Dana Blankenhorn

They Don't Understand (Perhaps They Never Will)

Having followed the political blogosphere for 5 years, and the Internet medium for 25, I really expected that by this point the media would be more integrated than it is.

After all, the Internet Generation is now grown. My two kids can't remember a time before the Internet. They have had broadband access in their rooms since she was 10 and he was 7. Today he never watches TV, and her TV-watching is usually accompanied by the clicking of her keyboard.

The Internet is not just integrated into their lives. It is their lives. It is the medium of their lives.

Their reality is also the reality for tens of millions of others. Not just old fogies like me. I grew up with TV and, while I now work exclusively online I'm more like a 1950s sitcom writer, translating the vocabulary of what I know into where I am.

So you would expect that, by this time, the old medium would have a fine-grained understanding of the new, and be able to bring the best of it along into the new age.

Nope. Not at all.

The Edwards Obsession

I have made an important decision.

I hate The Huffington Post. And you should too.

It's this Edwards obsession that really did it to me.

OK. I get it. John Edwards had sex with a lady, not his wife, in 2006, before he relaunched his campaign. Maybe he fathered a kid.

Frankly, big whoop.

Who is John Edwards, right now? Is he a public official? Is he even a candidate for anything? No.

Yet the bloggers of the HuffPo go on-and-on, making stuff up out of ifs and whats. Tearing their hair, rending their garments. Doing all the Republicans' work for them. Even tearing down other liberal sites in the process, for the sin of not obsessing like they do. Then complaining that the Republicans are doing this to them, when in fact they're doing it to themselves.

The Money To Do Online Journalism

Think of this as Volume 11, Number 30 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.

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We're on the verge of a breakthrough in journalism. A breakthrough in business models.

Publishers like ZDNet, where I now work, have found some success with incentive programs based on pageviews. They have good online publishing systems and ad staffs which can fill the corners of an online page with money-producing ads. By putting the two together, everyone can make a living.

Critics will note it can be tweaked a bit. I get a lot more traffic from trollbait than from innovative, interview-driven stuff, so when I'm hungry I go with the trollbait. Over time readers will notice, and it's up to the publisher to tweak their financial incentives to keep me on the straight-and-narrow.

If we could simply take this model into local news markets, we'd have enough money to pay for covering all those events and scandals which right now aren't being covered. The zoning games played with developers. The small corruptions of the local school boards. The side deals done to lure businesses to town. An open meeting is closed if there's no one there taking notes.

In his print column for July 28 Jonathan Alter of Newsweek (left) weeps bitter tears over this. "Bloggers rarely pick up the phone or go interview the middle-level bureaucrats who know the good stuff," he writes.

I know why. It doesn't pay.

This has always been true. You know how much of a print newspaper's budget goes to editorial? (This is also true for journals like Newsweek, by the way.)

8%!

That's all the writers, all the editors, the whole art department, the secretaries, the research people, everything. Over 90% of a newspaper's income goes elsewhere -- to the ad staff, to the printer, to the delivery guys, to the executive suite, to the bottom line. That's all you're really worth, Alter  -- a little piece of that 8%.

So there is plenty of room to create incentives for news-gathering. Advertising isn't disappearing. It's simply changing media -- from print to online. And newspapers simply aren't competing for that dollar. Because of attitudes like Alter's, which are divorced from the market.

The problem is this assumption of "authority" which positively oozes out of Alter's pores, and those of every other so-called journalist in this country. That's something your employer earns for you, and you try very hard not to toss away. It's a loan, not a grant, which comes from the market, not from God.

So here's the secret to making money online, doing real journalism, in 2008.

The Unstoppable Power of Communication

The most powerful force in the world is communication.

This medium brings more of it within reach of more people than any medium has before. (Pictured, the capital of Rwanda.)

When George W. Bush was in Africa this week reporters were astounded by the number of people there who supported Barack Obama, who seemed to know all about him.

And why not? Africa is filled with Internet cafes. Africans don't have to listen hopefully for a word from the BBC anymore. They can pick up The New York Times.

Recently I mentioned the idea that Obama should go to Kenya and try to sort out the growing crisis there. Turns out he's been there, via radio. He made a statement and took questions at the end of last month. This has not yet had an impact, as the struggle has morphed into a tribe-on-tribe war over land. But he was there, and could be again, at any time.

It's not just politics where this medium is making enormous change. It's in every facet of life. The turnaround in Rwanda is being driven as much by information as anything else. The use of sympathy to reach markets, and the opening of an online stock exchange,  is enabling capital to reach all of East Africa. Trouble in Kenya can now quickly move capital to Rwanda and vice versa. Rapid capital flows can create a gigantic incentive to make peace.

Have You Heard The Good News About Pakistan?

Pakistan has recently taken on the role Americans once reserved for Iraq, Afghanistan, Serbia, Iran, and (before that) the Soviet Union.

It's the unknowable, foreign, other, dangerous in the extreme. It frightens the children. It's meant to.

We're told, for instance, that Pakistan harbors Al Qaeda, its government is unstable and autocratic. It's the world's most dangerous place.

Maybe. But when you see Pakistan through Pakistani eyes, as it is my privilege to do, it's not so black-and-white.

My friend Tariq Mustafa IM'ed me from Karachi this morning with some of the good news:

• Every corporation in the Karachi area filed their tax returns electronically for 2007. I'll bet you money that's not true in Georgia. Many companies here haven't even started in on their returns.
• A job board launched by two Pakistani emigrants to Stanford now powers some of the biggest blogs in the valley. Silicon Valley, that is.
• oDesk is illustrating their outsourcing capabilities by showing off opportunities in Pakistan.

The Big Lies of Super Tuesday

The media is telling sweet little lies about what happened in the Tuesday primaries and where we go from here.

The lies, briefly, are:

1. The continuation of a nomination battle among Democrats is a big advantage for Republicans.
2. Republicans are uniting behind John McCain.
3. SuperDelegates have already been committed.

Why tell these lies? Mainly for dramatic effect. If people think November's results are essentially baked-into the system, they might change the channel. And you can't have them changing the channel.  (Note: Change the Channel. Anything is better than Chris Matthews.)

So let's fisk these lies quickly and easily:

The Media Narrative Is Not The Only One

One of the ongoing complaints of liberal bloggers is the "media narrative," by which they mean TV coverage of politics.

They're right. The coverage is execrable. It is horrible. It is terrible. It is worthless. It is beyond worthless -- it is malicious and evil and everyone involved should be fired. OK?

But that's how they roll. That's the only way they know how to roll. The present media environment was set in 1968, and has remained stuck in the Nixon Thesis ever since. It is part of the problem, by definition. Why belabor the point?

Fact is, this was true of the dominant media of the 1960s, as seen by conservatives. Movies and radio, by which we then meant music, were the primary enemies of the neo-conservatives. Their unfairness toward conservative positions, as defined by conservatives themselves, put a chip on their collective shoulders which remains firmly in place.

In response conservatives built their own, separate media universe. Republican music (country and gospel), Republican TV (Fox, CBN, etc.), Republican newspapers (Wall Street Journal, New York Post, etc.), Republican films and ethical universes, etc. etc. etc. Everything outside was automatically anathema, and the real story of this season is how those media are now turning on one another, leaving their readers and viewers confused, angry, ready to hear something else.

Today's media narrative is the natural response to that worldview holding for 40 years, the entire career lifetime of virtually everyone who is anyone in the media universe. TV networks either endorse that view or attempt to coddle it. So-called liberals like Chris Matthews are anything-but -- they are co-dependents.

We get it.

Glenn Greenwald at Salon offers yet-another example today. It's a national tracking poll from Rasmussen Reports which, according to Greenwald, shows Edwards with the race's momentum.  Sounds great...but.

Ritalin Wars Do Damage

One of the more interesting news items to hit our house recently was that MRIs confirm how ADHD impacts brain development.

Areas of the brain which are taught in kindergarten, those involved in social rules and cues, develop slowly. Areas of the brain dealing with higher functions develop normally.

This doesn't just explain the physiology of ADHD, but may also explain some of our social pathologies toward it. The idea of changing when things are taught is anathema to many people. ADHD kids are taught things they can't learn, then blamed later for having failed to learn them.

Unfortunately this isn't how the news was read by readers of Judith Warner (right) in The New York Times.  Let kids be kids, and they'll grow out of it, reared its ugly head, " a nation of boys drugged into conformity by knee-jerk liberal school systems."

Pl-ease!

You can't "let ADHD kids be kids," in that you can't just let them run around loose, unmanaged, and expect them to learn anything. You have to find some way to give them structure, to make them sit, before they can learn. And once they do sit, they learn faster than other kids, they hyper-focus and can become better at what interests them. The sooner you can start this process, the sooner strengths can be recognized and rewarded.

In my own case, knowing about my ADHD might have been the best medicine, only I wasn't given it. Instead, I was sent to a psychiatrist who knew nothing of the condition and an offer of Ritalin was rejected by my mother, who said  "you're not going to put my kid on drugs."

The result was a pretty hellish childhood, at least from the point of view of my own mind, one which I've only forgiven my parents for in the last decade, since I learned the cause of my trouble. Instead of being given help I was sent to a Baptist youth camp upstate, which taught Revelations until it came out of my ears, complete with movies. Step out of line and you'll fry in hell, they said, and here's what it will look like. Those images still inform my nightmares and leave me more than a little skeptical about churches and God, even though I know such communities can help whether or not you believe the doctrine.

The 1967 Game: Who's Agnew Now?

As a generational crisis comes on, and people en masse switch sides, the quality they most want to see is fearlessness.

Ironically it's at these times that fearlessness is in shortest supply.

During the last such crisis, in the late 1960s, it was George Wallace who embodied fearlessness for the Right. This was seen as so vital in holding the new coalition together that Nixon institutionalized his role in the form of Spiro Agnew.

When the scales fell from the eyes of former Democrats in the Long Island suburbs, in the latter years of Lyndon Johnson, it was Wallace whom they first turned to. George C. Wallace (I remember how they liked to put the middle initial in), with his red meat rhetoric, with his disdain for the intellectuals, and yes with his racism.

There is, at times like this, a crying need among new recruits to a political cause for revenge, the equivalent of le guillotine. Wallace delivered that. And then Agnew delivered that. It was Agnew's rhetoric which solidified these former Democrats as lifelong Republicans. They walked the Wallace bridge to Agnew, then to Nixon, then to Reagan, then to Bush.

The same sort of thing is needed today. I know that Digby and John Aravosis and Duncan Black would be angry to be compared with Wallace, because in their politics they are nothing like him, but they are performing that same historic role. Theirs is the red meat rhetoric that former conservatives are using as a bridge to liberalism. They, and other liberal bloggers like Cliff Schechter, are telling it like it is, unafraid, fearlessly. They are, in a rhetorical sense, sticking the opponents' faces in it and mashing down hard. They are going after the press and they are going after the think tanks just as hard as Wallace went after the academy. They are treating the war bloggers like the dirty fucking hippies they in fact are, at least in the context of 2007. (The polite term for these losers are the worst persons in the world.)

This sort of thing is essential in a process of structural political change. This kind of fearless rhetoric won't make you President, but it will allow the next President to ride a rising tide, one based on heart as much as head.

You can see why ambitious politicians would not want this role. Right now only Dennis Kucinich seems really hot to take it on. But Democrats don't want Kucinich. He ran in 2004 to wild laughter -- he actually used the campaign to find a wife --  and the political career of Dennis the Menace has more baggage than the late Leona Helmsley.

The Net Don't Lie

One of the most common refrains of TV and newspaper journalism is that the Internet is filled with liars, with criminals, with people who hide their identities and do damage which older media, because they're vetted, can't do.

This is utter nonsense. It is pure sophistry.

First, there is no question whatever that the TV and newspaper industries are subject to corruption. The philosophical beliefs of media owners, for starters. And not just at Fox. Every newspaper owner has its politics, and this determines who gets hired, who gets promoted, who gets read.

There is another form of corruption in TV and newspaper journalism, one which is seldom discussed openly. This lies in the nature of their function. The Washington press corps is a small, self-contained village, with no more relation to the real America than any other small, self-contained village. Yet because they talk to policymakers, pundits, and one another -- without any of the rest of us in the room -- Washington reporters assume they know the "true" story of what's going on. They don't. It's a hall of mirrors they live in, one which reflects their own assumptions endlessly, like the fun house at the end of Orson Welles' The Lady from Shanghai.

This is true on every beat, by the way. New York financial journalism is a village. Silicon Valley tech journalism is a village. Los Angeles entertainment journalism is a village. All villages impose a form of censorship on their members, a set of assumptions no one questions. I think I'm a much better tech reporter, writing from Atlanta, than I would be living in Santa Clara, because I'm outside the village.