RELATED: The Five’s Bob Beckel And Eric Bolling Go Off On Bill Maher For Tebow Christmas Tweet

Having to know and care about a young football player who is either good or bad, depending on what you read, was something of a shock when Tebow began to headline what feels like at least one segment an hour on most cable news channels, or popping up in headlines across blogs typically tailored to political media tastes. While the media’s Captains Obvious collectively began to ask things like “Why do we care about Tim Tebow’s religion?” I will readily admit I was still trying to figure out whether he was a freshman Tea Party Congressman or a controversial author, or maybe a Kardashian of some sort. By the time it became clear– whether I wanted it to be or not– who Tebow was and why sports fans got so excited about him from osmosis, it was still a complete mystery why he appeared to have taken over both Fox News and Bill Maher‘s Twitter account simultaneously, and why people kept abruptly kneeling to pray in videos and photos all over the place.

RELATED: Fox News’ Andy Levy On Bill Maher’s Tebow ‘Joke’: ‘Who Cares?’

But he had. Suddenly, Fox News was all over the harrowing tale of how some obnoxious teenagers were suspended from high school for “Tebowing” en masse instead of not crowding the hallway. The aforementioned Maher apparently spent his vacation time climbing up onto trees and Tebowing himself, perhaps to prove that God would not smite him for doing so after “joking” on Christmas Eve about Tebow’s defeat. Rick Perry declared himself the “Tim Tebow of the Iowa caucuses;” others argued that it was maybe Rep. Ron Paul, or Rep. Michele Bachmann (here is a chart to one can use to determine whether one is the “Tim Tebow of” something). “It’s hard to not see a bit of Sarah Palin in Tebow,” The Nation‘s David Zirin wrote on one of the many occasions he has gone after the quarterback. On another, he argued:

The right-wing strain of evangelical Christianity to which his family subscribes bleeds seamlessly into politics. Tebow proudly appeared, during the Super Bowl, in an anti-abortion commercial sponsored by Focus on the Family. FOF is an organization that believes in gay reparative therapy, ending women’s reproductive health, and organizing the far-right fringe of American politics.

The mockery of Tebow’s larger-than-life status on shows like SNL is natural and of a different breed than the attacks or exploitative praise coming from pundits. This is America and we have no sacred cows, with the exceptions of, maybe, Julia Roberts and Jon Stewart. That is why Hustler v. Falwell exists. And the more people believe in you– and people really believe in Tim Tebow– the larger the target on your back. But it is the artificial politicization of the player that appears on both sides of the political aisle to be hysterical and unfair. Tebow is a cultural icon, a pop confection– a symbol of the American “culture wars,” some may argue. But a political figure he is not.

NEXT PAGE: No, The Focus On The Family Ad Was Not Political

RELATED: Krauthammer Deadpans: Pearl Harbor Does Not ‘Do Justice To The Grandness Of Newt’

“The point is this is a self-inflicted attack,” Melber clarified.

“I think I would take issue with Oklahoma City,” host Alex Wagner interjected.

Earlier, Wagner asked MSNBC contributor Robert Traynham why the former Speaker of the House had made the comparison. “Newt Gingrich has always thought big. He’s always thought materialistically. He’s always thought about us versus them. It’s always about the enemy versus us. Good versus bad. That’s how he thinks.”

“Well, that’s delusional,” Wagner deduced.

Watch Melber’s remarks on Gingrich’s Pearl Harbor comments below via MSNBC:

RELATED: President Obama: ‘Ask Osama Bin Laden Whether I Engage In Appeasement’

Hayes also provided his insights on what President Obama has done right (health care reform), and wrong (the foreclosure crisis), in his term so far, and assessed the 2012 Republican presidential field.

Here’s part two of my interview with Chris Hayes: (still to come: Hayes answers questions from Up viewers, and find out what happens during Up‘s commercial breaks)

RELATED: MSNBC’s Up With Chris Hayes: A DVR Gem In The Making

As our own Frances Martel noted, upon the show’s mid-September debut, Up is “a DVR gem in the making” by virtue of its less-than-convenient airtimes (7am-9am on Saturdays, 8am-10am on Sundays), but for its fast-growing Twitter fans (self-dubbed “Uppers“), watching live is the only way to experience the show. While Up‘s ratings have been impressive (Up with Chris Hayes on Sunday (8a-10a) ranked No. 2 for the month with A25-54 (154,000 vs. 152,000), topping CNN Sunday Morning/State of the Union, Up is up 25% among A25-54 and 45% in total viewers compared to MSNBC in Nov. 2010), the response on the social media site is probably the best gauge, and driver, of Up‘s success. For the past several weeks, #Uppers has been a top trending Twitter hashtag nationally during the show’s broadcast. (More on those #Uppers to come, in a separate post.)

MSNBC President Phil Griffin is obviously among those dedicated fans. “I couldn’t be happier. It’s established itself far more quickly than I thought it would,” Griffin told me. “Chris has a really great sense of the show, of himself, of what he wants to do on that show, and it has succeeded right away.”

“What I hate about it is it’s another program I’ve got to watch,” Griffin continued, “but it’s such a smart show, a thoughtful show. It pulls together people from entirely different backgrounds, a different set of faces to the show…It goes beyond right and left, and really tries to get to the root of an issue in ways that I’m really impressed with.”

RELATED: MSNBC Gives Chris Hayes His Own Weekend Show

This isn’t just PR happy-talk from Griffin, either. He’s such a fan of the show that on a Friday night, rather than email me a canned quote about how happy he is with the show, Phil Griffin made a point of calling me, and gushed about the show for a good twenty minutes.

“Phil has been extremely supportive,” Hayes told me on Sunday, praising the amount of latitude Griffin has given him. “He has not micro-managed the show. He has given us feedback along the way, some of which I was skeptical of, and turned out to be right.”

For example, Hayes says that one early idea involved the use of pre-produced packages, an idea that Griffin didn’t like. “Phil didn’t say ‘Do not do that,’ he just said, ‘See how it works, I think spontaneity is going to be a key feature of the show,’ and I think he’s right. If we dumped out of a conversation to go to a 4-minute piece on tape, it would stall the momentum of the show.”

NEXT: Diverse Guests A Key To Show’s Success

He told his panel, “I just want to assure you at the outset I wasn’t trying to instruct anyone on how to handle themselves at that time in the South, or any parents.  And I think if I had been a parent in that situation at that time, I probably would have given the exact advice Herman Cain’s father gave his children.”

You would never know that from the way O’Donnell actually posed his question to Cain about his father’s advice.  His question, “Where do you think black people would be sitting on the bus today if Rosa Parks had followed your father`s advice?” was a clear indictment of that advice, and an accusation of racial cowardice. Whatever O’Donnell was trying to do, this is what he actually did, and he should have acknowledged that.

He also accused Cain of “sitting on the sidelines” during the Civil Rights movement, another clear implication of cowardice, and an obvious shaming tactic, although now he says, “I was trying to highlight, there was a moral question in front of you, history came to your doorstep.  Do you have regrets?  That`s all I was asking about.  Do you have any regrets about how you handled it?”

Had he actually asked that question, O’Donnell might have gotten an illuminating answer. As his panel pointed out, there are fair questions to be asked about Cain’s attitudes then, and now.

O’Donnell’s panel, meanwhile, fleshed out some of the contradictions of Herman Cain’s candidacy and personal story that illustrate just which opportunities O’Donnell missed by attacking Cain the way he did. Rev. Al Sharpton observed, “when he calls demonstrators in the ‘Occupy Wall Street movement,’ many of who are operating in the tradition of these same tradition of public demonstrations the civil rights movement did then and now, when he calls that un-American, I think that`s a legitimate question to ask him, because how can you call people un-American for assembling and protesting now and not then have considered those same tactics un-American then?”

Cain’s expressed gratitude for Rosa Parks and the Civil Rights movement also cuts against his view that people ought to “blame themselves” if they’re unemployed, or if they’re not rich, and also against the greater individualist narrative it illustrates. While Cain shouldn’t be shamed for following his father’s advice, and for working within the system to become a success, neither should he act like he did it all himself. The Civil Rights issue is a vivid example of collective action succeeding where “personal responsibility” could not, but the principle applies broadly.

Just as all Americans share in the building of successful businesses, so do those businesses share some responsibility for the inequity that has resulted. Every wealthy individual and corporation stood on our backs to get onto that ladder, and now that the rungs are all broken, fixing them is our problem alone. Cain’s 9-9-9 tax plan, for example, overwhelmingly shifts the burden of maintaining that ladder onto the folks who can’t even reach it.

O’Donnell also missed a great opportunity when he nonsensically asked Cain when it was that he “chose to be straight,” a showboating question with no real value. Instead, he could have asked Cain to square his gratitude for the Civil Rights movement (which, among other things, recognized the rights of black people to marry whoever they wanted to) with his opposition to marriage equality.

With the benefit of hindsight, O’Donnell told Melissa Harris-Perry that he didn’t “want to oversimplify the menu of choice that existed for black families in the South at that time,” although that’s exactly what he had done when he suggested that Cain “sat on the sidelines” rather than participating in demonstrations.

Harris-Perry wisely identified the problem with the manner of O’Donnell’s questions. She said that she was “squirming with discomfort” while watching the interview, and in explaining that discomfort, kindly employed the “royal we,” rather than point the finger directly at her colleague. “When we are not facing the lynchers’ noose,” she said,  ”when we are not facing that imminent violence, ourselves, we have to be extremely careful about even the implication that those who did not participate were necessarily cowards.”

She pointed out that “it was always simply a minority of African-Americans who were engaged at any point in the civil rights movement because it was a life and death question.”

The implication of O’Donnell’s questions, though, was that any black person who didn’t participate was a coward, when in fact, just being black in the Civil Rights era was an act of bravery. The cowards were the people they fought, the people who sought to preserve a legacy of oppression and murder. The cowards were those white people who had access to the levers of power, who knew that system was wrong, and who did nothing.

Harris-Perry also nailed the inherently racist double-standard embedded in the Civil Rights line of questioning. “I can`t remember anyone ever asking a white politician who is of the same age where they were during the sit ins. As you pointed out in your interview, there were white students who came down to be part of freedom summer. There were white allies at every point.”

“Yet we don’t consider it a litmus test for white politicians to have had enough moral courage, ethical vision and American value to have participated actively in the civil rights movement,” she continued, pointing out that military service is a common such litmus test. “I”m worried when we don’t ask white politicians about their patriotism related to how they have or have not stood up for racial equality.”

Sharpton and Taylor went on to criticize Cain over his “brainwashing” remarks, but Harris-Perry extended that criticism, that black people don’t think for themselves, that they vote as a herd, to some liberals, as well. “…you hear a lot on the left these days calling African-American
voters Obamabots, or Obama drones, for continuing to support the president of the United States,” she said. “… that is precisely the kind of infantilizing of adult persons who are citizens of these United States that is so troubling…it was troubling to hear Herman Cain do it. It is trouble when it happens from white allies on the left.”

To be fair, O’Donnell obviously recognized some of the problems with his interview, as evidenced by the time he spent on this. He even closed the second segment by reminding viewers that “Melissa Harris-Perry is not the only friend of mine who had exactly that uncomfortable reaction to what they were watching.”

But for a guy whose stock-in-trade is to graciously offer interview subjects the chance to apologize for things, O’Donnell conspicuously took a pass here.

Here’s the video for both segments, from MSNBC:

Part 1:

Part 2:

Host Chris Hayes opened the segment with a clip of comic George Carlin arguing that both parties were inherently the same by virtue of being corporatist, a sentiment that he saw reflected in the Occupy Wall Street protesters that somewhat concerned him. “I worry you end up in a place of political nihilism in this respect,” he noted, though suggesting that “this is a very familiar American attitude” and nothing new. That said, he suggested the attitude would “let people off the hook” by putting all politicians on the same level.

RELATED: Up With Chris Hayes Panel: Rick Perry’s Immigration Stance Gave Him His Pro-Jobs Record

Jones saw the cause for concern, but noted that, to him, it did not undermine the message that the game was broken, and not just the players. Comparing the protests to a “bad report card” a child would get, “you could say ‘the teacher doesn’t like me,’” but that wouldn’t change the failings. Despite having a majority and “the best Speaker ever” in now Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, Jones argued Democrats were “stuck on stupid for months now as the pain threshold has gotten worse,” and that wasn’t exclusively the province of Republicans. Hayes countered that “the path of least resistance was to do nothing” with much legislation, and yet Democrats had “expended tremendous amounts of political capital” on the stimulus package and “Obamacare” that demonstrated and effort to make the system work. Jones did not see the solution to the problem, however, as possible from Washington. While mostly supportive of the protests, particularly given that they were the first major left-wing political expressions of their kind in some years, no one on the panel objected to poking a little fun at the “hugs,” “drum circles,” and “tofu” at the event.

RELATED: Van Jones: Budget Talks Are Stuck Because ‘A Small Number Of Extremists Hijacked The Base’

“We didn’t mobilize the people,” he responded, adding that “what made a difference in America is what you see right now… we spent two and a half years where the only people who marched and protested in America were the right wing.” This silence he attributed directly to the White House. “There was a sense from the administration that you need to sit down, shut up, and we’ll take care of it.” The Occupy Wall Street movement, he concluded, was simply the pendulum swinging to the other side after years of this mentality. Fellow panelist Naomi Klein of The Nation had an alternate explanation to that silence, however– the nation’s “obsession with electoral politics” that made potential protesters wait to make their voices heard at election booths without trying to sway the votes of others.

The segment via MSNBC below:

Speaking with author Michael Eric Dyson and Director of Africana Studies at Lehigh University James Peterson, Matthews asked:

Do you have a sense as you’ve looked at politics in America that there are some white voters who will vote for an African-American say once? And they will hold that person to a very rigorous standard. Perhaps a much higher standard than they would a white politician. And they‘ll give them one shot and then they’ll dump them the next time. I look at this, I look at the Ed Brooke. I look at the senator from Illinois. I think about this…

Peterson was thoughtful in his answer, suggesting that Matttew’s question functions differently for different demographics, and that — while electoral racism is “just the way in which race and politics operates” to an extent — younger generations are making a concerted effort to push past race when casting ballots. He says:

I really have a lot of faith in young folk, across the main stream and college campuses. They were inspired by president Obama. And I really think the way we think about race, especially the way older generational folk think about race, younger generational folk are really trying to move beyond that and move past that. We’re not post-race, but there certainly is an earnest attempt by younger folk to look  at folks outside the ridged racial lines we’ve drawn for ourselves in the history of this country.

Matthew’s question has several right-leaning bloggers on the defense, but the thought that there might be an implicit racism at play in politics seems worth parsing.

In The Nation this week, Melissa Harris-Perry, a professor of political science at Tulane and sometimes MSNBC contributor, had a less optimistic take than Peterson. The piece called “Black President, Double Standard: Why White Liberals Are Abandoning Obama,” finds Harris-Perry wondering much like Matthews if the 2012 presidential election might reveal a deep seated electoral racism. “If old-fashioned electoral racism is the absolute unwillingness to vote for a black candidate,” she posits, “then liberal electoral racism is the willingness to abandon a black candidate when he is just as competent as his white predecessors.” Harris-Perry’s studies show that when he ran for Illinois Senate in 2004 and President in 2008, voters cast their ballots for Obama maybe in part because he was black, but more so because he was the candidate they most wanted to represent them. She worries, though, that this election might be different.

She is concerned that many of the complaints Obama has been made to field regarding health care reform and unemployment rates would also have been applicable to former President Bill Clinton at the end of his first term, implying that Obama is being held accountable where Clinton was not. Clinton was enthusiastically re-elected, whereas Obama has seen a decline in support amongst voters. Perry believes that “much of that decline can be attributed to their disappointment that choosing a black man for president did not prove to be salvific for them or the nation.”  If Obama loses, “it may be possible to read that result as the triumph of a more subtle form of racism.”

Read Harris-Perry’s piece here, and watch the Hardball clip below:

H/T The Blaze

“The last time this man ran for president,” he noted of Keyes, he was “dismissed as completely ridiculous.” Keyes, of course, is a perennial candidate that, among other pursuits, ran against Barack Obama for the Illinois Senate seat the latter won in a landslide in 2004. “Alan Keyes is actually much better educated that Michele Bachmann,” O’Donnell quipped, continuing to say that the point didn’t matter, as “Bachmann can say Lexington and Concord are in whatever state she happens to be in at the time and the Tea Partiers will still clap.”

He also went after other participants in Rep. Steve King‘s (not Rep. Peter King, as O’Donnell’s panel later mistakenly claims) Conservative Principles Conference, with his most generous label, “tag-alongs,” reserved for apparent candidates UN ambassador John Bolton and pizza magnate Herman Cain. Among those O’Donnell jeers are Barbour and Gingrich, those he saves a barb for a candidate from last time around: Mike Huckabee, “who will be safely ensconced in his Fox News studio in Manhattan… the booty prize Huckabee ended up winning after successfully pandering to right-wing voters.”

O’Donnell’s guests were far less generous, though in bringing up the more moderate Republican hopefuls like Tim Pawlenty and Mitt Romney, they appeared cordial to them by comparison. The Huffington Post‘s Alex Wagner described the Peter Steve King event as an ‘A-list/B-list’ situation in part due to who was hosting it, while The Nation Washington editor Chris Hayes added that “there’s a very thin line between being a media celebrity and being an actual politician” on the right, one that Bachmann appears to intend to walk quite delicately.

The segment via MSNBC below:

Central to that article’s premise is the notion that John Tyner, the originator of the “junk-touch” protest heard ’round the world, is not what he appears to be. Greenwald rightly labels the article a “smear” (an opinion shared by Nation reporter Jeremy Scahill), prompting a lily-livered response from Ames and Levine, and widespread refudiation from fellow liberals.

Aside from being a fun bit of grab-some-popcorn internet entertainment, this feudlet is a handy object lesson in policing your own side.

In the original Nation piece, the authors establish their premise, that Koch Brothers-style Astroturfers are “behind the TSA scandal,” using little more than their Spidey sense and some “scare quotes:”

Does anyone else sense something strange is going on with the apparently spontaneous revolt against the TSA? This past week, the media turned an “ordinary guy,” 31-year-old Californian John Tyner, who blogs under the pseudonym “Johnny Edge,” into a national hero after he posted a cell phone video of himself defending his liberty against the evil government oppressors in charge of airport security.

As Greenwald points out, Ames and Levine toss several paragraphs worth of verbal field greens together, but the word salad just doesn’t go with the rest of the meal, which is, itself, a pretty thin gruel of “ties” and “trails” that, absent a connection to Tyner, reveals nothing more than natural opportunism. The folks looking to use this crisis to privatize airport security (or to normalize racial/ethnic/religious profiling) aren’t behind this scandal, they’re on top of it, riding it for all it’s worth.

This is important to note because, in their response to Greenwald, Ames and Levine sort of concede that their treatment of Tyner might maybe potentially possibly have been a smidge unfair, but the rest of their article was rock-solid:

In retrospect, our article was less than clear about Tyner’s lack of Astroturf affiliations, and we regret in particular including extraneous details from the Union-Tribunearticle about Tyner’s past—that he went to a private Christian school and lived in a Republican community near a Marine base—because it distracted readers like Greenwald from the article’s main findings.

We believe that Tyner is in all likelihood innocent in his motives, but our larger point is that his discourse and the movement that has embraced it is far from innocent. In focusing entirely on our characterization of Tyner, Greenwald ignores the larger thrust of our argument and the vast majority of the evidence assembled in the piece, leaving a distorted impression of it.

Actually, no. The “larger thrust” of the article was that Astroturfers are behind the TSA scandal. Without the yellow assertions about Tyner, there is no larger thrust, the Astroturfers are just along for the ride.

Ames and Levine then resort to the time-honored tactic of the journalist who’s losing an argument: “Why didn’t you call me?”

How did Greenwald get to this conclusion? We’re stumped—he never tried contacting either one of us before publishing his story. That’s one big reason why we’re both so disappointed—because that’s what journalists do: we call our subjects to confirm, or not confirm, evidence and suspicions that we have compiled.

There’s just one problem with this: Greenwald was writing a critique of a news story, not a news story of his own. There shouldn’t be any reason for him to call a journalist. It’s the journalist’s responsibility to make sure everything is on the page. It reminds me of those drug commercials that tell you to “ask your doctor” about their product. If the drug is any good, I shouldn’t have to ask him, unless he’s a really shitty doctor. Greenwald puts it this way:

As I have told the multiple establishment journalists over the years who raised the same “you-didn’t-call-me-first” complaint:  with media criticism, what a journalist claims after the fact about what they published doesn’t really matter; what matters is the piece they published to the world.  That stands on its own.  And that’s what I assessed and critiqued.

What’s heartening about this episode is the willingness of The Nation’s fellow liberals to police their own side:

In addition to their own Nation colleague Jeremy Scahill (who denounced it as a “shameful smear“), Mother Jones‘ News Editor Daniel Schulman wrote:  ”This Nation story isjournalistic malpractice of the worst kind“; The American Prospect‘s Scott Lemieux, on his blog, called it “Liberal McCarthyism” and an “embarrassment“; and the usually rhetorically restrained Ezra Klein condemned it as a “hit piece” which I had “rightfully hammered.”

I often encounter resistance from liberals when criticizing one of their sacred cows, but this feud illustrates the importance of doing just that. Liberals take pride in being the smart, reasonable appreciators-of-nuance that must save the knuckle-dragging Fox Nation from itself. If you’re going to sit on a high horse, you’d better be able to handle the altitude, and hold yourself to a standard that’s orders of magnitude greater than that of your opponent.

Despite all the gloom, could last week’s Democratic pummeling actually have a silver lining for The Nation, once home to writers like Henry James, Ezra Pound, Kurt Vonnegut Jr. and even Yeats? Katrina vanden Heuvel, the magazine’s editor and publisher, did not have to think long about that question.

“If you can’t expose the hypocrisy of this new group of Republicans, then we’re not doing our job. And I mean that,” she said in an interview from her office on election night as she sipped a glass of Champagne, defiant as Democratic losses piled up and the mood around her darkened.

“I mean you’ve got a lot to work with,” she said. “You’ve got a Tea Party caucus in the Senate, a Tea Party caucus in the House. So I think you have a lot of rich material.”

If history is any guide, Ms. vanden Heuvel could be proved right.

The Bush years were good — very good — to The Nation. After operating in the red almost every year since it was founded by abolitionists in 1865, the magazine turned a profit in 2003.

From 2001 to 2003, the magazine’s circulation leapt from 107,000 to 149,000 and kept growing. By 2006, it had reached its peak at 187,000.

Read the full piece here.

Citizens United is the Supreme Court decision handed down this past January that allowed for corporations to donate to political organizations under the same rules as individuals, based on the First Amendment (this is why it is often facetiously referred to as the “corporations are people, too” ruling). The donations in question were from corporations to the group Citizens United, which sought to air a documentary against Hillary Clinton during the 2008 campaign, but its corporate funding forbade it from doing as per the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act (otherwise known as the McCain-Feingold bill). The Supreme Court overturned the sections of BCRA specific to corporate financing in ruling in favor of Citizens United.

The ruling is still a fresh wound to many who oppose any corporate presence in politics, definitively giving corporations the same free speech rights as citizens under the law, thus allowing them to spend money to advocate for positions or candidates they like or dislike (contributions directly to campaigns are still forbidden.) But for some legal scholars (and, obviously, for a majority of the Supreme Court), much of the media outrage seems unwarranted. First Amendment attorney and Mediaite dad Floyd Abrams who argued the case in the Supreme Court on behalf of Senator Mitch McConnell details in an extensive Yale Law Journal piece just what that outrage entailed:

“[T]here were the journalists, typified by CNN’s Jeffrey Toobin, who characterized the opinion as resting on “bizarre legal theories,” and Newsweek’s Howard Fineman, who dismissed the decision as “one of the more amazing pieces of alleged jurisprudence that I’ve ever read.” The New York Times, in separate editorials, excoriated the ruling as “disastrous,” “terrible,” and “reckless.” [...]

President Obama, a former professor of constitutional law, denounced the ruling when it was released and then again in his State of the Union speech without even adverting to the Court’s reliance on the First Amendment. The Nation magazine published a five-page editorial condemning the ruling and urging adoption of a constitutional amendment to overturn it without even mentioning its First Amendment roots. And E.J. Dionne, Jr., in five columns published in the Washington Post both before and after the ruling, first warned of and then denounced the Court’s “astonishing display of judicial arrogance, overreach and unjustified activism.”

“The ruling was treated as a desecration,” he laments, making the point that Citizens United seemed to elicit a more negative reaction than even the recent case where the Supreme Court defended videos of stilettoed women killing kittens with their heels (a sample of which you can watch, thanks to Rick Sanchez, here). Both were decided on the same grounds of freedom of speech. He goes on to elaborate on significant legal precedent in the protection of political speech and campaign finance regulation to make the point that the argument in Citizens United was one recycled out of past First Amendment rulings, often (but not always) involving the press and always celebrated by the media. The facts, he concludes, lead one down a path completely incongruous with what much of the peanut gallery has to say. (It’s also worth noting that peanut gallery including the New York Times, CNN and even Mediaite are all corporations.) The most perplexing part, he concludes, about the reaction to the decision is that many detractors “often chose not to respond to—sometimes not even to mention—Justice Kennedy’s First Amendment analysis in the majority opinion at all, as if the Court had simply ruled that Congress had passed a law with which it emphatically disagreed and would therefore strike down.”

Such is the frustration of attempting to explain away spin with facts.

Rather than assume the media’s endgame is facts, sometimes getting at a reasonable answer requires a bit more of a cynical take. There is certainly an endgame to the visceral reaction against people who aren’t in the business of talking politics being allowed to talk politics, and it isn’t objective. It isn’t even partisan, though right-wingers may look askance an opposition composed of Barack Obama, the New York Times, and The Nation. Those who oppose Citizens United in the media uniformly have one thing in common: they are professionals who discuss political campaigns. They depend on what the Citizens United Hillary Clinton ad aimed to do to put food on the table, no matter whose side they’re on. And people who talk about politics for a living don’t appreciate the threat of their voices being drowned out be people who don’t talk about politics for a living. This is a general rule of thumb.

As political commentary increasingly democratizes thanks to the social media, it can get very, very loud in the public sphere, and it is fairly easy for voices to get drowned out. In such a competitive talking head atmosphere, allowing entities that aren’t even human beings to have their say feels a little bit like when someone plays words like “ai” or “xu” in Scrabble— the rules say they count, but it feels quite wrong that they should. Thus, journalists and media personalities have a vested interest in not having First Amendment rights expanded to make more aggressive the marketplace of ideas in which they are merchants.

That’s not to make a blanket generalization that all politicos who oppose the Citizens United decision are acting to protect their own personalities– on the contrary, the language Abrams cites from Justice Elena Kagan that corporations could have a “corrupting” effect on the political process are valid concerns that many in the media express earnestly. But they are mostly partisan concerns, unless the corrupting has more to do with corruption of the discourse than of any individual wallet. Only this understanding could the scope of the media’s rejection of the Citizens United principles really fit the scope of the decision’s impact.

Junod essentially re-stated the point of his post: that, in his view, the GOP is “producing stars as much as producing candidates” (in the words of his original post: “the values Americans care about are not family, but entertainment”). He added that he believes Democrats have lost any foothold among the “soccer mom” crowd in places like his hometown of Marietta, Ga.: “Soccer moms, in general, identify with people like Sarah Palin.”

Reed had a somewhat different take on things, saying that candidates like Palin and O’Donnell appeal primarily to men, and that “what is keeping Democratic strategists up at night” is how to get women to the polls at all – she believes correcting the “enthusiasm gap” will put a significant dent in Republicans’ progress.

Either way, there’s no questioning the amount of attention focused on Palin and O’Donnell…especially impressive when, as Reed pointed out, O’Donnell is lagging far behind in polls. Video of the segment below.

O’Donnell strictly mediated – this was Dobbs vs. McDonald. And the first thing to jump out about this segment: it was long, taking up half the program. McDonald thought Dobbs was “holding [him]self to a completely different standard than the standards that [he's] held all other American employers to,” while Dobbs thought her piece was “a hit job.” At the center of the debate was, seemingly, semantics: Dobbs seemed to be out to prove that he never “directly, knowingly employed any undocumented worker” (and MacDonald admitted she didn’t have evidence as such), while The Nation’s point wasn’t so much that Dobbs even indirectly employing undocumented workers would make him a hypocrite. (It’s even right in the title.)

In fact, as O’Donnell himself said to Dobbs at one point:

“Well, what they’re calling you on this case is a hypocrite if you did that. You do, what I’m agreeing to is you absolutely didn’t commit a crime if you did that. I’m agreeing to that. But when you take to the pulpit and preach what you preached you got to be, you got to understand why people think this is a hypocritical outcome.”

This gets at the heart of it: Dobbs at one point said, “If you want to hold me to…a different and higher standard, you go right ahead.” And that “different and higher standard” is the price of making illegal immigration a pet cause for so long. Dobbs also mentioned during the interview his ultimate goal is a “rational, effective, humane immigration policy.” That’s a tall order, and after The Nation’s piece – “hit job” or not – the pressure is on for him to contribute significant ideas toward just that.

UPDATE: Here is the full video, split into two parts.

Part 1:

Part 2:

Writing for The Nation, Isabel Macdonald reports:

Since he left CNN last November, after Latino groups mounted a protest campaign against his inflammatory rhetoric, Dobbs has continued to advocate an enforcement-first approach to immigration, emphasizing, as he did in a March 2010 interview on Univision, that “the illegal employer is the central issue in this entire mess!”

His scheduled October 9 address at the Virginia Tea Party Convention will mark his second major Tea Party address of the year, reviving questions about whether the former CNN host is gearing up for an electoral campaign. He recently told Fox’s Sean Hannity that he has not ruled out a possible Senate or even presidential run in 2012.

But with his relentless diatribes against “illegals” and their employers, Dobbs is casting stones from a house—make that an estate—of glass. Based on a yearlong investigation, including interviews with five immigrants who worked without papers on his properties, The Nation and the Investigative Fund at The Nation Institute have found that Dobbs has relied for years on undocumented labor for the upkeep of his multimillion-dollar estates and the horses he keeps for his 22-year-old daughter, Hillary, a champion show jumper.

In researching the story, Ms. McDonald spoke to at up to five individuals who she claims to be undocumented immigrants and who were employed by Dobbs. This story appears to be based on some of the information published two years ago in a book titled A Sunday Horse: Inside The Grand Prix Show Jumping Circuit, written by Vicky Moon . In it she writes of the Dobbs’ horse scene:”This melting pot of international equine aficionados does not include the countless numbers of illegal Spanish-speaking immigrants who shovel the 40 tons of poop a day.”

That was the genesis of Olbermann’s “worse persons” segment which you can watch below:

Though the Pentagon Papers were released almost 40 years ago, Fallows explains the structural similarities between the two leaks:

The interaction between “traditional” and “new” media is the most immediately arresting “process” aspect of this event. It’s structurally similar in one sense to the Pentagon Papers case nearly 40 years ago. Back  then, Daniel Ellsberg worked with the New York Times to publicize the documents. Otherwise, how could he have gotten them out? This time, Wikileaks worked with the Times — and the Guardian and Der Spiegel — to organize, make sense of, and presumably vet the data.

He further makes the point that there’s something to be said for disseminating through these “traditional” news outlets:

Wikileaks could have simply posted the raw info even without the news organizations’ help. At first glance this is a very sophisticated illustration of how newly evolving media continually change the way we get information, but don’t totally replace existing systems. The collaboration of three of the world’s leading “traditional” news brands makes a difference in the way this news is received.

Adam Kirsch makes a similar point in The New Republic. He makes the case for why WikiLeaks still needs the New York Times, because the Internet alone is not enough:

Wikileaks’s highest value is transparency, but the leak suggests that transparency is moot without authority. Perhaps this truth will start to dawn on Assange and the many other new media figures who, with their gleeful attacks on the mainstream media, are helping to undermine the authority of institutions like The New York Times in ways that the U.S. government never has or could. Where would a leaker find himself—in an old movie or in real life—if there were no one left to leak to?

[emphasis ours]

Transparency is moot without authority. This is an important point, and hopefully one that won’t soon be forgot. It also ties back with a fundamental difference between the Pentagon Papers and the AfPak leaks.  As The Nation‘s Robert Dreyfuss points out, the Pentagon Papers “involved a detailed analytical study of that misguided war, while the WikiLeaks papers are for the most part raw data and intelligence reports, not yet vetted.” And who else is vetting them, if not for the traditional media Fallows writes about.

In terms of historical perspective, ProPublica’s Richard Tofel argues there is a remarkable difference between the two leaks:

In terms of important disclosures, it’s not even close, with the historical importance of today’s documents likely to be relatively minor, and that of the Pentagon Papers enormous.

In 1971, in contrast, the Pentagon Papers revealed a host of important discrepancies between the public posture of the U.S. government with respect to Vietnam and the truth…

This leads to the question: does Daniel Ellsberg, the Pentagon Papers whistleblower himself, think the two leaks are comparable? In a DemocracyNow round-table discussion, Ellsberg said he was “very impressed” by the release, saying it was the first time since the Pentagon Papers that something of that scale has been released — adding that such a release is long overdue:

“How many times in those years should there have been the release of thousands of pages showing our being lied into war in Iraq, as in Vietnam, and the nature of the war in Afghanistan?”

He also said he thought highly of Pfc. Bradley Manning, the military specialist accused of leaking the information:

“I admire very much the spirit in which he did this. He said that he felt the public needed to know this and that he was prepared to go to prison, even for life—he said that—or even to be executed. That’s the first person I’ve heard in 40 years who is in the same state of mind that I was 40 years ago.”

Ellsberg will be further discussing the WikiLeaks story today at 4:30pmET on MSNBC.

Watch Ellsberg’s full remarks below:

Maddow’s trip to the war-torn country was similar to Cronkite’s trip to Vietnam in 1968. Cronkite said the war was “mired in stalemate” and we’ve all heard Lyndon B. Johnson’s famous reported remark: “If I’ve lost Cronkite, I’ve lost middle America.” That is a testament to the influence Cronkite had and the respect he commanded.

Hayden, himself, is known for his social and political activism and anti-war involvement in the late 1960s. In The Nation, he draws a parallel between Vietnam and Afghanistan and asks, “Isn’t this precisely the situation in Afghanistan today, or worse? The war itself is not going well.” — and many people want out. Drawing from these similarities, he wonders why Maddow didn’t ask Richard Holbrooke more pointed questions:

Maddow never questioned Holbrooke’s repeated contention that Afghanistan is not Vietnam, where the youthful Holbrooke himself was involved in a failed counterinsurgency almost 40 years ago.

Couldn’t Maddow have challenged the core justification for the war, not just how well the war is going? Indeed if American lives and national security are at stake, the military doctrine of the 50-80 year “long war” would seem justified.

Here is where independent journalism is so critical. Maddow might have asked why 100,000 US troops are fighting in a country where the CIA estimate of Al Qaeda numbers is less than 100, and whether the US intervention itself has pushed Al Qaeda to sanctuaries in Pakistan and Yemen [featured last week as the next Al Qaeda base in a New York Times cover story].

The remarks at the end of one segment were the closest Maddow came to what Hayden thinks she should have questioned:

To be fair to Maddow, she at one point wondered if “maybe the clock has run out” for saving Afghanistan, and questioned if the counterinsurgency campaign is being fought on the “wrong premise” that there really is an Afghanistan regime that can be revived. In her concluding summary…[Maddow] was ambiguous, asserting on the one hand that it’s wrong to ask young Americans to fight and die if the Kabul regime is beyond repair, while on the other hand claiming that “development, training, support [are] OK, but lives, no. That’s the choice, not partisan, not even passionate. It is rational.”

[emphasis ours]

Hayden concludes that “Maddow is less bold today on Afghanistan than Cronkite was on Vietnam 32 years ago, though the CBS anchor was by far the more mainstream of the two.” The Maddow/Cronkite comparison is interesting because of the parallels between the two wars. But a lot has changed in those 32 years, and it is important to keep a relative perspective of things: Maddow may have a quite a fan base and one of her network’s more popular shows, but she arguably does not wield the same degree of influence that Walter Cronkite did.

In The Nation, Eric Alterman wrote a piece arguing that a progressive presidency, at least for now, is not possible in this country. In doing so, he immediately states — as if fact — that most people who call themselves progressives would be underwhelmed by Obama:

Few progressives would take issue with the argument that, significant accomplishments notwithstanding, the Obama presidency has been a big disappointment.

Alterman devotes his lengthy piece to what he says is the reason progressive leaders cannot have their way in America: structural limitations.

Face it, the system is rigged, and it’s rigged against us. Sure, presidents can pretty easily pass tax cuts for the wealthy and powerful corporations. They can start whatever wars they wish and wiretap whomever they want without warrants. They can order the torture of terrorist suspects, lie about it and see that their intelligence services destroy the evidence. But what they cannot do, even with supermajorities in both houses of Congress behind them, is pass the kind of transformative progressive legislation that Barack Obama promised in his 2008 presidential campaign.

While Alterman’s argument lays out how our political structure prevents progressive legislation, a piece in Politico uses the argument to support “why Obama wins by losing.” In it, John F. Harris and Jim VandeHei discuss how despite his achievements, Obama is widely perceived as “flirting with a failed presidency”:

You can argue over whether Obama’s achievements are good or bad on the merits. But, especially after Thursday’s vote, you can’t argue that Obama is not getting things done.

The problem is that he and his West Wing turn out to be not especially good at politics or communications — in other words, largely ineffective at the very things on which their campaign reputation was built. And the promises he made in two years of campaigning turn out to be much less appealing as actual policies.

The Politico piece does have a good premise, but the Huffington Post’s Jason Linkins rightly points out faults — including the issue that most of the story is based entirely on anonymous sources, with authors simply stating “interviews with officials in the administration and on Capitol Hill, and with Democratic operatives around town.”

Furthermore, Linkins takes issue with how the Politico writers downplayed unemployment. Linkins’ makes a sound critique, because the numbers prove (as they have for years) that unemployment numbers are directly correlated to a president’s approval ratings.

These above mentioned pieces are legitimate examples of political analysis. Yet the broader picture seems to show an increasing interest in how progressives specifically might assess Obama’s presidency. Perhaps this is because we already know how conservatives feel (and it’s not pretty). Perhaps it is because we’re sure to hear more and more about how independents feel as November edges closer.

Yet, at least right now, the focus on progressives seems a bit disproportionate. What kind of effect does this kind of semi-polarizing coverage have on the country’s dramatically polarized political landscape? It would be naive to think the media does not influence the public — and while these individual publications may not be reaching everyone, the big picture does. In an ideal world, we would focus more on policy and ideas. In the real world, most things seem to be defined by political parties.

Josh Rogin at Foreign Policy quotes an unidentified senior Pakistani official, who tells the publication that “neither the U.S. government nor the Pakistani government are saying this is true and it is not true… it just doesnt make sense that we would arrest a man and keep it a secret.” Tensions are high between the Pakistani government and US officials since Secretary of State Clinton told 60 Minutes that she suspects that Pakistan knows where Mullah Omar is, although she does not think they have captured him.

The speculation began when Big Government‘s Brad Thor posted an exclusive stating that his sources have told him that Mullah Omar is in custody. Most of the skepticism with the story revolved around shady sources and the fat that Thor’s credentials before Big Government were mostly known to be as a novelist. The Nation went in search of an answer to who Thor is and why he would know, and found that he does have a military background. According to Jeremy Scahill, Thor has connections in Afghanistan, which he made during his time there as part of a “black-ops” team. “This would be the only way Thor has this story remotely right: If, by chance, he happens to know people on the ground who are in a very small, compartmentalized loop on this.”

Perhaps this is what Breitbart is banking on as he continues to defend the story. While Big Government itself has not posted any updates on the topic, Breitbart has been retweeting attacks on him about the topic throughout the day, noting the silence of his arch-nemeses at “TeamPodesta” on the subject as confirmation that he is right, as well as independently stating, “This would be a nice time to tell Karzai & the world that the Pakistanis have had Mullah Omar in custody for over a month.”

For now, with anonymous sources claiming one thing and anonymous sources denying it, it seems to early to tell who in the media will pick up the story and whether, based on the same sources, a major media organization picking it up will strengthen the story.

For John Nichols and Robert McChesney, this was a book promotional event and an opportunity to outline their recommendations to save traditional journalism. It was a setup for a predictable night full of previews of what’s contained inside yet another “save journalism” solution book. Yet, thankfully, David Carr took a topic that has been spoken about to death and breathed new life into the discussion.

That’s not to say the writers didn’t have a great deal to suggest and share – their $30 billion recommended government subsidy has generated much attention. In fact, both Carr and Pamela Newkirk had read and digested the pair’s book in anticipation of the panel and referenced specifics in their insights and responses. It was Carr, however, who stirred the pot by taking issue with the pair’s controversial plan to get government heavily involved with journalism’s resurrection. While Carr believes that government can play a role, he questions whether a government-run press will actually lead to watchdog journalism that capably patrols the institutions that feed it.

And so the debate began and never really ceased. Both Nichols and McChesney were civil in their defenses. McChesney argued that their book is not intended to be the end-all and be-all of journalism solutions, but was written to get the discussion going. (That “just getting the ball rolling” position reminded us of the Freakonomics duo.) He said that before 1875 – when advertising began to fund and fuel the media – the U.S. government paid for the press, and there’s no reason we can’t return to a similar model in order to bail newspapers out during their toughest times.

Newkirk didn’t offer any solutions, but did say enrollment numbers at journalism schools are on the rise. She added that while the internet is ushering in a new era of media, it isn’t designed as a substitute for newspaper reporting. A true replacement with a major overhaul might not come any time soon either. Nevertheless, it’s worth noting that there are some opportunities available for those seeking them.

What They Said
“It’s an acute crisis, not something that can wait five years or ten years to shake out.”
- Pamela Newkirk is growing more concerned about fixing journalism

“This is a problem with a media system that treats people as nitwits and [therefore] doesn’t give them the information.”
- John Nichols thinks that improvements begin with attitude, not finances. He also uses the word “nitwits.” Nice.

“I plan to continue covering the media until I write about myself: ‘David Carr got laid off today.’”
- David Carr is going to create another Moses conundrum

“We will always have news, but it will be journalism-free news.”
- Bob McChesney believes that newspapers have already begun to loosen their ethical standards to cater to those with agendas to push. This is like soy “milk.” Can we really still call it newspapers?

What We Thought

• Before giving his first remarks, Carr thanked everyone in attendance for coming out and showing their concern for the future of the press. He seemed to appreciate that at least 100 people chose a journalism program over Avatar. Imagine how big a crowd they’d get if they did the panel in 3-D.
• McChesney gave a statistic that 86 percent of stories that came out of Baltimore newspapers last year originated from public relations companies and press releases. We at first balked at that number, before recognizing what a service these releases provide. It’s not a message about laziness or influence, but one about making the most of limited resources.
• We liked that McChesney and Nichols were so honest and up front about how difficult it is to make money online – only about 2,500 journalists do it. The internet is simultaneously giving journalists future paths and holding them back. The internet is to journalists what alcohol is to Homer Simpson: the cause of, and solution to, all of life’s problems.

PANEL RULES!
Some audience behavior seems to repeat itself panel after panel. We’ll be updating a running list of “PANEL RULES!” that will help ensure that you are not the dweeb of the Panel Nerds.

Panel Nerds don’t like… An Arm Around the Girlfriend
For the most part, we were thoroughly impressed with Laura Flanders’ managing of the panel. But midway through the Q&A section – during which she was handed business cards with prepared questions – Flanders read three questions in succession in order to speed up the process. She then asked the panel to chime in on any of their choice. This reminded us of our high school teacher’s admonishment that “if you drive with one arm on the steering wheel, and one arm around your girlfriend, you’re not paying enough attention to driving – or to your girlfriend.”  If questions are good enough to ask and entertain, they deserve time and investment. But to packages three questions together like that does a disservice to the panel. It’s better, in our opinion, to just get to fewer questions than you’d have liked.

What: The Nation’s “What Will Become of Our Culture?”

Where: Symphony Space

When November 18, 2009

Thumbs: Up

Something as broad as the subject and role of “culture” demands an abstract discussion of ideas and implications. If this were another event, we would have been critical of the general questions that moderator Gene Seymour lobbed at the panel. But faced with such a huge and daunting task as predicting where “culture” is headed, open-ended solicitations like “Is imagination under siege?” were everything but light.

The headliner was supposed to be Toni Morrison who fell ill at the last minute. Her substitute, Wallace Shawn, filled in nicely as he drew inspiration from his long career as an actor, playwright and essayist. Between Shawn and fellow panelists Tony Kushner and Walter Mosley, this panel possessed a huge wealth of experience, thought and consideration for the written word and its impact on our culture.

Perhaps the most surprising thing that they all agreed on was that in order for literature to survive, it must adapt to technological advances. Kushner was quick to point out that it was a bookseller — Amazon — that revolutionized online marketing. And it’s the Kindle that has people most excited about innovation. Mosley hopes that as his generation ages they will avoid the trap of looking back at how things were in the past and believing that simpler was ostensibly better.

It was an audience member, though, who reminded everyone that sometimes we forget what we’re leaving behind with progress. He half-jokingly pointed out how gadgets make it more difficult to be a “nosy reader” these days; you can’t as easily strike up a conversation with a stranger after being struck by his or her book cover. It left us all with something to continue to think about, especially faced with Mosley’s belief that there’s an onus on all artists to connect with as many people as possible.

What They Said
“When was the Golden Age in the 50s under McCarthy when people were reading ‘Moby Dick’?”
- Walter Mosley wonders if there is anything to the claim that there was a time when people had a deeper appreciation for books

“Somebody was paying writers to write about subjects no one was interested in.”
- Wallace Shawn remembers when the New Yorker used to be able to tell the public what to care about

“I love the current President. I think he is the first genuinely progressive person in the White House since Roosevelt.”
- Tony Kushner couldn’t help but interlock the cultural with the political

“Almost every day there is at least one interesting thing on television.”
- Walter Mosley says that with 300 channels to pick from, odds are one of them is airing something worth watching. The hard part is finding it

“I would personally trust more sophisticated and cultural people.”
- Wallace Shawn had some disparaging things to say about past administrations whom he calls “limited” in their scope

“In a healthy culture, everyone’s an artist.”
- Walter Mosley inspires us ere completion to compose this caption as an ode: O’ hark!  To be words/ written by Panel Nerds

What We Thought

• We liked Wallace Shawn’s point that e-mail has evolved to become more professional-sounding, even literary. Chances are if we look back at e-mails we sent a decade ago, we’d find the voice of people who deserved to be left in the past. We’ve, together, (albeit subconsciously) changed the tone of e-mails to reflect a more glamorous side to us.
• Kushner gave as good an explanation for the success of blogs as we’ve ever heard. Americans, he says, like secondary, digested sources. We tend to trust someone who’s scrutinized the original document more than we do the person who put it together.
• The only debate that emerged from the discussion was between Mosley and Kushner about whether “America” could be treated as a character with consistent behavioral patterns. We got the feeling that both would consider writing that character into their next works.

PANEL RULES!
Some audience behavior seems to repeat itself panel after panel. We’ll be updating a running list of “PANEL RULES!” that will help ensure that you are not the dweeb of the Panel Nerds.

Panel Nerds don’t like…Confusion
Three of the eight questions taken at the event left the panelists speechless. Not because the questions were so excellent they took their breath away. Rather, it was extremely unclear what the question was. On all of these occasions, after dealing with a brief, awkward silence, Mosley stepped up and said, kindly, “I’m not sure I understand your question.” We’d have thought that after the first warning that audience members would have tailored their ensuing questions to come across clearly and succinctly. Not so. We sat through cries about capitalism, aesthetic beauty and political theory that were so lofty and complicated that we began to seriously contemplate whether considering the future of our culture was worth the labor.

How do you get a book of grave, intellectual critiques of Sarah Palin, printed by a recently-launched independent publisher, to get national press attention and a panel discussion on Entertainment Tonight‘s “The Insider?” Easy: call it Going Rouge and make the cover as much of a one-off swap as the title.

Going Rouge, printed by OR Books and assembled by two editors of The Nation, does not sound like a natural candidate for widespread adoration. It is a compilation of anti-Palin essays and other writings, many of which date back to last year’s election. It is a “very serious book,” editor Richard Kim told Politico, and it is “not at all intended as a joke or a parody.” Hence the cover. Essays with titles like “Palin’s Petropolitics” and reflections on Frank Murkowski‘s role in Palin’s ascent may be natural candidates for, well, The Nation; “The Insider,” not so much.

That wacky cover/title, though. There are lightning bolts coming out of the clouds, rather than sunshine! It’s a somewhat cynical form of piggyback marketing that gets a bump every time the actual Going Rogue is discussed, but given the ruthlessness of Palin’s publicity blitz, it seems like fair game. A bonus: the book has benefitted from free advertising via a number of media typos. Last night, a chyron on Hannity said that Palin was “Going Rouge.” The Canadian Broadcasting Channel went a step further, accidentally displaying the cover of Going Rouge in a segment on Palin’s book. A newspaper in South Carolina made the same mistake. (h/t Regret the Error)

It’s odd, given the waves of free publicity that Going Rouge has lapped up, that it’s not for sale on Amazon. Another Going Rogue knockoff, Going Rouge: The Sarah Palin Rogue Coloring and Activity Book, is #50 among humor books on Amazon and is currently sold out, despite the fact that it seems truly opportunistic and hacky. Sample coloring page/joke: “What animal will Sarah kill in 2012? a) Moose, b) Caribou c) Dall Sheep d) Republican Party.” LOL. Imagine how well the Going Rogue doppelgänger could do?

(The actual Going Rogue, by the way, is currently #1, and was a bestseller even before it hit stores thanks to preorders.)

Update: OR Books co-publisher Colin Robinson tells Mediaite, via e-mail: “We’re not on Amazon because we are spending very substantial amounts on promoting the book direct to readers and, as a result, can’t afford the substantial discount that Amazon requires. But the book is easily available from www.orbooks.com.”

Alas, poor Bob Silber‘s “book” Going Rouge: A Candid Look Inside The Mind Of Political Conservative Sarah Palin, which was for some reason released on November 11th instead of yesterday, is not doing as well. This may have something to do with the fact that it contains no text, just blank pages. Because it’s supposed to be like Sarah Palin’s mind.

The message that the panel insisted we take home was that imaginary estimates don’t necessarily translate into real value. We suspect the audience on this night felt the same way about this promising and accomplished group of financial writers. Potential for a good discussion doesn’t necessarily translate into a gripping panel.

Much of the excitement and anticipation for the panel stemmed from opening remarks delivered by a series of hosts of the event. The moderator, David Brancaccio, the fourth speaker of the night, delivered a short presentation with his introduction. A half an hour went by before Brancaccio first invited the panelists to the stage and seated them.

The panelists, all of whom have written books in recent years about the financial industry, gathered to mark the one year anniversary of the government bailout. Brancaccio asked them to draw lessons from recent economic failures and to propose ways for the government to be a part of the solution. The panelist who achieved that best was Daniel Gross. Gross provided some insight into how bubbles typically build infrastructure in America and then lead to consolidation. But Gross’s contributions were overshadowed by Nomi Prins.

Prins simply had too much to share. She rambled for much of the night, at times giving telling pauses between sentences that indicated she’d lost her train of thought and couldn’t trace her way back to the proposed question. Prins focused more on the process that led to the collapse, describing it with longwinded analogies. It demonstrated how difficult a time the media has had over the course of the year to make finance understandable.

Brancaccio could have done a better job jumping in and keeping the conversation moving. We felt he should have been more active in including Matt Taibbi in the discussion. Taibbi kept his answers short and to the point and, as a result, remained mostly silent.

The crowd didn’t exhibit the same patience with the panelists as Brancaccio did. Many left early, some fell asleep, and others turned to reading materials, such as the complimentary copies of The Nation, to occupy their attention.

What They Said
“I think it’s 80 percent right and 100 percent wrong”
- Daniel Gross says that President Obama’s accusation that the economic collapse was a collective failure of all Americans is tough to defend

“There’s no value if nobody wants them, yet there they are just sitting there.”
- Nomi Prins points to hype and lies that made bad loans appear to be more attractive than they were. When the truth emerged, nobody wanted the loans anymore

“It’s a sewage system that allows the banks to dump all the garbage on us.”
– Matt Taibbi puts the government bailout of Bear Stearns in terms we can understand

“I’m going to tell a lame financial joke to give each of you 30 seconds to think about the answer.”
– David Brancaccio bought the panel some time to consider their final thoughts for the evening

“It was debt layered with debt, frosted with debt, iced with debt. Say ‘happy birthday’ with debt.”
– Daniel Gross explains how the economic problems just kept getting deeper and deeper

What We Thought

• The easiest way to get a round of applause from a liberal crowd is to suggest that the government more heavily regulate financial institutions. Still, we remain saddened by the notion that we’ve reached the point where we no longer trust each other to shy away from greed, excess and self-indulgence.
• The disappointing results led us to wonder if the composition of this panel was amiss. All three of the speakers approached the topic from relatively the same angle. We think that this panel would have been enhanced by heavier interaction and debate between the panelists.

PANEL RULES!
Some audience behavior seems to repeat itself panel after panel. We’ll be updating a running list of “PANEL RULES!” that will help ensure that you are not the dweeb of the Panel Nerds.

Panel Nerds don’t like… Collecting Cards
We’ve seen it done from time to time as a way to push things along. The moderator will have ushers collect index cards with audience questions written on them. It gives the moderator control over what gets asked during the Q&A. This method winds up giving the moderator a chance to cover topics he glossed over or forgot, but it takes away from the audience’s (and Panel Nerds’) fun in hearing people deliver their questions from the microphone.

Who

What: The Nation’s “What Will Become of the News?”

Where: Symphony Space

When: September 23, 2009

Thumbs: Up

With three leaders in three separate media branches at his disposal, moderator Victor Navasky didn’t limit the agenda for the evening. Instead, he kept it open-ended and tried to address the question of the evening: What’s in store for the future of media?

Marcy Wheeler, who blogs at FireDogLake, immediately defended her medium in the face of traditional journalists. She distanced herself from other breeds of bloggers, saying that political bloggers have become more mainstream, accepted and reliable. In the most recent election, she said, bloggers like Nate Silver and a few Alaskan reporters contributed some of the best coverage. Bloggers, she argued, have changed the way pollsters and reporters approached their assignments.

A source of contention quickly emerged though, when Wheeler suggested that her readers serve as her fact-checkers. Jane Mayer, who said she’s endured her share of 10-plus hour sessions of New Yorker fact-checking, objected to this practice. She said that journalists who make mistakes, regardless of whether it is on a blog or in a publication, undercut the authority, accountability and credibility of all journalists.

Dan Rather argued that there has been a distinct drop in the quality of journalism, though he doesn’t blame bloggers in particular for the decline. Rather indicated that what concerns him are the diminishing values and leadership of news organizations. He says that the powerful — corporations, lobbyists, politicians, governmental departments — have become even more intimidating, leaving media outlets on the outside looking in.

Bloggers, in this way, seem to have an edge on reporters who must answer to editors and owners before conducting an investigation. Cost is a central issue, as investigations have widely been labeled as luxury items that few can afford to fund today. The immediacy that qualified political bloggers bring to their projects carries weight that even a skeptic like Mayer recognizes. Still, she stressed that there’s a certain beauty to a well-researched and crafted piece of traditional, long-form journalism.

What They Said

“It’s not just about getting the little facts right, it’s about getting the truth right.”

- Jane Mayer suggests that bloggers can’t compete on accuracy

“Most of us when we were 17, 18, 19 years old knew less about the news than we’ll try to convince you we did.”

- Dan Rather grew into his role as a trusted source for world news

“The notion of credibility and what gains you credibility is changing.”

– Marcy Wheeler contends that bloggers do a better job reading through court documents than reporters do. She thinks reporters can learn from bloggers’ initiatives

“There are vertebrates in Congress who have no backbone.”

- Jane Mayer said that it has become increasingly more difficult to get politicians to go on the record with her. It’s probably also more difficult for politicians to stand, walk, live, and do other backbone required activities

“Normally the moderator will tell you not to make statements but to ask questions. Tonight you get to make statements.”

- Victor Navasky proudly told the audience that their admission fee would grant them the perk of not being shushed, though it does not grant you the perk of not being cited in Panel Rules

What We Thought

• Mayer claims that there’s a lasting post-9/11 pressure that applies a fear factor to both reporters and citizens. She says that it has allowed both the current and past Presidents to push National Security as a means to justify errors of judgment and other embarrassments. It has also left many in Washington fearful of speaking to reporters who might wind up challenging the government’s agenda.
• We appreciated Navasky taking a moment at the end of the panel to share his conclusions from the evening’s panel. The fact that he had scrawled notes during the panel demonstrated how he, a veteran journalist and educator, knows there’s a lot left to learn and resolve.

PANEL RULES!

Some audience behavior seems to repeat itself panel after panel. We’ll be updating a running list of “PANEL RULES!” that will help ensure that you are not the dweeb of the Panel Nerds.

Panel Nerds don’t like… Academicrophoners

Yes, we know that you were given approval by the moderator to sound off about whatever you wished. But when you spend a couple of minutes educating us about the history of media regulations and restriction on monopolies, we wind up daydreaming like we we’re back in Mrs. Mei’s 6^th grade history class. The question itself was good, but we could have done without the detailed account of every business decision media conglomerates have made over the past 100 years.

Panel Nerds Etan Bednarsh and Danny Groner are New York-based writers and avid panel-goers. Want them at your panel? Email them here: PanelNerds@mediaite.com

During a segment on Live with Carlos Watson, Abrams got into a bit of a kerfuffle with Nation publisher Katrina vanden Heuvel, revealing the torturous management style we at Mediaite have to endure.

As a media watch dog site we can only make the following comments:

• Nice scruff Don Johnson
• It was not your show big guy.
• Does this attack on The Nation‘s editor mean Abrams is a closet conservative?
• How come there were no TV appearances to promote the Mediaite launch?
• Though Abrams has no say in the editorial content of the site, we still are constantly badgered by his interruptive style. How does this taste boss-man?

In the hard new priorities of news management, dwindling resources struggle to keep coverage alive on essential routine beats, while the public-interest side of the business — investigative journalism,  the very heart and soul of journalism — is being unforgivably squeezed in the face of fiscal realities.

So, how to pay for the vital probings on behalf of the entire polity, in this time of forced deprivation?  Philanthropy, perhaps?  The success of the pioneer ProPublica — the non-profit independent newsroom that produces investigative journalism in the public interest, with “moral force” — bodes well.

Launched last year, ProPublica is funded by a multi-year, $10 million budget from the Herbert and Marion Sandler Foundation, supported by the MacArthur Foundation, Atlantic Philanthropies, the Peter G. Peterson Foundation, and the Kohlberg Foundation, with pro bono counsel support from Cleary Gottlieb and Davis Wright Tremaine. It is led by Paul Steiger, former managing editor of the Wall Street Journal, and Stephen Engelberg, former  managing editor of the Portland Oregonian and investigative editor of the New York Times. Their staff consists of  32 top-flight journalists (eight of them winners of Pulitzers), individually and collectively way beyond the pay scales of the publications they seek to serve. They range wide over their specialties, find leads, investigate, research, and produce original stories — which they offer exclusively, free, to the local news organizations where they will have the most impact.

From a standing start, they have done a spectacular job. ProPublica has already provided more than 40 publishing partners with original  reports of consequence.  One on the environmental damage caused by hydrofracking — the practice of injecting toxic fluids underground in the process of natural gas drilling — was picked up by the Albany Times-Union, Business Week, the Denver Post, the San Diego Union-Tribune, and the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. The story has touched off a fierce debate in Congress over  extension of  the extraordinary legal exemption for the practice.

Another, on California’s failure to check the criminal backgrounds  of 195,000 health-care professionals, published in the Los Angeles Times, prompted the state Department of Consumer Affairs to add 104,000  professionals from all levels of medical care — doctors, dentists, psychiatric technicians — to that total, and spurred the state into remedial action. ProPublica’s ongoing investigative efforts into the California health care system this week resulted in Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger replacing most of the State Nursing Board.

Elsewhere in the country, ProPublica posted an update on its earlier story published in The Nation about vigilantism in New Orleans in the wake of Hurricane Katrina:  new video footage has surfaced about one of the murders, in which the police may have been involved.

So far, ProPublica has brought more than 50 similar heretofore secret stories into public view in its first year in business. And counting.

And, apparently, just in time. “We don’t pretend to be a substitute for all the resources that are being lost,” says Dick Tofel, ProPublica’s general manager from its inception. “Many, many millions of dollars, many scores of people. It’s a national tragedy. We can’t fix that by ourselves, but we can push back, and perhaps ultimately serve as one model  for how you can build a non-profit news organization that may be replicable, for instance, at the local or regional level around the country.”

Tofel’s sense of urgency comes from what he perceives to be the core of “investigative journalism,” as he defines it: “It is the stories that someone in some position of power wants to keep secret. What investigative journalism is about is getting those stories that people in some position of power want to keep from being told. If one can accept that definition, then I think one can quickly understand why it is a very important function of self government.”

Tofel cites David Simon, former journalist and creator of The Wire on HBO, whose comments while testifying before Congress earlier this year at the “Future of Journalism” hearing echoed around the industry:  “The next 10 or 15 years in this country are going to be a halcyon era for state and local political corruption.“

Well, not if ProPublica can help it. Tofel, Steiger and Engelberg aim to be around for those 10 to 15 years, and then some. “We all agree it’s an integrated whole: If you just do great content it’s not enough; if you just have great staff it’s not enough; if you just have distribution it’s not enough,” says Tofel. “It’s a system you need to build; it’s a machine you need to construct, and then to maintain on the fly.”

To that end, they are building it. First priority:  recruit and retain a first-rate staff.  (“Very pleased about that,” says Tofel. “Not 100 percent done, but close.”) Indeed: Pro Publica just added Jesse Eisinger, formerlyof Portfolio and the Wall Street Journal, and this past spring added online and organizing savvy with Amanda Michel, the former director of “Off The Bus,” the Huffington Post’s citizen journalism arm. Second priority: Do great work. Tofel is modest (“I think we’ve started to do some, but we need to do years of it  before people can start assessing”), but the California State Nursing Board might beg to differ.  Third: Distribute effectively. No need for modesty there. Says Tofel:  “We’ve already proven that.”

With work of such incredible public value, it seems almost depressing that it traditional business models can’t support it. But, says Tofel, that’s why now is the time to shake things up. “I think we’re at a moment of cataclysmic change here; there’s a need for a lot of real experimentation,” he says. “I do think that philanthropy can catalyze a lot of experimentation that needs to be done. We are about to get more systematic about what a sustainable long-term funding model would look like and go out to try to build one. I have more questions than answers about that, very honestly. I don’t have answers.  All I will tell you is that we’ve been publishing just a year now, and I think this is the next big thing for us to do.”

Like the rest of their investigations, we look forward to the results.

Bill Rappleye has spent the last 60-plus years in journalism. Read more about him here.