It’s most amusing to watch the reception of Joe Klein – “… not so much a political writer as a bad theater critic” – the Slate columnist and alleged liberal is getting as he sheds his designer bathrobe and dips his carefully-manicured toes into the choppy waters of the blog sea, via the safety of Time/CNN’s new astroblog, Swampland.
(Btw did you notice Ana-Marie Cox is now Time Washington Editor? And they call it serious journalism? Wahahahahaha.)
Myself, I’m amazed by Klein’s chutzpah: after having spent the past few years basking in journalistic comfort onshore, idly cursing the swimmers, he seems to have expected a sedate Hamptons water-polo match in which position and seniority would give him innate advantage.
Surely blogging would be a doddle for such a fine figure of a pundit and anonymous novelist as Klein, if so many provincial neanderthals were doing it, wouldn’t it?
Of course, having no editor to save his skin or tone down his vainglorious self-certainty and belligerence he floundered badly straight away – hysterically accusing the blogging left of being illiberal, anti-American and hoping for US defeat and in the process lying, saying that he’d never supported the Iraq war when his own words said otherwise.
Oh dear. He didn’t want to do that…
Understandably he’s getting an ass-whupping from the real bloggers:
Late yesterday I was mulling why exactly Klein feels the need to presuppose the worst motives on the part of unnamed liberals and Democrats — whom he regularly accuses of rooting for America to “lose” — when Klein went ahead and unwittingly revealed a possible answer in his new post. It’s vanity.
[…]
To look into the mirror and see a brave and heroic pundit staring back, of course, you need to flatter yourself into believing that you’re challenging entrenched ideas and the people who hold them in some way, even if you aren’t. This impression can be created in several ways. One is to simply dream up a whole class of people, claim they hold “extreme” opinions based on nothing at all, and set yourself up as a lonely warrior against them — preferably while standing shoulder to shoulder with other lonely heroes of moderation like John McCain and Joe Lieberman. That’s David Broder’s preferred approach. Another way is to dream up a whole series of nefarious but nonexistent motives driving colleagues’ opinions, so that you can deprive those colleagues of credit for those opinions, and position yourself as, again, braver and more heroic than they are — even though you agree with them. That is Klein’s approach — and I submit that at bottom it’s all about vanity.
Klein issued a challenge in his post that has already been deftly parried by Boo Man. So here’s a challenge for Klein: Back up your arguments with facts and evidence. Produce one example of someone whose comments betray the fact that they’re tacitly rooting for American failure. Quote this person. Explain why this person’s quotes should be interpreted that way. If you manage to get that far, then maybe consider finding a second example, and even a third. That doesn’t sound all that hard, does it?
One might think that a journalist who has had the very basis of his reporting skill challenged in such a very public way might be a little shame-faced that his lack of professionalism had been so devastingly exposed. Not Klein.
But why is this little blogospheric kerfuffle of any importance at all in the larger political media picture?
There appears to be yet another evolutionary change happening with political blogs as the big news corporations switch their loss-making paper operations online and the group and community blogs become, in their turn, more corporate. The online operations of the media conglomerates are now being recast, falsely, as group or community blogs themselves, a direct marketing challenge to the likes of Kos and Atrios – the use of folksy names like Swampland is one way of fooling visitors that what they are reading is the voice of the average American.
This is not just about Joe Klein spouting his outdated and overexposed mouth off, entertaining though that is. This is about TimeWarner using its online presence to take on the liberal blogs – ‘We, the corporate establishment are patriots; you, the liberal bloggers, are unwashed hippies” – using Klein as its willing proxy.
They’re slapping down any attempt at encroachment on one of their markets, of course; it’s a fiduciary duty to maximise shareholder value and dividends. What else can they do? They won’t be happy until until they own or control all the media outlets, it’s what conglomerates do, and liberal independent blogs are a direct challenge to corporate dominance of the news markets and public opinion.
“The largest media company in the world is the standard bearer of synergy and vertical integration in the modern digital age. The marriage between “old” media Time Warner and “new” media AOL in 2000 was heralded by many experts as a sign of a new era. The belief was that traditional media companies had to align themselves with online partners or risk the chance of finding their business model and methods obsolete. A weak ad market, subscriptions for new online users hitting a plateau, and a less than expected demand for broadband Internet service are just some of the reasons why AOL Time Warner never jumped started an overhaul of the entire media industry as first predicted. The company dropped AOL from its corporate name in 2003 in an effort to show Wall Street that it still valued its core assets. With such influential brands as CNN, Warner Brothers studio, Sports Illustrated and AOL Instant Messaging, a Time Warner property is never too far away from any consumer’s fingertips.”
Supposed journalists like Klein don’t see this at all: First Amendent? Democracy? Accountability? Phooey. Blogging is for them just an opportunity for further personal aggrandisement and for unencumbered-by-truth-or-editing, vainglorious ranting in which they can get back at all their percieved enemies. And get paid for it!
Klein has confused the immediacy of blogging and the fact that the posts scroll off the screen with the notion that what he’s written is gone, because he doesn’t see it any more: he thinks there’ll be no consequences from his lies: that was yesterday and besides he’s got TimeWarner at his back. He’d better think again.
Read more: Media ownership, Blogging, Media conglomerates, CNN, Time magazine, Time/Warner, Joe Klein
