Republican Noise Machine Playing the Game Again

One thing I can't stand about how the Republican Party plays the game at the federal level is that they can never seem to take responsibility for what they do, even if they're caught red-handed. It's pretty well understood in the blogging community that Mel Martinez has admitted that his staff authored the Schiavo memo, but the Republican noise machine fires up anyway. Media Matters gives a chronology of what happened as the noise machine went into high gear to discredit the memo and distance themselves from it. So even though we have an admission from Martinez, the noise machine obfuscates the issue by suggesting that the memo could be a fake. It starts with conservative blogs, and then the non-story story bubbles up to Michelle Malkin, The National Review, The American Spectator, The Washington Post and The Washington Times.

This is textbook. It's absolutely typical of how the Republicans have been using the media for the past several years. The impact of what the Democrats have discovered is almost completely blunted because legit sources are now casting doubt on whether or not the memo is a fake, simply by writing stories suggesting there might be something fishy about it.

The worst thing about this is that the issue will die along with everything else that the Democrats have rightly pinned on the Republicans, mostly because the Dems can't mobilize their own counterpoint to what the Republicans have put out there. Efforts to bring this story to completion and establish the responsible parties in the mind of the average American will probably fall short. The average American will either remember nothing about this, or they'll remember that somebody in the Republican party got busted trying to politicize the situation, but it might have just been a dirty trick put into play by the Democrats.

Doubt that the wingnut noise machine is obfuscating the issue? Do a Google search on "Schiavo memo" and look at all the top links. Lessee...there's the Washington Post story headlined "Doubts Raised on Schiavo Memo" as the first link. Then there's two links to Michelle Malkin's blog. The PowerLine blog entry and the American Spectator story are also in the top ten. If you had been some clueless person looking for information on the memo, you would reasonably come to the conclusion there are doubts as to the memo's authenticity. And that's just bullcrap.

I'm not saying that everyone gets their news from Google searches, but I am saying that the noise machine can create as much positive press or water-muddying bullshit stories for the Republicans as is needed to get the job done. And the Dems don't have an asset like that.

You might be thinking that the Schiavo case has gotten its fair share in the press already, but that's a separate issue from what we're dealing with here. The Republicans have been caught trying to politicize a very sensitive situation and using the controversy to position themselves as belonging to a "Culture of Life." In reality, the memo shows the Republicans care less about life and more about finding issues they can use to mobilize the pro-life base to their political advantage. That, to me, is serious. And until the Democrats learn to play the media game as well as the Republicans, they're going to be schooled over and over again.

Thinking Back to J-School Again

This morning, I'm remembering a discussion we had back in journalism school. We were talking about how the media convey credibility - not necessarily when something is reported on the television news, but when something is mentioned on television in general. One thing that sticks in my head to this day was Professor Brian Richardson momentarily adopting a southern drawl in imitation of Joe Sixpack, saying "It's true...I seen it on the teevee" to illustrate his point. Lots of people, in their consumption of mass media, attribute legitimacy to things they get through the mainstream, regardless of the credibility of the source. I assume the presumption is that if what was presented wasn't true, it wouldn't be broadcast over the airwaves, printed in the paper, etc. I've been thinking a lot about this lately, and I think one of the big pain points concerning the mass media these days is that credibility is fluid, and many people aren't used to that. I remember watching the first Gulf War on CNN and pretty much believing everything I saw. But that's certainly not the case with war coverage these days (or pretty much anything that's reported in the mass media).

While it's true that plenty of news organizations have terrific credibility, increased transparency brought about by blogs, a new influx of new media outlets and increased criticism of the mainstream news media have shown many news consumers that institutions previously believed to be beyond reproach often get it wrong. But this is far from a "black or white" concept. Jayson Blair's fabrication of news stories didn't destroy the credibility of the New York Times forever - it damaged it to an extent, but the credibility is still there.

That's why we can have situations like this. A story can be broken by bloggers, but achieve added legitimacy by being re-reported in newspapers.

The idea that credibility is constantly in a state of flux jives with my prior assertions that we're in an interactive "Marketplace of Ideas" era where truth rarely exists in black and white, but rather in shades of grey. The driver behind moving something closer to black or white on the truth scale is the infrastructure for supporting conversations. We're in a period where that infrastructure is still emerging, thus the pain we're all feeling. Asking someone to make truth judgments in this evolving marketplace is like dropping someone off at a giant mall in a foreign country where the shopper has never heard of many of the stores and doesn't yet know who to trust with their business.

What many news consumers are looking for, subconsciously, is a stable of trusted sources for news and opinion. And it's less a question of whether they'll eventually find those sources, and more a question of what will fill that vacuum today and in the future.

More choice is a good thing, but we can't expect a huge shift in the way people consume news without a good deal of pain along the way.

HD Update #4

Managed to boot from floppies and get an external USB CD-ROM drive working. From there, I got XP Pro installed and all seems to be running fine. The data recovery guys need another 18 hours to scan my old drive platters for the remnants of my old Outlook .pst file, which sucks. But by then, I should be finished loading all the software and whatnot that need to be on the machine. I took the opportunity to install some new applications, including the new Microsoft anti-spyware app. I think I'll also try PC Cillin rather than the usual Norton pigware for anti-virus. This is also a good opportunity to update every app and driver to the latest versions. So far, the formerly dead Toshiba is running like a champ. (Keep fingers crossed.)

Reaction: Reuters Blogging Panel

First off, let me say thanks to Sophie Brendel over at Reuters. She went out of her way to accommodate my request for a LAN connection so I could blog live from the panel. She's great and went out of her way to make me feel welcome. Secondly, let me say that the LiveBlogging thing didn't work out as well as I would have liked. One thing I didn't realize was that in my journalism days, I'd have plenty of time to snag quotes and make tape recordings and then come back to my computer and think about things for a bit before I started to write my lede and write a compelling story. It's very difficult to sit at an event like this and try to write something meaningful while key quotes are whizzing by.

That said, I've had a few minutes on the train and on my walk over to the office to think about what I just witnessed. In many ways, the panel discussion was very surprising to me. I expected that the mainstream journalists in the room wouldn't "get" blogging, but by the end of the event, I got the impression that most of the journalists in the room understood a lot more about blogging than I thought they would.

Having said that, I definitely got the impression that quite a few people in the room were journalists who, in one way or another, resented bloggers on their turf. I wouldn't say it was a jealousy thing, but rather an acknowledgement that journalists have played by an established set of rules for a long time. Now, here comes a bunch of "citizen journalists" who may or may not play by those same rules. I can understand the concern and even a bit of resentment. For me, the most interesting parts of the panel centered around identifying real problems that concern the blogosphere that I hadn't considered before. For instance, John Fund talked a bit about how sometimes, a big benefit of working for a news organization is that objective reporters and editors can step in when they believe that an individual journalist has stepped over the line ethically or through editorializing. I hadn't considered that before. And in thinking about it further, I came to realize that the blogosphere itself could one day serve as that check on individual bloggers. As blogging becomes more popular, not just in terms of the number of bloggers involved, but insofar as the number of people critiquing ideas and stories increases, mechanisms like comments and trackbacks will help keep individual bloggers in line from an ethics perspective.

I also particularly liked the comments Jeff Jarvis made about blogging taking off in foreign countries that have greater restrictions on political speech than the U.S. does. He mentioned Iranian, Saudi and Ukrainian bloggers conversing about their political systems, with bloggers seemingly cropping up overnight to fill the vacuum in those places insofar as political speech is concerned. I don't think anyone in the room would disagree with the notion that this is a good thing.

To be honest, I expected some knockdown dragouts at this panel, given the friction between bloggers and journalists in the recent past. But it was a largely civil discussion. I think the closest it got to the line was a minor dust-up over the circumstances of the Eason Jordan case. Things got a bit heated for a minute or two between panelist Bryan Keefer and someone in the audience. Let's just say there was some disagreement over the true impact of what happened there.

One other thing - I really liked Halley Suitt's comments on what her various audiences expected of her as she blogged in different online publications. She mentioned that people who read "Halley's Comment" expect to be entertained by her comments and she'll write in a different voice about topics ranging from sex to politics to her son. Compare this to some of the writing she does for Tom Peters' site and the voice and expectation of the audience is completely different. I think that's one of the most interesting dynamics of blogging and I want to give that some more thought over the next few days. After all, I'm in much the same boat with regard to many of the things I write. My "Online Spin" voice is completely distinct from my Hespos.com voice, which is worlds away from what I write in newspaper columns, guest blogging gigs and other public forums. I think this demonstrates that different audiences can have different expectations of the same writer in different situations and venues. And when you think about how that plays in a world where people are expecting more transparency from journalists and writers, maybe it doesn't hurt to be able to write in a voice on your own personal blog that's more frank and human than business-oriented or hardcore news writing. I think it helps transparency along by showing readers that the writers they follow are real human beings.

Anyway, I loved the event and thank Reuters for putting it on. I have but one regret - once again, I was at an event where Jeff Jarvis was speaking and I didn't come up and introduce myself to him. My bad. I kind of had to rush out at the end of the event so I could come back to the office and post my thoughts.