Hi everybody -- this is Will Bunch, and I'm senior writer at the Philadelphia Daily News. I just posted this essay over on my blog for the newspaper, which is called Attytood -- and I wanted to make sure that folks over here saw it. I've been following the bogus reporting of Bill O'Reilly, and so I want it known why this journalist -- with more than 26 years of experience and a number of awards, including sharing a Pulitzer Prize for spot news reporting -- is proud to be taking part as a speaker at Yearly Kos this week. Here's what I wrote:
I never realized that my own Attytood was a far-right blog with extreme anti-civil-liberties points of view -- until I started to think with the wisdom of Bill O'Reilly. You see, by the O' Reilly standard, you can't judge Attytood just by what I write here as a blogger -- by my posts calling for a more open, transparent and energetic news media, or an end to government hypocrisy and lying on Iraq, or for respect for the rule of law from the cellblocks of Guantanamo to the corridors of the Justice Department.
My blog's problem is this: I also believe that my own ideas are just a starting point for a broad and open discussion on the issues, no matter what the subject matter, whether it's the fate of U.S. Consititution or the future of Phillies' catcher Chris Coste. And I will not censor anyone who wants to join the discussion for his or her ideas, no matter how extreme, or how much they may differ from my own. A few comments are removed by me or by the Daily News site administrators -- but only if they are obscene, or threaten violence against other people or divulge personal information about them, or attempt to clutter the blog with juvenile noise. No post has ever been removed because of an idea, no matter how radical or out there. That's called freedom of speech.
And so last week, when I suggested the Republican presidential candidates were chickens for not wanting to do a You Tube-style debate, the first four or five commenters all disagreed with me. "LOL. this from the party that can't go on Fox news and debate because they might get hard questions," one said.
That just proves it.
Attytood is a conservative blog, as O'Reilly would say, sometimes even boiling over with right-wing hate.
Ridiculous? Of course, but that's the logic that the host of Fox News' "O'Reilly Factor" in his recent series of attacks over the last two weeks on the Daily Kos website and on this week's annual Yearly Kos convention -- in Chicago -- that was spawned by the progressive political blog. Daily Kos is, in essense, a Democratic blog with a large "D" -- it seeks to elect Democratic candidates and sometims raises money for them -- but it is also one of the most democratic sites, with a small "d," on the World Wide Web. (More on that in a minute.)
What Bill O'Reilly is trying to do is flat-out dishonest, but it's easy to understand what he's doing from an amoral, Machiavellian "Politics 101" point of view. He knows that millions of his viewers will never visit Daily Kos -- some don't even have the Internet, some are senior citizens, and many are just not the type to seek out a website like Daily Kos first-hand. But most of these people will vote in 2008. So O'Reilly will define DK as an "enemy" his viewers will never see -- and he can do this by cherry-picking a few of the literally tens of thousands of user-generated essays -- called "diaries" -- and reader comments, on a site that is visited 500,000 times or more every single day.
Here are the facts:
Daily Kos is an open forum -- any properly registered citizen user can post diaries or comment on the writings of others. Although the site is moderated to some degree, just like here at Attytood, the ideas of citizens are not censored -- which is exactly what Bill O'Reilly and his cohorts in Rupert Murdoch's Fox empire find so threatening. Diaries, comments, and the authors themselves are rated or recommended by the Daily Kos community -- and so while extreme and wrongheaded viewpoints can be expressed, they also will sink like a stone into oblivion. The shared values of the community -- progressive and pro-democracy -- float to the surface.
What Bill O'Reilly didn't tell America is that the most popular writers on Daily Kos tend to be school teachers, ministers, soldiers fighting in, or just home from, Iraq or Afghanistan, and their wives and parents, as well as every other type of salt-of-the-earth citizen you could think of. The views that are most commonly voiced -- calling for an end to the war in Iraq, or health care coverage for all -- are the views of the majority of the American people. And that is the real reason that Fox now seeks to destroy it.
There's something else that Bill O'Reilly won't tell you about Daily Kos, and it has to do with the reason that I'm traveling there this week to take part in a roundtable discussion on Saturday morning. There is some excellent journalism that takes place there, journalism that is practiced by citizens who are eager, willing and shown themselves able to investigate stories in their own free time that many of my colleagues in mainstream journalism won't, or can't, in our salaried positions.
I saw this first hand in 2005, as I watched private citizens took the lead in exposing how an unqualified right-wing mole working under the fake name of "Jeff Gannon" was given a coveted seat in the White House press room. And other acts of journalism, large and small, are commited there every day, advancing the U.S. attorney scandal or developments in the CIA leak case.
Many journalists, frankly, are frightened by the kind of passion that the American citizens of the Kos community bring to the daily dialogue of our democracy. And that is a shame, because I believe that as mainstream journalists, we should not reject the passion of a community like Daily Kos but acknowledge it, embrace it, and in some cases harness it, using our skill as professionals to bring the research of caring citizens to a wider audience. I believe that journalists have a unique role in American society -- and so while we should not be partisan as many Daily Kos users are -- we also should care about ideas and about democracy, and never dismiss what the Kos site does in these areas.
Currently, I am at work on a book that is be published in early 2008 by Vaster Books -- the imprint that was created last year by Markos Moulitsas of Daily Kos (whom, for what it's worth, I have never met or spoken to or even traded emails) and Jane Hamsher of Firedoglake. It's called "The News Fix," and the goal is to design a new kind of news organization for the 21st Century, something that I call a "norg." One of the keys to a successful "norg" -- and saving the endangered jobs of American journalists like me -- will be to stop talking down to or even insulting our so-called "audience" of readers -- but forming a working partnership with everyday citizens who care about good journalism.
People like the American citizens of the Daily/Yearly Kos communities.
And so I hope that anyone in Chicago this weekend -- either attending the YK convention or from the area -- who cares about the future of news in America will come by and take part in our roundtable discussion, which is called "Time for a New Kind of News Organization." In addition to myself, you'll here from journalism reform guru Jay Rosen, Susan Gardner of ePluribus Media, which broke a lot of the "Jeff Gannon" story, and Andrew Golis of Talking Points Memo, which has put the U.S. attorney story on the national map. It takes place at 10:30 Saturday morning (Aug. 4) in Room 101a of the McCormick Place. On Friday at 3:30, I'll be promoting "The News Fix" at a faceplate signing with Duncan Black of Atrios, who is writing an introduction to the book.
As for O'Reilly and this manufactured controversy, all I can say is that this mainstream journalist -- with more than a quarter-century of experience and several awards under his belt -- has looked at Daily Kos and seen an important piece of the puzzle of fixing the American news media. I'm proud and honored to be able to speak at Yearly Kos and to continue the conversation.
And if you want to know the truth about Daily and Yearly Kos, do what any good journalist would do. Check it out for yourself.