Marc Ambinder responds to my earlier post about his earlier post on the oil-drilling announcement. It gets tetchy!
Anyway, briefly. Things I wasn't doing in my post.
- Attacking politics. I love politics!
- Attacking Mark Halperin because it is fashionable. I've been complaining about Halperin since well before it was modish.
- Suggesting Marc is "suddenly down on environmentalists, and, by extension, civil rights advocates, health care advocates, and even gay rights activists." Please.
- Suggesting Marc is "the White House stenographer." Nope, I don't think he is. I don't even know where he got that!
Things I was doing in my post:
Urging Ambinder, and others, not to fall into the casual stereotypes of Washington conventional wisdom. You'll notice I didn't complain about Ambinder's analysis -- because I didn't disagree with it. What I disagreed with, which I thought was pretty clear, was the sense in his post that the environmental lobby's lack of political power rendered their complaints unworthy of analysis.
I used the examples of three other groups originally known for their lack of influence to argue that political power is not the best measure by which to judge the merits of an argument, not to suggest that Ambinder is somehow against the positions those groups take. Those groups may have been better than the enviros at making their points in the political arnea, but they were all dismissed for years as complainers or worse.
Ambinder notes that his job is explaining why political actors do what they do. That's fair. But I think his readers deserve to know a little more than that. Whether or not environmental groups are effective political actors is beside the point of whether their complaints are important. If his brief blog post isn't the best place to discuss the merits of the environmentalists' critique of this policy, it doesn't make it an acceptable venue to dismiss them completely, either. It may not be Ambinder's job to spread the green message, but journalists are expected to "give voice to the voiceless."
Sometimes the most important policy critiques are those that come from the side with the least political power -- for another analogy sure to be taken the wrong way, consider the media coverage of the anti-war movement circa 2003.
Incidentally, I may have gone too far in comparing Ambinder to Halperin -- just compare their production today. I got the above picture from Halperin's coverage of the off-shore drilling proposal. Yipes.
-- Tim Fernholz
