Bloggasm

He just can’t seem to catch a break:

His first column for The New York Times’ op-ed page last Monday held a major attribution “error”, and then the paper’s public editor called his hiring a “mistake.” Now a key claim in William Kristol’s second column for the paper has been undercut by a news article at the Times a few hours later.

Maybe three times a charm? If a clock can be right two times a day, then I’m sure he can get something right in his third column.

While the media slices and dices last night’s primary, let’s not forget the fact that the serious “intellectual conservative” Bill Kristol, in his very first column for The New York Times, has already been found to be wrong on two major points.

Firstly, he misattributed a quote to conservative pundit Michelle Malkin, when in fact the quote came from Michael Medved.

Also, in the very first paragraph, Kristol said this:

Thank you, Senator Obama. You’ve defeated Senator Clinton in Iowa. It looks as if you’re about to beat her in New Hampshire. There will be no Clinton Restoration. A nation turns its grateful eyes to you.

If someone had come up to me and said, “Simon, what’s the best possible way Kristol could embarrass himself and epitomize the degree of his wrongness on just about any matter of significance?” I wouldn’t have been able to devise such an outcome.

As I said, this is his very first column. What more will come from this train wreck of a pundit in future months?

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Most journalists are contacted by nutballs on a regular basis. You’ll be sitting at your desk working on an article when your phone rings and the person on the other end tries to feed you the most filthy slime available with the hopes that you’ll write a story about it. Just the other week, I received a bizarre call from a professional body builder who’s suing both Pat Robertson and Jon Stewart (don’t ask, long story). He also happened to be suing a political candidate I had written a story on (that’s how the guy knew to contact me). Naturally, he wanted me to write a scathing article on the candidate and use him (the bodybuilder) as the source.

I gave the crazy guy lip service and promised to look into it and then hung up the phone with no intention of doing so. Because that’s what most journalists do with nutballs: we ignore them.

But every now and then one of these people somehow rises through the ether and gets covered by journalists for pretty much the sole reason that he or she is a nutball. Ann Coulter is, to me, the most notable example of this. Coulter receives media coverage almost entirely because she says hateful, controversial things. It can be argued that nearly all her income is the result of the free media coverage she gets when she says something crazy.

I mean, can anyone argue that she adds anything meaningful to political discussion? Just look at the title of her books; they’re becoming increasingly unimaginative in their antagonism. If Democrats Had Any Brains, They’d Be Republicans, the title of her most recent book, is so bland that it could only cause the deepest apathy when I see it. She’s not even trying to pretend that she wants to be taken seriously anymore.

I’m not the first journalist to point out that Coulter thrives on free media coverage. And I’m not the first journalist to appreciate the irony that we give her free media coverage when we publish articles complaining about her free media coverage. It’s a win win situation for her.

This is why I have made it a New Year’s resolution to never mention Ann Coulter again. Starting on Jan. 1, 2008, you’ll will never see her name on this blog. Nor will I ever write about her in any future articles. I don’t care what batshit crazy thing she says — no matter how badly I want to take the time to easily debunk her, I’ll refrain from doing so.

I’m hoping other bloggers and journalists will join me in this endeavor. If we can cut down on her media coverage considerably, then she will receive less free promotion for her books and columns. She will just be another nutball starving for attention.

So will you join me?

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I think any objective person could make a strong argument that the neocon columnist William Kristol had been the most catastrophically wrong when it came to writing about weapons of mass destruction in pre-invasion Iraq and Iran’s nuclear weapon program. That’s why many were astonished that Time Magazine had hired him as a “star columnist” about a year ago to contribute regularly to the magazine. As some pointed out, Time was basically rewarding him for being one of the lead cheerleaders in a war that had by then gone terribly sour.

Well, the news came recently that Time will not be renewing Kristol’s contract. It’s still unclear why this is happening, and it should be noted that it looks like Time will be bringing in an editor from the conservative magazine the National Review for a regular column.

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I have plenty of ideas for substantive posts but unfortunately little time on my hands this week. So instead I’ll point you to this scathing critique of the Washington Post’s media critic, Howard Kurtz.

Kurtz does sort of what I do here, only as a full time job and with a hell of a lot more readers. He critiques the media and specifically focuses on journalism. I’m not one of those people who obsesses over whether a journalist gives equal time to both conservatives and liberals, but Media Matters’s Eric Boehlert makes a good case that Kurtz ignores media stories that are harmful to conservatives while pumping up any minor media scandal reported by the conservative blogosphere.

I guess I should issue the caveat that I have read Kurtz’s book Spin Cycle and enjoyed it tremendously. Part of me wonders if this is his misguided attempt to battle the liberal-bias stereotype by giving undue weight to conservative bloggers (EDITORIALIZING: who are some of the worst fact-checkers on the internet). Either way, his credibility is certainly declining.

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Earlier this year, The New Republic published first-person accounts from an anonymous U.S. soldier in Iraq. The articles recounted gruesome — often crude — behavior from American service members, including the brutal killing of dogs and one instance of soldiers openly mocking a disfigured girl.

In July, a few media outlets — The Weekly Standard chief among them — began to doubt the veracity of the anonymous soldier’s claims. Editors from The New Republic, including Franklin Foer, initiated an aggressive investigation to test the accuracy of the stories. After several conservative bloggers raised doubts of the anonymous soldier’s existence, TNR managed to convince him to come out in the open, and he revealed himself to be Scott Thomas Beauchamp, a private in the United States Army and a member of Alpha Company, 1/18 Infantry, Second Brigade Combat Team, First Infantry Division.

After several months of investigating, TNR published a 14-page article detailing their findings. Many within the conservative blogosphere claimed immediately afterwards that the article admitted that Beauchamp had lied. “The maxi-mea culpa runs more than 10 pages and thousands and thousands of words (self-pitying, rationalizing, messenger-blaming),” wrote conservative Michelle Malkin, “but this is the belated bottom line: The Beauchamp stories are bullcrap.”

But is the article an admission of untruth? After reading it in its entirety, I can conclude that it’s nothing of the sort. In fact, Foer managed to find several soldiers to corroborate Beauchamp’s claims, and the editors only really unearthed one definite factual error.

This is not to say that all their questions were answered; there are several mysteries surrounding the soldier’s claims. But this is not because of TNR or Beauchamp — rather it’s the obfuscation by the U.S. Army that blocked the editors from fully investigating the articles.

While TNR tried continuously to get access to Beauchamp and others who could speak authoritatively on his situation, officials from the Army, many under the cloak of anonymity, began to leak carefully-selected information to highly partisan bloggers in order to smear the soldier’s character. The most notorious incidence of this was when excerpts of an interview transcript between TNR and Beauchamp were leaked to Matt Drudge. It was a very deliberate attempt to undermine the magazine’s investigation while at the same time defaming the soldier’s character.

Many bloggers — typically on the right — have accused TNR from stonewalling the public and not issuing an immediate retraction. But after reading that 14-page document, I can only wonder: “What choice did they have?” How can you release an immediate retraction if you have to go a full month just to speak to the writer in question? By pointing out how long it took TNR to publish this article from the time they were first alerted to the problem without at least acknowledging the magazine’s lack of access to information is engaging in intellectual dishonesty.

Did The New Republic make horrible editorial decisions in this matter? With the revelation that the person assigned to fact check Beauchamp’s work was his own wife, there’s no doubt in my mind that their was some shoddy journalism. But because of the questionable media tactics of the U.S. Army and the highly-partisan echo chamber of those rooting for TNR to be proven wrong, we may never know to what extent.

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SLIGHTLY RELATED: Compare TNR’s attempts to aggressively investigate Beauchamp’s articles to the terrible journalism practices of The National Review when they published outright falsehoods and then refused to investigate them after it was pointed out.

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I’m not a regular listener of talk radio, but I’ve always wondered why they use a one-person format. It seems like they could keep the conversation going more smoothly if a talk radio host had another host to talk to. To me, it just seems so unnatural for a guy to basically talk to himself for hours straight; the few times I have listened to the medium I noticed that there seems to be no flow.

I’m currently reading an article about right-wing radio that was originally published in The Atlantic Monthly. It’s written by David Foster Wallace and is titled “Host.” Now, I usually hate it when bloggers simply block quote huge chunks of text, but I really need to in this instance.

In this particular passage, Wallace describes the difficulty of being a talk radio host:

To appreciate these skills and some of the difficulties involved, you might wish to do an experiment. Try sitting alone in a room with a clock, turning on a tape recorder, and starting to speak into it. Speak about anything you want — with the proviso that your topic, and your opinions on it, must be of interest to some group of strangers who you imagine will be listening to the tape. Naturally, in order to be even minimally interesting, your remarks should be intelligible and their reasoning sequential — a listener will have to be able to follow the logic of what you’re saying — which means that you will have to know enough about your topic to organize your statements in a coherent way. (But you cannot do much of this organizing beforehand; it has to occur at the same time you’re speaking. Plus, ideally, what you’re saying should be not just comprehensible and interesting but compelling, stimulating, which means that your remarks have to provoke and sustain some kind of emotional reaction in the listeners, which in turn will require you to construct some kind of identifiable persona for yourself — your comments will need to strike the listener as coming from an actual human being, someone with a real personality and real feelings about whatever it is you’re discussing. And it gets even trickier: You’re trying to communicate in real time with someone you cannot see or hear responses from; and though you’re communicating in speech, your remarks cannot have any of the fragmentary repetitive, garbled qualities of real interhuman speech or speech’s ticcy pauses while you try to think of how to phrase what you want to say next. You’re also, of course, denied the physical inflections that are so much a part of spoken English — the facial expressions, changes in posture, and symphony of little gestures that accompany and buttress real talking. Everything unspoken about you, your topic, and how you feel about it has to be conveyed through pitch, volume, tone, and pacing. The pacing is especially important: it can’t be too slow, since that’s low-energy and dull, but it can’t be too rushed or it will sound like babbling. And so you have somehow to keep all these different imperatives and structures in mind at the same time, while also filling exactly, say, eleven minutes, with no dead air and no going over, such that at 10:46 you have wound things up neatly and are in a position to say, “KFI is the station with the most frequent traffic reports. Alan LaGreen is in the KFI Traffic Center” (which, to be honest, Mr. Z. sometimes leaves himself only three or even two seconds for and has to say extremely fast, which he can always do without a flub). So then, ready: go.

Excerpted from The New Kings of Nonfiction

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