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From the diaries -- kos)
We're crashing the gates.
Oh, I'm not talking about the gates of the Democratic Party, like a certain new book I've heard somewhere you can pre-order ... that's not the big struggle anyway. Oh, no, I'm talking about the major struggle against the established media and it's bizarre relationship with the right-wing and the truth. And, missed in all the fury at the Washington Post and Chris Matthews is a recognition of a simple fact that is the real lesson of those incidents: we're getting closer to winning this thing.
Like Gandhi said in the over-quoted line: "First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you ... then you win." That line is so over-used it's close to a cliche, but in this case, it's elegantly true. So, let's look back at how this bloggy thing has gone, and why Howell and Matthews show we're winning ...
First they ignore you
I hope you'll forgive the self-referential meta stuff here, but it's a story I lived through. And, judging by the traffic stats of this site and Left Blogdom in general, a fairly small percentage of you were here for it all ...
One of the most frustrating, searing experiences of my public life was being on-line, reading this blog and others--participating in the on-line debate--from October '02 to March '03. It was like living in an alternate reality during that surreal march to war. Check back into some of the archives of the Moveable Type dKos.
Like, for example, right after the "universally praised in the established media" Powell UN presentation, here's what I read here:
Powell has spoken. I have little to add, since 1) there was ZERO evidence presented of the claimed Iraq-al Qaeda link, and 2) none of the evidence presented (at least as written in the Reuters and AP wire stories) seem to offer more than pictures of bunkers and talk about a "modified vehicle". Is that supposed to somehow reference the "mobile chemical factories" we've been hearing about? If so, I hope there's more evidence than the news story presented, because that's pretty weak.
And, frankly, Kos wasn't even really in the forefront of debunking Powell's charges. It was like that all over; the national media was running one narrative, and the blogs were punching holes in it all over the place (for one particularly poignant example considering what happened, check out this Oct.02 beauty ... 2 comments!). But the national, traditional media figures were ignoring this completely, deaf to the screaming on the left.
Leading to the next phase ...
Then they laugh at you
Deaniacs. Deanie babies ... the slurs were many toward Dean supporters on-line.
The blogosphere had grown enough through the course of the war that it was now a force that had to be noticed. The huge crowds for Dean, the fundraising ... it was too big to ignore now. And, oh, for a few weeks there, the established DC power axis got a wee bit nervous, with the media actually scratching its collective head over what was happening.
But, basically, all they did was laugh. And condescend. And when Dean flamed out in Iowa, they could laugh and condescend some more, safe in their assumption of the basically naive and essentially powerless "Deanie babies."
Read this NYTimes editorial, which is meant to be well-meaning, but made me scream at the time:
However he fares in the coming primaries, Howard Dean has already touched more than a few young lives. Around the country -- campus by campus, computer by computer -- thousands of teenagers and 20-somethings have fallen hard for his campaign. They're lucky. It's a wonderful experience to lose one's political heart for the first time, as did the college students who sacrificed long hair and beards to be "clean for Gene" -- Eugene McCarthy -- in 1968, or the young men who stood bare-chested waving placards for Bill Bradley in the New Hampshire snow or followed the banner of Senator John McCain in 2000. The newly enchanted of 2004 bring a rush of young blood into the nation's old campaign arteries.
Unfortunately, the nearly inevitable conclusion of these first heady forays into presidential campaigning is political heartbreak. "Don't you lose some essence of life when you really can't give your heart?" asked Kate DeBolt, an 18-year-old Floridian who says she could "go to the ends of the earth" for Dr. Dean.
Fuck you. The condescension is just dripping.
But that wasn't the best indication of the media's attitude. It was the t-shirt that really did it. To jog your memory:
An edgy moment of own-expense laughter is the best that reporters and an about-to-drop-out presidential hopeful can hope for, as a campaign enters what everyone knows is its final hours.
Hence, candidate -- and media critic -- Howard Dean reacted with humor Tuesday in Milwaukee as journalists presented him with a long-sleeve white T-shirt. It carried the motto "Establishment Media" in front, and a slogan swiped from Dean in the back: "We Have the Power, Dean Press Corps 2004."
Man, do I ever remember that! The arrogance! The cynicism! I was personally insulted by that, screaming at the screen when I read about it. I'd put in a lot of time for Dean, done a small amount of paid work for the campaign, and a large amount of unpaid evangelizing.
"All they're doing is laughing at us," I remember thinking. And I was right.
And the attitude pretty much carried through the election. Oh, sure, there was a lot of talk about "blogs," but the DC media didn't really pay attention. I mean, the Orange Mothership here at dKos as growing at an awesome rate, but Powerline was named Blog of the Year by Time Magazine.
You see, the right's blogs were noticed because they were basically part of the power structure in which the DC/establishment media lived. Powerline et all could get their "version" of the CBS Memo story out into the mainstream not because they were a dynamic new development, but because they were simply a new facet of the powerful Right-Wing Noise Machine. And the rest of the RWNM just carried their story forward.
Meanwhile, Left Blogdom screamed about the lies of the Swift Boat crew, debunking them at every turn, but no one listened. The Internet community not blessed by the right-wing power structure were still below notice, guys in pajamas blogging in the basement.
Then they fight you
But since the election, things have changed. The traffic of Blogdom in general, and dKos in particular, has exploded. Important sites like Media Matters were started and grew. And guys like Josh Marshall grew ever more sophisticated at exerting influence over the debate (Josh, in particular, had a big role in the Social Security fight).
Because of all that, e-mail campaigns against people started to bite harder. And campaigns against the distortions on the right began to enter into the mainstream a bit. So the establishment fought back.
Most hilariously in the person of Bill O'Reilly, whose thin-skinned, blustery paranoia is alternately fascinating and repulsive. But the push-back goes across the DC-establishment media, and it generally has two main forms: attacking the credibility of blogs (Scott McClellan trying to challenge the credibility of a questioners facts by asking if he got them from, sneeringly, "a blogger") or, more commonly, attacking the "civility" of the new Internet media environment.
Well, I'm sorry, but if you lived through the Iraq invasion and the Swift Boat lies from this perspective, you'd be a little angry, too.
Which brings us to the Washington Post.
And then you win.
I'm not going to rehash the whole story of Howell's mistake and Brady's shutting down of comments. You already know all that. It's right in the context of the push-back against the Internet community, bemoaning the lack of "civility" while you try to shut off the debate.
But it's not working. Howell caved:
My mistake set off a firestorm. I heard that I was lying, that Democrats never got a penny of Abramoff-tainted money, that I was trying to say it was a bipartisan scandal, as some Republicans claim. I didn't say that. It's not a bipartisan scandal; it's a Republican scandal, and that's why the Republicans are scurrying around trying to enact lobbying reforms.
Oh, sure, she couches it in a general "I was misunderstood" tone, but the implications are clear. The "firestorm" changed her narrative. A simple, clear statement in that last sentence not only painting it as a GOP scandal but implicitly calling out the GOP spin war.
And concurrently, we had the Chris Matthews explosion, when he tried to move the GOP ball down the field on tying in Democrats with Osama. The response was huge, with pushback across Left Blogdom, even including John Kerry's first ever recommended diary (hey, Senator, just about 200 more and you'll catch Jerome a Paris!) and continuing with Louise Slaughter exhorting us to keep up the pressure. And Matthews whined the very next day that "everyone misunderstood what I said." Then on Monday, he tried to walk himself back with a hilariously transparent kiss-up to Michael Moore:
"You know, on Hardball we've been raising the question about no-bid contracts and how Halliburton has gotten some profits out of that, and maybe we were right or wrong, but we were raising that issue. Certainly people like Michael Moore raised that question of profiteering."
Michael Moore, Crusader for Truth! Once again, the pressure was enough to change the narrative.
Then, in today's WaPo editorial, the mind-boggling insistence by Fred Hiatt to ignore the 90s precedent and soft-shoe around a partisan scandal cracked just a bit:
Under these circumstances, asking about Mr. Abramoff's White House meetings is no mere exercise in reportorial curiosity but a legitimate inquiry about what an admitted felon might have been seeking at the highest levels of government. Whatever White House officials did or didn't do, there is every reason to believe that Mr. Abramoff was up to no good and therefore every reason the public ought to know with whom he was meeting.
Mr. McClellan dismisses requests for the information as an effort to play "partisan politics," and no doubt there is more than an element of partisanship in Democrats' efforts to extract this information. But Republicans wouldn't stand for this kind of stonewalling if the situation were reversed. We can say that with confidence because history proves it. During the 1996 scandal over foreign fundraising in the Clinton White House, Republicans demanded -- and obtained, though not without a fight -- extensive information about White House coffees and other meetings, including photos and videotapes.
Think Fred will start using the IOKIYAR acronym soon?
Oh, sure, the WaPo shut down comments and will tread much more carefully in any future attempts to solicit reader feed-back. But the damage is done. They opened the gates of the castle for just an instant and caught sight of the angry mob outside with torches and pitchforks. Closing the gate won't rid them of the knowledge that we're out here, angry and connected.
And that's a very big step. A lot of the problems of the establishment media really boil down to a lack of perspective. "News judgement" is an amorphous thing, and it mostly comes down to what the people in the editor's experience would think are important. For years, the right-wing in DC has twisted that perception, giving the impression to news folks that impeachment of Clinton is a valid story, but impeachment of Bush is not. Or that treating claims of Democratic ties to Abramoff as valid can be considered good news judgement.
But those days are ending. The Internet community of the reality-based community has grown stronger and stronger. Our voices are being heard, practically in real time. There is still a long way to go; that Hiatt editorial is still a break from the usual narrative on those pages. But we are changing the narrative in demonstrable ways. We're finally breaking through.
To borrow a phrase, we're crashing the gates ...