Tag: Daily Kos

What it comes down to is this: I’m sick of Daily Kos meta. I’m an issues guy, and I know that most of you are issues people, but the meta bullshit is driving us away from what most interests us. It’s driving us away from what we do best.

Crossposted at Daily Kos

Patrick Chappatte, International Herald Tribune, Buy this cartoon

:: ::

Warning: This pictorial version of Daily Kos’ history has not as yet been reviewed or approved by our Community Director Lord Protector, Meteor Blades.  Were he to look it over, I have no doubt he would heartily agree with its content.

It is, as we say in the blogging world, subject to revisionist interpretations.  Opinions are not in short supply on this blog.

History is always written by the winners.  Native Americans know it, African Americans know it, Palestinians know it, working class people in every country in this world know it, every gay man or woman who has ever lived knows it.  Everyone who has ever been beaten into submission by the power of armies, by the power of economic might, by the power of entrenched religion, entrenched conformity, entrenched bigotry, entrenched conservative ideology knows it . . .  

History is always written by the winners. When two cultures clash, the loser is obliterated, and the winner writes the history books, books which glorify their own cause and disparage the conquered foe.  As Napoleon once said, ‘What is history, but a fable agreed upon?’

And what is Obama’s healthcare reform bill, but a fable agreed upon?  

By Reid.  By Pelosi.  By the Democrats.  By the reciters of fables at Daily Kos.  Check out the recommended Fable List there and behold all of the happy endings.  Hansel and Gretel follow the trail of crumbs to incremental change and everyone lives happily ever after.  Snow White ate the Poison Option and fell into a purist coma, but Prince Charming kissed her and she awoke in beautiful Healthcare Reform Land, where everyone, even the Three Bears and Three Little Pigs and Rumpelstiltskin and Pinocchio and most of the Seven Dwarfs got to take a first step towards having affordable health insurance.

That’s one small step for the Three Bears and their friends, one giant leap for the health insurance industry.

Triangulation Base here, the Vulture has landed.

But I digress . . .

It doesn’t matter when you check that place out, they’re always off to see the Wizard. Everyone is dancing down the Yellow Brick Road to the Emerald City of More and Better Democrats, where Steny the Tin Man will get a heart, Harry the Cowardly Lion will get courage, and Barack the Scarecrow will finally get a fucking brain. Whatever you do, don’t tell them they’re on a Yellow Brick Road to nowhere, the big bad wolves of Kos Communications Inc. will huff and puff and blow your house down, clean slate or not.            

Happy endings at Daily Fables are only for the true and faithful believers in Humpty Dumpty.   I’m not sure what they’ll do when Humpty falls off that Wall of Centrism, and all of Rahm’s horses and all of Rahm’s men can’t put him back together again, but if their past attitudes are any indication, far left fringe Naderites, Docudharma deadenders, radical Teabagger empowering firedogging firedoggers, Cindy Sheehan worshipping attention whore purists, and instant gratification political neophytes like us will get the blame.

Time Magazine, or at least its online edition, seeks to understand why Google seems to love highlighting a particular “news source” in its search results.  The very subtle, but nonetheless evident message implanted within the article is that search engine algorithms might have the same biases and favoritism embedded into them as any other corporation who owns or has partnership with other media companies.  I know that by monitoring IP addresses that visit my site by use of a tracker I frequently notice when Google bot sweeps periodically come through to make a note of and reference recently posted columns I have written.   It isn’t very long after that before I notice that traffic has been directed to my site as a result.   However, let me say that I do make a concerted effort to write something unique and meaningful, qualities which are in short supply when effort is not rewarded by much in the way of money.

If you type the name of a celebrity – say, Angelina Jolie – into Google News, chances are somewhere in the top five results you’ll get a story from Examiner.com. This is particularly true if the celebrity is in the news that day. For early December that means searches for Tiger Woods, Sandra Bullock and Weezer on Google News consistently brought up Examiner.com stories in the topmost results. And in those stories, by the way, there was very little actual news.

Absolutely.   The only currently existing model available to those who blog for pay is centered around advertising revenue as the most important variable of all.   Instead of providing a unique perspective on the news, instead one gets a bare minimum of original content and a whole e-farm’s worth of hyper-linking and search engine keyword baiting.   It needs to be noted, of course, that Examiner.com is not the only site out there using a similar strategy to press a similar agenda.   But in that regard, it is not much different to any kind of freelance work which promises sporadic assignments, minimal pay, few benefits, and no real job security.   The signer of the paychecks or distributor of funds to the PayPal account still holds most of the cards at the table.   In a field where so many are fighting to be heard and where competition is fierce and often cutthroat, employers get utterly inundated with prospective writers and many of them have the ego and the swagger but none of the talent to back it up.   Proceeding directly for the easy sell and the low hanging fruit has padded profits but has rarely advanced a civic discourse or issue evolution.    

They also have very little news value. Generally, an Examiner.com news story is a compendium of tidbits culled from other websites, neither advancing the story nor bringing any insight (a description, it should be noted, that can be just as fairly applied to many offerings of more mainstream media). Most Examiners are not journalists, and their prose is not edited. CEO Rick Blair, who helped launch AOL’s Digital Cities, an earlier attempt at a local-news network, calls them “pro-am” – more professional than bloggers, but more amateur than most reporters. You might also call them traffic hounds: because their remuneration is set by, among other things, the number of people who click on their stories, Examiners will often piggyback on hot news, or oft-searched people. The Angelina Jolie story, from a celebrity-fitness and -health Examiner, discussed Jolie and husband Brad Pitt’s recent night out at a movie premiere and assessed their health by their appearance.

Put this way, here is a decent enough description of most collaborative blogs.   However, before one buys into this description hook, line, and sinker without taking into account the underlying intent it must be added that Daily Kos was described by Time as one of its “Most Overrated Blogs of 2009” in very searing language.

It wrote,

Markos Moulitsas – alias “Kos” – created Daily Kos in 2002, a time he describes as “dark days when an oppressive and war-crazed administration suppressed all dissent as unpatriotic and treasonous.” Be careful what you wish for. With the Bush years now just a memory, Kos’s blog has lost its mission, and its increasingly rudderless posts read like talking points from the Democratic National Committee.

Easy for you to say, Time.   Dear pot, kindly meet kettle.

Returning to my original point, at the beginning of this post, I referenced an article written to encourage a spirit of full disclosure, no matter how stealthy proposed.   I would be similarly remiss if I did not state that I, too, am a reporter for Examiner.com.   Yet, I note, however, that in nearly a month of writing for it I have made under $20 for my efforts, even though my pieces usually attract a respectable audience that frequently exceeds the average number of hits which typify the typical DC Politics Examiner.  I don’t run away from controversy in that which I write, but neither do I seek to provoke without backing up my points, buttressing my argument, and taking into account the inevitable counter-arguments of my opponents.   Still, one simply can’t keep up with those who dispense romance advice, bicycle repair, child rearing tricks, and pet psychic services.   Nor can I keep up with the barrage of ultimately meaningless drivel that might be the opiate of the masses but tends to put me into an opium-based sleep.   I do not expect to make much out of any of what I do but I will say that I seek to strategically position and my postings to get maximum exposure.   I am no different from many of you reading this, I daresay.  

So why does Examiner.com’s fairly superficial posts on the big stories of the day end up so often near the front of Google’s news queue? “It’s not a trick,” says Blair. “We have almost 25,000 writers posting 3,000 original articles per day.” Examiners take seminars on writing headlines, writing in the third person and making full use of social media, all of which are Google manna. But Blair thinks it’s mostly the scale of the operation that makes Examiner.com articles so attractive to search engines, from which more than half of the site’s traffic comes. That is, by stocking the lake with so many fish every day Examiner.com increases the chances the Google trawlers will haul one of theirs up.

And here we have a perfect example of why an unholy combination of made up celebrities, made up drama, and manufactured crises for the sake of readership threaten to choke out everything wholly decent.   Weeds are on the verge of taking over the garden.   Or, as Howard Beale would say, “And woe is us! We’re in a lot of trouble!”   Speak softly, though, because to some extent we’ve already been handcuffed by the almighty dollar and may always be.   Some realities go well beyond our poor power to add or detract.

In a coy final note, the Time article concludes,

The goal of all these companies, eventually, is to snare local advertising, a $141 billion market that, according to Blair, has been left largely untapped by the Internet.  Examiner.com will start rolling out ad packages in the next few months, and will hit up its network for leads.

In the meantime, these pro-am armies are giving the big media companies plenty to worry about. The mainstream media’s news-harvesting machines are no match for a swarm of local locusts buzzing over the same crop. And Big Media is starting to take notice. CNN, which already uses a lot of crowdsourced material with its ireport arm, just invested in another local outfit, outside.in. Perhaps the news giant figures that if everybody’s going to be a reporter, they might as well work for CNN.

The note is winking and coy because Time is, after all, owned by CNN.   I, too, have been an iReporter for CNN, for the same reasons I write at Examiner.com.   I don’t make a dime out of it, but I do get my name out in the hope that someone, somewhere, is listening, reading, and contemplating.   My hope, of course, is that at least with my post there will be an alternative, thought-provoking voice in the middle of all the fluff and unsubstantial content.   Perhaps that is what we all wish for when we put our fingers to our keyboards and begin typing or begin synching up our digital cameras.  We want to be better than that which we just finished reading or want to be provide a better analysis than a pundit who makes thousands upon thousands of dollars a year to sound supremely ignorant.   Yet, we might also need to contemplate our current realities before we get caught up on our own narratives.  Recall Network once more.

You get up on your little twenty-one inch screen and howl about America and democracy. There is no America. There is no democracy. There is only IBM and ITT and AT&T and DuPont, Dow, Union Carbide, and Exxon. Those are the nations of the world today.

We no longer live in a world of nations and ideologies, Mr. Beale. The world is a college of corporations, inexorably determined by the immutable bylaws of business. The world is a business, Mr. Beale. It has been since man crawled out of the slime. And our children will live, Mr. Beale, to see that perfect world in which there’s no war or famine, oppression or brutality — one vast and ecumenical holding company, for whom all men will work to serve a common profit, in which all men will hold a share of stock, all necessities provided, all anxieties tranquilized, all boredom amused.  

If there’s still enough time, if it’s not too late, if you haven’t given up, if you can find the words, if you haven’t run out of words, if you haven’t been silenced, banned, exiled because too many Obamabots profusely supportive admirers of Barack at GOS and other bizarre locations don’t want to hear the truth, don’t want to deal with it, can’t bear to look at it, won’t acknowledge it because he is their last refuge, their final sanctuary, the only source of hope they have left in this betrayed wreck of a country.            

How many times do they have to see Obama stumble down the side of that Misty Moderate Mountain before these people realize he’s not the Moses of the Democratic Party, before they finally understand he’s not leading us to the Promised Land, he’s just plunging us deeper into the Valley of Centrism Death, where lies and self-delusion reign and the truth is never heard.  It shouldn’t be so hard for them to figure out how this is all going to end if progressives back down again, if we take one for the team again, if we let K Street’s bought and paid for hacks pass this healthcare “reform” atrocity.  

You don’t have to walk and crawl on six crooked highways for the rest of your life to know where we’ve been and where we’re going next, an IQ of 50 and two functioning eyes are all that’s necessary to confirm that those crooked highways are just an endless corporate tollway to nowhere and that it’s our job to keep paying for the trip.  

Hey guys –

So I understand that some of you are kind of worried about the GBCW that I posted on Dkos yesterday (well, early this morning), and I’ve had a few requests from DD folks to just delete that diary, take a break from The Kos, and then come back when I’m ready.

Yeah. I’m not going to do that. Here’s why:

When I deleted last night’s rant, it was really just the final straw for me. I cried a lot but, today, I don’t regret my decision at all. It was a good, solid decision for me to make, actually, and it frees me up to explore other ways that I can write without all the name-calling bullshit attached to it. I mean, I’d like to start posting here regularly, and maybe a few other places, too. And I’ll probably start up my own website at some point.

I’m 40, ya know? I’m too old for that kind of drama. I don’t want it anymore.

I wasn’t sure Politico could stoop any lower than it did when it published seven highly subjective (to put it lightly) meta-narratives that the Obama Administration supposedly did not want to become public knowledge.   Widely ridiculed, the column caused the periodical’s credibility to take a severe hit, and unfortunately its turn towards right-wing distortion in opposition to fact seems to have continued.   While none of us knows for sure what goes on behind closed doors, in true Politico style if I had to guess before I knew all the facts, I’d conclude that someone must be pushing the notion that it must incorporate more content that appeals directly to conservatives into each daily edition.  Right-wing points of view have a place, but sloppy logic never does.

I do read Politico on a daily basis, if only to see media framing devices at work, and so yesterday I was incensed, to say nothing of dismayed to note that apologizing for rape apologists appears to be no big deal.   Since the media is comprised of human frailties, it frequently mirrors the frustrations and the flaws of its creators.   For example, an article published this week took Senator Al Franken to task for not taking questions from reporters and instead directing them to his own public relations manager.   Exclusive stories and one-on-one scoops are the Holy Grails of the profession and with the continued decline of the industry, so one can understand easily why disappointment and resentment might build if one of the most colorful and newest Senators might wish to refuse to play ball.

Politico portrayed the decision to avoid contact with the media as evasive and obstructionist by implying that the Junior Senator from Minnesota was too staff-driven and not the soundbyte machine that some had hoped he would become once finally sworn in to take his seat.   That the Fourth Estate would be surprised by his desire and strategy to be kept on a deliberately short leash strikes me as disingenuous at best.   Candidate Franken wisely restrained himself from drawing too much undue attention during the campaign and during the exhaustive recount process that immediately followed last year’s election made only short, safe statements while keeping largely out of sight until the situation was resolved.   This was a carefully crafted design that did him well before and abandoning it now doesn’t make much sense.   Once established and having achieved some degree of seniority, Franken will have the freedom to branch out and speak his mind without fear of serious backlash or threat of losing his seat, but for the moment the most sensible solution is to for him to learn the ropes and avoid stepping on toes in the process.        

The column critical of Franken’s media management style took special effort to note that the Minnesota senator is one of only a very small number of elected representatives who do not stand directly at the podium to make statements to the press or undergo question and answer sessions.   Reading between the lines, the column implied that perhaps the Senator had something to hide or was afraid of letting his true self and true concerns shine through.   It cited an anecdote where Franken very nearly answered a reporter’s questions before deciding instead to pass the inquiry along to his communications director.   The disappointment and let down inherent in the entire column was clearly palpable and I have to say that while a part of me wished also for more candor from him, I also understood the Senator’s dilemma and did not disagree with his choice of resolution.  

Returning to the column referenced in the beginning of this post, I cite a particularly revealing segment to reveal a better understanding of the full picture.

In a chamber where relationship-building is seen as critical, some GOP senators question whether Franken’s handling of the amendment could damage his ability to work across the aisle. Soon after Tennessee GOP Sens. Bob Corker and Lamar Alexander co-wrote an op-ed in a local newspaper defending their votes against the Franken measure, the Minnesota Democrat confronted each senator separately to dispute their column – and grew particularly angry in a tense exchange with Corker.

People familiar with the Corker exchange say it was heated and ended abruptly – a sharp departure from the norm on the usually clubby Senate floor.

As rendered, the entire story reeks of false concern and shame.  It is certainly true that the Senate as an entity is an elite club where partisan differences are often merely for show and bi-partisan friendships help grease the wheels of legislation, but a reliance on deep background sources to make a damning point always raises alarm bells to me.   Nebulously defined sources of information remind one of celebrity gossip more than hard news.   Some outlets, it needs to be mentioned, won’t even use anonymous sources because they leave a column’s veracity quite understandably open to question.  Without credibility, a news article reads as fiction, defeating its entire purpose for existing.  

Here is what actually happened.   Here is how Senator Franken dared to create this supposed maelstrom of ill-will and resulting uncouth broach of decorum.   In particular, note the first sentence of the paragraph and how it prefaces what follows afterward.

Franken, who declined to be interviewed, has said previously that the measure was inspired by the story of former KBR employee Jamie Leigh Jones, who alleges that she was drugged, beaten and gang-raped at age 19 when stationed in Baghdad. She fought the arbitration clause in her contract, and in September the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit ruled that Jones’s sexual assault allegations were not “related to” her employment, allowing her to proceed in court. KBR is fighting the ruling.  

Yes, how dare Senator Franken not add a few choice bon mots to flesh out the interpretation of a contemptible act that one would think speaks quite sufficiently for itself.   As for the he said/he said conflict, we are told that it didn’t end up with F-bombs being dropped or with personal attacks being levied on the floor of the chamber itself, quite unlike the conduct of certain other Senators from a party that shall remain unspecified.   The left-wing blogosphere has become a convenient target for Republicans and Trusted Media Outlets™, particularly if and when they get thoroughly bored with blowing spit balls at each other.   People familiar with the exchange say their anger was heated and ended abruptly—a sharp departure from the norm.

“I don’t know what his motivation was for taking us on, but I would hope that we won’t see a lot of Daily Kos-inspired amendments in the future coming from him,” said South Dakota Sen. John Thune, No. 4 in the Senate Republican leadership. “I think hopefully he’ll settle down and do kind of the serious work of legislating that’s important to Minnesota.”

Silly me.   I wasn’t aware that the act of rape or violence were a bipartisan matter that might be best resolved by compromise.  Could we say that a rape only traumatizes 3/5ths of a person while we’re at it?  Seems fair enough to me.  You really confuse me, Senator Thune.   You remind me of the mainstream media and its attitude towards little old us out here in the blog realm.  First you say that the blogosphere isn’t an objective source of news or information and is of no real consequence, but then you throw darts at us as though you were really paying attention all the time.   One can’t be on two sides of an issue at once, even though as a politician I’m sure you’d like to present that concept.   One can be either one way or the other, but not both simultaneously.

[Franken] Aides point out that despite attacks on Republicans by liberal commentators like Rachel Maddow and Keith Olbermann and on blogs such as Daily Kos, Franken never appeared on any of the shows or on the blogs to make a partisan argument about the matter, saying that the senator turned down entreaties to do so. Also, they point to the 10 Republicans who voted for the amendment as proof that it wasn’t a partisan measure.

Yet again, we are encouraged to believe that Senator Franken is somehow cowardly for not going on the defensive or bolstering his claims by directly speaking out in favor of them.   While the blogs and the increasingly ravenous media love a contentious argument, the Minnesota Senator is wise to not draw undo attention to himself.   Those who hog the spotlight risk taking the focus off of the reform measure that desperately need to be enacted and serve as an unnecessary distraction.   One person is a much easier target than a collective group of people with similar goals.   In addition to being common sense, this is also Public Relations 101 and the fact that Politico is either unaware of it or instead determined to provoke an exchange reveals that a once noble profession acts increasingly like a drowning man.   Ignore those who are unhappily going down with the ship, because their spite and desperation reveals everything about them and almost nothing about us.

Ho now diarist on the Daily Kos rec list, asking that the boycott either be explained or abandoned.

Really? You have reasonable questions, and I’ll give you a reasonable response: We want better. And no more politically expedient decision-making. Clear. And simple.

There’s another rec listed diary there in which progressives are chastised for … undermining Obama. I’m thinking the ones undermined wholesale would be we lowly citizens, the LBGT community, our dead and injured soldiers, orphaned Iraqis, drowning polar bears et al. There’s a whole list of the “undermined” and Obama and Dems aren’t on it.

The writer fields this question: just HOW childish and spoiled and selfish can so-called progressive be?

A double REALLY?

^{cross-posted at Daily Kos and at firedoglake}