One of the things that generally irritates me about most right wing blogs is the conservative sense of victimhood. Conservatives imagine themselves a people under siege, cornered by a hostile oppressive culture that wants to destroy them. This has the effect of making the blogger believe they are some sort of warrior, a martyr for the cause that the establishment desperately wants to silence.
Glenn Beck has adopted this paranoid style for television, but before it was most prominent among the warbloggers Eric Boehlert used to regularly skewer at Media Matters. There was a new enemy of the state to destroy every few weeks — whether it was Pulitzer Prize-winning photographer Bilal Hussein, the AP’s supposedly fictional source Jilal Hussein, the Frost family during the debate over SCHIP expansion. Conservative bloggers thrived on ephemeral threads of evidence amplified by mindless aggregation — one blogger would assert something off some vague bit of information, another would take the assumption as fact, and then it would be. There was no journalism required, just repetition and speculation. And of course even when they were wrong about their conspiracies, they were never wrong — because whenever they saw something they didn’t like or that challenged their worldview, they knew that there was always a shadowy conspiracy at hand that needed dot connecting.
Unfortunately, that kind of Glenn Beck chalkboard style rabid conspiracy mongering isn’t the exclusive province of the right. A few weeks ago, my colleague Tim Fernholz criticized an article written by Matt Taibbi. Frankly I’m not well versed enough in matters of financial regulation to decide whether Taibbi or Fernholz was right. But criticizing Taibbi apparently broke some sort of rule, and suddenly it wasn’t just that Tim disagreed with Taibbi, it’s that he must have been part of a paid conspiracy to discredit “progressive critics” of the administration. Here’s Kevin Connor:
The fact that Fernholz enjoys special access to White House officials may help explain why he mounted such an “intemperate attack” on Taibbi, as (Reuters’) Felix Salmon called it. I don’t mean to suggest anything nefarious or conspiratorial (God forbid!). Just that Fernholz is on good terms with the Obama economic team and their leading lights, and this likely helped influence his views of Taibbi’s article.
What is this kind of access worth? The piece Fernholz interviewed Farrell for, The Myth of Too Big to Fail, amounts to a flimsy, meandering defense of the Obama administration’s unwillingness to break up the big banks. Fernholz says that he spoke to a wide range of sources for the story, including consumer advocates and congressional staffers. Farrell appears to be the only interviewee quoted in the piece, and she is quoted at length (Dean Baker is also quoted, but that quote appears here). Fernholz essentially built the piece around her quotes, offering no counterpoint or critical framing of her arguments (see Simon Johnson for the opposite view).
Uh yeah, that would be the Dean Baker who writes for this magazine, the one David Sirota has decided, upon one reporter here having once visited the White House, is “trying to base part of its niche on inside access.”
Can I address the “special access” thing for a second, just um, just briefly. As a non-profit, we don’t even have fucking congressional press passes because the rules prohibit it. They gave Tim one last year on a trial basis, but no one else at the magazine has one. So yeah, I mean, if we’re trading on access I guess Tim would be the point man.
A reporter visits the White House for an interview! How terribly sinister. We’ve reached a twilight zone of paranoia when the mere act of a reporter interviewing a policymaker once becomes “special access” to the Obama administration. Tim’s a regular fucking Mike Allen! Interviewing sources is you know, pretty much essential to the basic act of journalism. But for some people talking to someone in the White House means you have traded your soul for access. The only way to be a pure liberal is to not actually confirm any of your assumptions ever. Ignorance is strength.
But let’s continue on with Sirota:
At one level, that is a brilliant-if-cynical strategy by the White House: If liberal publications are attacking progressive independent administration critics like Taibbi, then the implicit message beyond the overt attacks is that someone like Taibbi’s arguments can be wholly written off not on the substance, but on the simple fact that he clearly must be on the extreme ideological fringe. I mean, hell, if you are being attacked by the “liberal” American Prospect, you’ve gotta be some sort of communist, right?
To clarify: Tim criticized Taibbi. Tim also once spoke to an administration official. Ergo, the White House is using the American Prospect to attack “progressive independent critics” of the administration. And there’s no need for Sirota to prove what he’s actually saying–because actually looking for evidence that proves his assumption would merely taint him by association. The original suggestion made by Connor has transitioned, in Sirota’s hands from unsubstantiated accusation to unquestionable fact. On cue, Jane Hamsher accused Tim of not only being in the administration’s pocket, but of being their personal hatchet man. Just like the warbloggers, one weak strand of bullshit is amplified through aggregation into veritable rope of nonsense they can strangle their intended target with.
Okay not to diss, but if the administration was looking for a media mercenary they could do a lot better than this magazine with our traffic and circulation numbers. But it’s not really about the feasibility of the bullshit theory being put forth, it’s about the narcissism of the critics themselves, who desperately need to imagine themselves as martyrs for truth in a world where the forces of evil are arrayed against them.
During the debate over the health care bill, the mainstream press did what it usually does to left-wing critics: it pissed all over them, portraying them as lunatics, drug addicts, and worse. So to some extent, I understand the bunker mentality. On the other hand this kind of conspiracy mongering is so clearly rhetorical, self-serving, and mean-spirited, that I question whether driven by frustration over mindless beltway centrism or just marketing. The whole point is to persuade the reader that the person writing must be important, because after all, these shadowy, powerful forces are trying to silence them.
At another level, though, it misunderstands the new media ecosphere. For every liberal DC publication like the Prospect trying to base part of its niche on inside access there are other liberal media organizations that have the opposite model: namely, questioning power, regardless of who has that power.
Look, I’ll translate for those who have never had the pleasure of reading David Sirota before. There’s an “us” and there’s a “them”. The “them” is bad. You don’t want to be “them”. You want to be “us”, because otherwise you’re a piece of shit. You aren’t a “them” are you?
Insert topic, rinse, repeat.
It’s frankly maddening to listen to Sirota pat himself on the back for being able to deal with “the personal conflicts and uncomfortable social pangs that come with the idea of writing hard-hitting stuff.” Dude, if you can’t be bothered to check your facts, nothing you write is “hardhitting”. It’s just you yelling into the wind and then bragging to your echo how brave you are. You aren’t writing “hard hitting stuff” David. You are jerking off into a mirror.
What so ironic is about this schoolyard bullying is that it is Connor, Sirota, and Hamsher who are doing exactly what they accuse their critics of doing. It’s plainly obvious that by accusing Tim of being literally paid, Armstrong Williams style, of being a tool of the White House, that the intent is to cast any of his future writing as illegitimate–and dissuade any other potential critics from daring to criticize a member of their protected tribe. This isn’t “progressive criticism”. It’s fucking McCarthyism. And it’s not even hidden. It’s outright. And it’s not any less cowardly coming from a self-identified liberal.
And you know what? If I wanted to be a tool for a powerful interest, I sure as fuck wouldn’t do it for 30,000 fucking dollars a year.
— A. Serwer