Bloggasm

That’s the question I try to answer in a blog post I wrote for Media Shift. Go over and read it.

…she feels the need to defend Sarah Palin from US Weekly. This is….what’s that phrase Malkin likes to use?… snort worthy.

A PR person just emailed me this new anti-Obama ad that’s supposedly going to start running in swing states from a group that calls itself Our Country Deserves Better PAC. It looks like the Republicans have decided that Clinton voters are a key weakness for the candidate and they’re going to try to twist the knife as much as possible.

The dumbest quote from the ad: “He says he’ll play nicey nice with Islamic militants who want to kill Americans at home and abroad.” Much of what the woman in the ad says are recycled Republican talking points that wore thin 6 months ago (Rezco, Obama is an Islamoterrorist, flip flopper), but the Clinton footage certainly packs a punch.

Of course there is no shortage of prominent Republicans that have said bad things about McCain; Will Democrats start running audio footage of James Dobson bashing McCain in order to chip away at his Christian base?

I’ll believe it when I see it. I’m somewhat skeptical that he’ll forgo some kind of major media appearance in favor of a carpet bomb announcement of his future vice president.

When he was George Bush’s political adviser, many journalists complained that Karl Rove typically refused to talk to the media, instead choosing to stay out of the spotlight. Now that he’s no longer working for the president, the media can’t get enough of him, no matter how many conflicts of interests he may have.

These days, Rove has regular gigs with Fox News, the Wall Street Journal and Newsweek, often providing “analysis” on the presidential campaigns. But as Salon documents at length, those outlets are refusing to disclose several conflicts, including Rove’s informal advising of John McCain’s campaign and the consulting firm he heads that distributes electoral maps. I say “refusing” because they’ve been aware of these criticisms for weeks.

“After Rove had made 14 appearances on Fox News, Politico reported that soon after donating to McCain’s campaign, Rove ‘had a private conversation with the senator,’” writes Salon. “A top McCain advisor also told the paper that Rove and Bush-Cheney ‘04 campaign manager Ken Mehlman were ‘informally advising the campaign.’”

Yes, the cable news landscape is littered with former political advisers, though for the most part their political affiliations are disclosed. Failures to inform viewers of conflicts of interest have become a rampant problem in the industry, as we saw with the recent NY Times “military analyst” story.

It’s time for Rove to choose: Does he want to be a pundit or a political strategist? And since he long-ago proved that he has no qualms with violating ethics, it’s time for these news outlets to choose for him.

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.