that by tens of thousands of links to The New York Times website on any given day from around the internet, and you’ll see the problem isn’t that we aren’t reading their content. The University of Southern California’s Annenberg School studied the problem and determined that plenty of Americans are reading newspapers online.

Newspapers simply haven’t capitalized on the changing way we read them.

Columbia Journalism professor Daniel Sinker catalogues their lack of innovation, comparing it to the many new business ventures launched by Google:

What have newspapers done in that same timeframe? A few hamfisted redesigns? A couple relaunches of websites? A few bad acquisitions? And layoff after layoff after layoff.

[...]

Newspaper execs talk with exasperation, as if they’ve tried everything they can. But they define “everything” so narrowly that it renders the word almost meaningless. In reality, as they watch their massive river of money slowly shrink away, they’ve tried almost nothing. They had a couple hundred year head start on Google, and yet they collapse in a heap here at the dawn of a new age.

Former newsman Jeff Jarvis is even more scathing:

You had a generation to reinvent the business but you did too little. I by all means include myself in that indictment because I spent my career in our industry: Guilty. I didn’t raise loud enough alarms (it felt as if they were too loud already) or accomplish enough change (not nearly enough). I blew it, too. But no last-minute hail-Mary passes will make up for our failings. Having not taken advantage of the last two decades to reinvent the news business, you’re not going to manage a rescue in two months, before the creditors come calling. That was your worst hail Mary: stoking up on debt and hoping to milk these cows for years to come. Mad cash-cow disease, that’s what too many of you had. Your other desperate moves: suddenly fantasizing that you can fix everything by going behind a wall (to hell with Google and its billions of readers!) and charging us because you think we “should” pay. Since when is a business plan built on “should?” I haven’t seen a sensible P&L justifying this dream from any of you.

Indeed, there was a time when newspapers could have owned the internet:

But these experiments were discontinued when newspapers began to behave like Fortune 500 companies, gobbling each other up to consolidate into publicly-traded companies. They saw no profit in innovation. Worse, in becoming bigger they have actually stymied innovation. This morning brought news that The New York Times has asked its staff to stop sending text messages:

Although we recognize that texting has become an indispensable means of communication for many people, our basic company plans with Verizon and AT&T do not provide for unlimited texting,” wrote Mr. Schmidt. “A lot of texting costs us a lot of money, whether as a per-message fee or as an unlimited-message add-on.

Mind you, unlimited text messaging is usually a $5 add-on for an individual cell plan — and the Times‘ own reporting has revealed that the costs of texting for carriers are practically zero. One blogger can afford to text his heart out, but apparently the Times cannot afford to provide the service for its thousands of employees even with the bargaining power of a major company.

Owens and Huffington Post are the future. Big Media gave up that future thirty years ago; instead of adapting now, they want to change the rules of the internet and do away with the hyperlink.