Bloggasm

Updated below

When it comes to political satire, pseudonymous blogger Jon Swift has been adept at transferring irony and sarcasm to the printed word — not an easy feat given the absence of nonverbal cues and voice inflection. In the online world, he was revered by blogs on both the right and the left. And despite his infrequent postings, he was still able to gather quite a readership, with thousands of inbound links, regular visitors, and RSS subscribers (see an interview I conducted with Swift over here).

Why then — at the height of his popularity — did he disappear from the web completely? His last post was published March 15, and in it he gave no indication that he would be going on a blogging hiatus. Since that last post, dozens of his readers have entered his comments section to express their worries. “It’s hard to come to an optimistic conclusion about this disappearance,” one commenter wrote. “I still hold a little hope that he’s gotten a richly deserved book deal but can’t say so or something positive like that, but I’m increasingly afraid he got hit by a truck or something.”

Unfortunately, Swift went to great lengths to hide his identity, at one point even turning down a Huffington Post guest-blogging gig just so he wouldn’t have to reveal who he really was. Given this, it’s incredibly difficult to investigate his current status and find out if he’s still out there somewhere.

Below I’m going to lay out what we know about Swift and his disappearance and hopefully others will eventually chime in with new information. Feel free to provide any input into the comments section or to email me at simon.bloggasm@gmail.com if you know anything.

Though it would seem that Swift departed from the web on March 15, there’s evidence that it occurred much later. If you check his Facebook mini-feed, for instance, you’ll see that the last time that he engaged in any activity on the social networking site was actually April 13. On that day, he joined a Facebook group called “Free the Jefferson 1!”

There’s evidence that whoever Swift is, he lives and/or works somewhere within New York City. The first indication of this is his Facebook profile, which lists that as his location.

But I’m also reminded of an incident that happened in December. Swift emailed me to ask if I was interested in participating in his “best of the blogosphere” post by submitting a link to one of my articles. I replied to his email with a link to a specific post of mine. Five minutes later, I noticed in my sitemeter logs that he had clicked on the link from his email — it was very obvious that he had been the one who clicked on the link.

Curious, I checked out his IP address. He was surfing the internet from a law firm in New York (unfortunately I can’t remember now which one). Wondering if I could maybe guess his identity, I went to the website of the law firm to see how many lawyers it had so I could maybe figure out who he was. But that path quickly went cold, because the law firm in question had somewhere around 200 lawyers.

Given his chosen expertise (if he is, indeed, a lawyer), I can certainly see why he didn’t want his real name affiliated with partisan political blog posts. There’s no doubt that he was trying to protect his career and possibly his personal life.

So what does this say about his disappearance? Did someone come close to giving away his identity? Was he afraid it would negatively affect his career? Did he, as that one commenter suggested, get hit by a bus?

That’s what I’m hoping to find out. It’s my goal to have this blog post either draw out Swift himself or someone who knows of his condition.

So Swift, you jokester you. Where are you?

UPDATE: Melissa McEwan from Shakesville published a post today after having a conversation with Mr. Swift:

Well, let me assure everyone that he is fine. I just spoke to him at Swift HQ and can confirm he’s not trapped under anything heavy and hasn’t been hit by a bus—he’s merely busy, nose-deep in an alarmingly modest proposal, natch.

Hmm. I don’t doubt McEwan’s reporting, but it still leaves me wondering why Swift hasn’t been responding to emails, facebook messages or his worried commenters. Very odd.

Last week I published a study showing that four major conservative blogs — michellemalkin.com, redstate.com, littlegreenfootballs.com, and powerlineblog.com — focus almost entirely on non-policy issues in their Obama coverage. Instead, they focused largely on guilt-by-association stories by hyping every controversial figure even vaguely tied to Obama. For instance, they published dozens of posts criticizing Obama for serving on a few panels with Weather Underground founder Bill Ayers (even though Ayers wasn’t a member of the campaign) and the fact that Hamas had issued a quasi endorsement for Obama.

Over the weekend, Newsweek broke a major story that McCain’s handpicked choice to manage the GOP convention this summer is lobbyist Doug Goodyear, whose firm once represented Burma’s repressive regime. It has also been revealed that Doug Davenport, a regional campaign manager for McCain, was a lobbyist at the same firm who worked directly on the Myanmar account during 2002.

In the short span that the Newsweek article has been online, it has become one of the most widely linked news articles on the web.

But guess who’s missing from that long list of blogs who have addressed the article? You guessed it, the four blogs in my study. The blogs that went to any length to launch guilt-by-association attacks on Obama for people who weren’t even involved in his campaign (Ayers). Now here we learn that McCain’s hand-picked manager of the GOP convention (which is a metaphorical representation of the entire Republican party) and one of his regional managers were lobbyist trying to spruce up the image of a repressive regime that is currently getting a lot of negative news coverage, and not a single one of these blogs think it worth mentioning?

Sorry guys, you make the rules. Now it’s time to play by them.

It’s been over 24 hours since the story broke. Let’s see how long it takes them to address it, if ever.

In the lead-up to the Indiana and North Carolina primaries, most television news pundits were relying on polls from professional pollsters — like Zogby — to predict the outcome. But a pseudonymous blogger known as Poblano was using a different methodology — demographics.

Guess whose predictions were more accurate?

“Critics scoffed. Most of the public polls pointed to a close race in North Carolina,” writes the National Journal. “Looking back at Poblano’s efforts in Pennsylvania, pollster Dick Bennett decried the models as ’stepwise regression run amok.’ Slate’s Mickey Kaus predicted failure for ‘a sophisticated model that ignores… what’s been happening in the campaign. Like Rev. [Jeremiah] Wright.’”

But in the end, they were wrong and Poblano was right.

What’s perhaps scary is that he was able to make these predictions based on demographic sub-groups. Are they really that predictable? Is this evidence that no matter what happens in a campaign, these subgroups will always vote the same?

The National Journal article has a nifty chart that gives a clear picture of how accurate the blogger’s results were compared to all the professional pollsters.

Approximately 77% of posts dealing with Barack Obama in four major conservative blogs focused on non-policy issues. The blogs I surveyed include michellemalkin.com, powerlineblog.com, redstate.com, and littlegreenfootballs.com.

The four blogs published a total of 311 posts in April prominently featuring Obama. Of those, 71 posts (23%) focused on policy issues. The remaining 240 posts (77%) focused on non-policy issues.

Policy issues the blogs covered include Obama’s views on Iraq, the economic slowdown, the housing crisis, the gas tax, immigration, and the war on terror.

Non-policy issues the blogs covered include Rev.Jeremiah Wright, Weathermen founder Bill Ayers, “bitter” comments about rural voters, his decision to wear a flag pin, and his alleged elitism.

Of the blogs surveyed, redstate.com had the highest percentage of posts focusing on policy (34%) and littlegreenfootballs.com has the lowest percentage (11%)

The breakdown of policy/non-policy posts featuring Obama prominently for each blog can be found below:

michellemalkin.com

Policy: 9
Non-policy: 54
Total: 63
Percentage of policy issues: 14%
Percentage of non-policy issues: 86%

powerlineblog.com:

Policy: 10
Non-policy: 60
Total: 70
Percentage of policy issues: 14%
Percentage of non-policy issues: 86%

redstate.com:

Policy: 48
Non-policy: 92
Total: 140
Percentage of policy issues: 34%
Percentage of non-policy issues: 66%

littlegreenfootballs.com:

Policy: 4
Non-policy: 34
Total: 38
Percentage of policy issues: 11%
Percentage of non-policy issues: 89%

Total posts from all blogs: 311
Total policy posts: 71
Total non-policy posts: 240
Percentage of policy posts: 23%
Percentage of non-policy posts: 77%

Flaws in the study: Obviously, what constitutes a “policy” post versus a “non-policy” post is not always clearly defined. In the few instances where this was murky, I tended to put the post into the “policy” category. Also, an argument can be made that “non-policy” posts could indirectly shed light on Obama’s policy views.

I attempted to only include posts that featured Obama prominently, and tried not to count ones in which Obama’s name was only mentioned briefly. For instance, all posts that featured the Rev. Jeremiah Wright but didn’t mention Obama were not counted. The exception to this rule was michellemalkin.com, which automatically used an “Obama” tag in its Wright posts regardless of whether Obama’s name was used in the post. This indicated that the site was blatantly tying all Wright issues with Obama, and therefore they were counted as “Obama posts.”

Vanity Fair has an interesting article about a war currently going on in the liberal blogosphere — a war that is most visible at Daily Kos because it has so many writers. I’m speaking, of course, of the war between Clinton supporters and Obama supporters. And since we all know the success stories of Obama’s online campaign, it isn’t too hard to guess which side is outshouting the other.

It has been two weeks since the US military announced it would release AP photographer Bilal Hussein, who was held by the military for two years without charges. The military had launched vague terrorism accusations at the journalist but provided no evidence for this — instead it released anonymous leaks to various right-wing partisan bloggers (led by Michelle Malkin). Unfortunately, these bloggers went to every extreme in amplifying these accusations with multiple posts saying the AP was associated with terrorists.

But after Hussein was ordered released (by an Iraqi judicial panel, with the US military saying, “he no longer presents an imperative threat to security”), many of those bloggers who had spent thousands of words smearing both him and the AP barely issued a peep. Those who gave brief statement refused to apologize and said that because Bilal was ordered released under an “amnesty law” (a law none of them read so could know nothing about its content) then it wasn’t proof of his innocence. But other than those few brief posts, only cricket chirping.

Eric Boehlert has a great article at Media Matters that gives a comprehensive background of the bloggers’ shameful reporting and their silence in the aftermath of his release. After reading it I couldn’t help but be depressed at the thought that these bloggers still have thousands of readers that are subjected to their writing. For some, there is no justice.

I am constantly astonished by how many bloggers out there do not provide basic contact info, i.e. a simple email address, on their blogs.

It’s absolutely silly. I mean, I would guess that most blogs are out there because they’re meant to be read, and I bet many bloggers dream of having huge audiences. Why then, are you hindering yourself by not providing an effective way for your readership to contact you?

For instance, I am an avid news tipper. If I’m reading something that I think will fit into your niche, I’ll actually take a few moments to drop you an email and point you to it. There have been dozens of times when I’ve wanted to provide a news tip to a blogger only to not be able to find his contact info.

One could say that this is one of my main blogging pet peeves.