The Debatable Land

McCain's Coming Media Hurricane?

At TAPPED Paul Waldman hails this Arizona Republic piece questioning MCain's "maverick" credentials and then asks:

One thing I've noticed lately is that there are a bunch of Chicago reporters (like Lynn Sweet and Jim Warren, for instance) who have become regulars on cable TV, presumably because they know a lot about Barack Obama. But the reporters who have known John McCain the longest and know him the best -- the ones from Arizona -- are nowhere to be seen. Why do you think that is?

Clearly, we're supposed to impute some pro-McCain or pro-conservative bias here. But it's much more likely that the truth is that while the BHO vs HRC stramash continues no-one gives a damn about John McCain. Now of course it's true that McCain gets a very generous press (partly because - canny man! - he gives the press greater access than do other candidates) but it's also true that November is a very long way away.

It's also true that McCain has, until now, generally (though not always) been the upstart outsider and upstart outsiders almost always receive more indulgent press than do front-runners. He's never received the attention a nominee must endure however, and I suspect that McCain will have to endure tougher press coverage than he's ever received before. One reason for that is, as I say, that he could actually be President now; another is that having been pretty soft on Obama for some time, the press knows it can't be soft on McCain too. Equally, the memory of past cheerleading for McCain will prod some editors to redouble their "vetting" efforts this time around.

In other words, expect to see Matt Welch, author of McCain: The Myth of a Maverick on TV a lot this summer.

The Small, Quiet Tragedy of Hillary Clinton

Fine Peggy Noonan column today:

Many in the press get it, to their dismay, and it makes them uncomfortable, for it sours life to have a person whose character you feel you cannot admire play such a large daily role in your work. But I think it's fair to say of the establishment media at this point that it is well populated by people who feel such a lack of faith in Mrs. Clinton's words and ways that it amounts to an aversion. They are offended by how she and her staff operate. They try hard to be fair. They constantly have to police themselves.

Not that her staff isn't policing them too. Mrs. Clinton's people are heavy-handed in that area, letting producers and correspondents know they're watching, weighing, may have to take this higher. There's too much of this in politics, but Hillary's campaign takes it to a new level.

Others are better placed than I to comment on this, but it rings true to me. My own (limited) experience has been that the extent of her staff's paranoia about the press knows no bounds. I can recall the futility of even trying to make small talk about the campaign with Clinton staffers at Washington dinner parties. Even in relaxed, private moments their hostility to the press knew no bounds. On the campaign trail, of course, it's worse as any reporter who's spent much time on the road can tell you.

This has consequences. It builds a culture of resentment that, eventually, calcifies into loathing. Operating on the assumption that the press can't be trusted and is irrevocably hostile to you breeds a contempt for the media that, in time, is matched by the media's contempt for the candidate herself. You may win early victories, perhaps you may even leave reporters in awe of your press operation's skill and ruthlessness. But it can't - and doesn't last. Eventually the media tires of the bullying and the abuse and the lying and rebels. Once the process of rebellion has started it has an all-but unstoppable momentum of its own. Mrs Clinton isn't the only person to have discovered this. She could have looked to Tony Blair (and Gordon Brown's) experience. For years the media gave New Labour the benefit of the doubt. Barring a few remaining true believers that no longer applies.

(And of course there's an irony here too: Blair's people studied Bill Clinton's 1992 campaign closely - Philip Gould was present for most of the campaign - and learnt much of their subsequent media-handling style from the 1992 "War Room". Hillary would perhaps have been well-advised to look across the Atlantic and learn, in turn, from her husband's followers. Hillary's press operation, like Labour's doesn't seem to have adapted to the "new media" world.)

Now part of all this is simply the passing of time: the media grows bored and needs new carrion to pick at (and Hillary, of course, has been a public figure for a long time). But part of it is also the fact that this sort of rigid, cautious, none-too-human style of campaign is, I think, past its sell-by date.

It didn't have to be this way. Hillary could have learnt from John McCain. We all know that McCain's breezy style on the campaign trail has been his greatest asset. By charming reporters - an granting them access of course - he helps compensate for weaknesses in other areas. Say whatever else you will about McCain but reporters are more likely to enjoy themselves following him and, in the long-run, this clearly has an impact upon coverage.

But Hillary can't do that. It's as though she's so afraid of seeming vulnerable or human or acting in a spontaneous manner - for fear, perhaps, that any slip of the tongue or off-colour joke might be turned against her - that she risks coming across as a cold fish whose very move is calculated and whose every utterance is carefully parsed before its shared with the general public. Ironically this too causes difficulties. John McCain can plunder the Beach Boys for his "bomb, bomb, bomb Iran" riff and sensible people know (or assume!) he's joking; folk would assume Hillary was serious if she did the same.

Perhaps that's unfair and, in its own way, it's rather tragic. But it leads to situations in which every Clinton statement is analysed to death since it's assumed to be part of some grand political strategy. Thus her comment that Barack Obama isn't a muslim "as far as I know" is interpreted as a deliberate strike against Obama. This too can lead to absuridties such as her claim that she was "sleep-deprived" and "misspoke" in her own prepared remarks about her now-infamous trip to Tuzla. This sort of nonsense insults everyone's intelligence and invites mockery. Candidates can withstand criticism but mockery kills them.

Does Obama get something of a pass? Yes. Is that unfair? Probably. But he gets it because he's offering something new and fresh. Even if you accept that some of the grander claims about Obama's candidacy are inextricably wrapped up in the idea that Obama, simply by virtue of being the man and colour he is, can solve America's problems it remains the case that Obama's person - and its symbolism - stands and is perceived to stand for something bigger, ultimately, than what he is himself. No wonder that's an appealing, powerful message.

Hillary's campaign by contrast too often seems to stand for little more than the greater glory of Hillary Clinton herself. This is a problem she shares, incidentally, with Gordon Brown. What are they actually for? The answer is too opaque, too wrapped up in considerations of their own ambition and, yes, unfortunately apparent sense of entitlement. Brown deserved to be Prime Minister because, well, because he'd waited for it for a long time; Hillary deserves to be President because, well, because it's her turn. This too, alas, breeds resentment from a press corps that believes it has the right to referee these matters itself.

When you have a reputation, fair or not, for being a charmless, humourless control freak it's a mistake to run a campaign that exacerbates rather than discourages that impression or reputation. When politics becomes a soap opera character and humanity matters; simply being an efficient, knowledgable technocrat or policy wonk is not enough. Equally, it's never wise to be caught on the wrong side of the Future vs Past divide. David Cameron's devastating taunt to Tony Bliar that "You were the future once" could just as easily be used by Obama to Clinton.

Hillary's campaign to "undo" the Bush years and roll back the clock could have worked in other circumstances and with another opponent. But Obama, right now, doesn't merely promise the idea of the United States taking a mulligan but of actually moving "beyond" the Bush era. Is it any surprise that this is a more appealing message?

(Gordon Brown's predicament is even more acute, mind you, since he's essentially asking voters to grant Labour a mulligan after a decade in which Brown was himself Chancellor of the Exchequer. I don't believe that this is a hand that, absent some monstrous bluffing, can win.)

One final thought: Hillary's rigid, top-down campaign is ill-constructed for the modern age. In an era in which public cyncicism is, not without reason, rampant it's not wise to present yourself as some kind of omniscient, error-free robot. The public craves humanity (which requires admissions of failure or weakness) as the price of trust. Hillary hasn't delivered that. Equally, her campaign and candidacy seem ill-fitted to an open source world in which all manner of corporate and hierarchical structures are collapsing. Her comparative reliance on traditional big-box donors compared to Obama's army of internet activists is but one telling indicator of the difference between their candidacies. Incidentally, it will be interesting to see if McCain's proposed "regional" strategy for the general elecion - devolving much greater responsibility to local campaign chiefs and distributing power away from the official campaign headquarters will work. I have a hunch it may do better than many experts in Washington suspect.

Trust is earned by transparency - a lesson Hillary seems not to have learnt if her continued reluctance to release her tax returns is any admission. With a different opponent or in a different era Hillary Clinton might have been a compelling candidate. Her misfortune is that the moment is now and she's facing Barack Obama.

What's her campaign for? That's a question she's never really answered satisfactorily and everything we know about the way her campaign has been run aupports the suspicion that it's not something she actually has an answer for.

She could have been the future once, but she isn't now.

Media whoring: gaelic edition

Switch off your radios: I shall be on BBC Radio 4's PM programme at around 5.45pm talking about, of all things, state-sponsored Gaelic TV. It may not surprise readers that I consider this a perfectly senseless boondoggle. by the standards of government waste it is, for sure, trivial and harmless stuff. To the extent that it perpetuates the nonsense that we should all be speaking Gaelic and have bilingual signs all over Scotland it's further evidence that the national capacity for self-delusion and fatheaded history endures.

You can listen online here.

A Picture of Putin

Rod has an excellent and rather moving wee tale about how Time magazine ended up with a photograph of Vladimir Putin not an icon to illustrate its decision to hail Putin as its Person of the Year.

It's a reminder that non-believers can find much to admire in believers. Or, to put it another way, religious devotion that is sincere and modest and personal - and thus the exact opposite of how religion has come to be used in the American political arena - is a tough road to follow but one who's virtues ought to be apparent even to those of us who remain unpersuaded by organised religion. I like to think that if I were more religiously-inclined I would oppose the introduction of religion to public life, not because it would be an insult to the agnostic, but because it would tarnish religion itself. Better, I think, for it to remain something between man and his maker than just another kind of snake-oil.

Chutzpah thy name is Halperin

Mercy me. Mark Halperin makes a lateish run for Most Incriminating Column of the Year with this entry, published in today's New York Times in which he laments how terrible it is that the media have confused campaign froth with the stuff that might actually indicate whether or not a politician is capable of performing the duties custom and the constitution assigns to the President of the United States of America.

Halperin, formerly Political Director at ABC News, argues that:

Our political and media culture reflects and drives an obsession with who is going to win, rather than who should win.

For most of my time covering presidential elections, I shared the view that there was a direct correlation between the skills needed to be a great candidate and a great president. The chaotic and demanding requirements of running for president, I felt, were a perfect test for the toughest job in the world.

But now I think I was wrong. The “campaigner equals leader” formula that inspired me and so many others in the news media is flawed.

Well, this is, of course, true. But who helped make it so? Well, media bigwigs such as Mark Halperin himself. To read this preposterous column you might think that Halperin was but an innocent bystander rather than a major player in a media climate he did as much to foster as anyone else. Really, it would take a village to do this nonsense the justice it merits, but someone needs to make a start...

Mr Halperin continues:

Case in point: Our two most recent presidents, both of whom I covered while they were governors seeking the White House. Bill Clinton and George W. Bush are wildly talented politicians. Both claimed two presidential victories, in all four cases arguably as underdogs. Both could skillfully serve as the chief strategist for a presidential campaign.

But their success came not because they convinced the news media (and much of the public) that they would be the best president, but because they dominated the campaign narrative that portrayed them as the best candidate in a world-class political competition. In the end, both men were better presidential candidates than they were presidents.

First thing to note here is the massaging of the historical record. Show me someone who thinks Bill Clinton was the  underdog against Bob Dole and I'll show you someone whom I'll welcome to my poker game. Equally, George W Bush may have done his best to destroy the advantages of incumbency in his tussle with John Kerry but it's still quite a stretch to suppose that he was the underdog. 

Note too, the requisite Washington Wisdom that Clinton was a failed President. Well, as Enoch Powell said (and he would know) all political lives end in failure, but you'd have had few takers for that proposition when Clinton left the White House. He was, after all, such a failure that it's quite clear that he'd have been elected to a third term had it been available to him. But no, this sort of piffle requires one to posit that they're all as useless as each other. (Of course, I'd say they are, just in way that the likes of Halperin will never understand.)

But no!

For instance, being all things to all people worked wonderfully well for Bill Clinton the candidate, but when his presidency ran into trouble, this trait was disastrous, particularly in the bumpy early years of his presidency and in the events leading up to his impeachment. The fun-loving campaigner with big appetites and an undisciplined manner squandered a good deal of the majesty and power of the presidency, and undermined his effectiveness as a leader. What much of the country found endearing in a candidate was troubling in a president.

When George W. Bush ran in 2000, many voters liked his straightforward, uncomplicated mean-what-I-say-and-say-what-I-mean certainty. He came across as a man of principle who did not lust for the White House; he was surrounded by disciplined loyalists who created a cheerful cult of personality about their candidate.

As with Mr. Clinton, though, the very campaign strengths that got Mr. Bush elected led to his worst moments in office. Assuredness became stubbornness. His lack of lifelong ambition for the presidency translated into a failure to apply himself to the parts of the job that held less interest for him, often to disastrous effects. The once-appealing life outside of government and public affairs became a far-less appealing lack of experience. And Mr. Bush’s close-knit team has served as a barrier to fresh advice.

Whatever else this is, it ain't an especially rigorous analysis of the strengths and weaknesses of Bush and Clinton respectively. Or rather, it's an analysis that pays no attention to - and cares not a whit about - what either man actually did in office, but that is obsessed with psychologically analysing their shortcomings.

In other words, it makes exactly the same mistake Halperin chides himself (oh, how noble you are for doing so Mark!) and the media for making in the first place. Even in this post-mortem you can see that image matters more to Halperin than substance. It's comfy of course to ascribe mental shortcomings - If only Bill didn't like blowjobs! If only Dubya could pay attention! - to what should more properly be considered policy failures, but that's a media problem all of its own. (And, in any case, one might note that while we can guess what Halperin thinks are Bush's policy mistakes he makes no mention of what Clinton's were. Perhaps it was Monica that made Arafat be a fool at Camp David and Taba. Who knew?)

So what should we do now? Never fear, the intrepid Halperin is here to offer the sagest kind of advice:

Well, we pause, take a deep breath and resist. At least sometimes. In the face of polls and horse-race maneuvering, we can try to keep from getting sucked in by it all. We should examine a candidate’s public record and full life as opposed to his or her campaign performance. But what might appear simple to a voter can, I know, seem hard for a journalist.

If past is prologue, the winners of the major-party nominations will be those who demonstrate they have what it takes to win. But in the short time remaining voters and journalists alike should be focused on a deeper question: Do the candidates have what it takes to fill the most difficult job in the world?

Does it really need to be said that this is exactly what Mark Halperin has never done? To the extent that Mr Halperin is famous it is because he was the force behind ABC News' super-insidery The Note.

This newsletter, originally only available by email, purported to offer the inside scoop on the 2004 Presidential race. Disdaining anything as boring or old-fashioned as policy, let alone notions of who might, you know, actually make the better President, The Note was a daily update on campaign gossip and Way-Inside-the-Beltway scoopiness that traded on its Insidery status and knowing, It's-All-A-Ridiculous-Game-But-What-Can-You-Do? cleverness. It was entertaining, for sure, and smug as all hell with it's loving fixation on The Gang of 500 journalists who, in The Note's world, would actually decide the election for all you poor rubes out there. There were some regrets at ABC, I believe, when The Note was eventually offered to the great unwashed. It was never about how things are, always about how they'll play.

Halperin was so ashamed of this way of covering the campaign that he reluctantly acquiesced to a long and flattering New Yorker profile that suggested, if memory serves, that he was the most influential journalist in Washington.

Surprisingly, none of this is mentioned in his NYT op-ed.

Not that the bold Halperin was done there. Not by a long-shot. His next project was a book entitled How to Win which put The Note's thesis into book form. According to his book's own publicity:

The Way to Win takes a lively and irreverent approach, but Halperin and Harris also show the disturbing ways that American politics has become a Freak Show–their name for a political culture that provides incentives for candidates, activists, interest groups, and the news media to emphasize ideological extremism and personal attack. For the first time, Halperin and Harris describe how Freak Show campaigns orchestrated by the likes of Internet pioneer Matt Drudge forced Al Gore and John Kerry to lose control of their public images (with considerable help from the candidates’ own ineptitude) and lose the White House.

On the brink of what will be one of the most intense, most exciting presidential elections in American history, The Way to Win is the book that armchair political junkies have been waiting for. Filled with peerless analysis and eye-opening revelations from the trenches, it is a must read for everyone who follows American politics.

All this of course happened in a vacuum. Nobody in the media, bless us all, ever had anything to do with creating a "Freak Show"?

Now, I'm more tolerant of the circus nonsense but even I take exception to this self-promoting idiocy. I have no idea what the NYT is thinking publishing this self-serving tripe without pointing out Halperin's role in helping create the very situation he so innocently deplores but there you have it. Rules for Big and Important People are not the same as they are for mere mortals who are, occasionally, required to acknowledge and even take some measure of responsibility for their actions and mistakes.

How open government really works

The Daily Telegraph's Christopher Hope wanted to know who Gordon Brown has been inviting to dine at Chequers since he became Prime Minister. Not an unreasonable Freedom of Information request you might think - especially to a Prime Minister who pledged a new era of openness and accountability. Well, how's that working out? Not so well it seems... Here's the reply Mr Hope received from Downing Street:

Sir Humphrey would be proud.

Tim Russert is Hurting America Too

An excellent column by Paul Waldman on the Ghastliness of Tim Russert. (Note for British readers: he's America's  version of Paxman except twice as smug and half as useful) Waldman makes the reasonable point that Russert and his ilk help ruin Presidential debates. On Tuesday in Philadelphia Russert was at it again, demanding if the cadidates would "guarantee" that Iran would not produce a nuclear weapon while they were President. As though the US President were some omnipotent being capable of achieving anything they desired merely on the ground that they, well, desired it. To her credit Hillary Clinton refused to be bullied into giving Russert the imbecilic answer he wanted, insisting only that she would do all she could to prevent Tehran getting the bomb.

In many ways that was worse stuff - because it was at least concerned with serious policy - than the nonsense served up at the end of the debate with questions about UFOs ("Do you believe in them?") and Halloween costumes.

Still, Waldman cites another excellent example of this banality:

Last month, near the end of the Democratic presidential debate in New Hampshire, moderator Tim Russert -- known as "Washington's toughest interviewer" and perhaps the most influential journalist in America -- had one last chance to pin the candidates down with his legendary common sense, persistence, and no-bull style. This is what he asked, first to Barack Obama:

"There's been a lot of discussion about the Democrats and the issue of faith and values. I want to ask you a simple question. Senator Obama, what is your favorite Bible verse?"

When Obama finished his answer, Russert said to the other candidates, "I want to give everyone a chance in this. You just take 10 seconds."

One can only lament the fact that neither Obama nor any other candidate saw fit to give the only appropriate answer:  "Jesus Wept."

Media Training 1980s Style...

Jim Hacker, immortalised forever in the classic BBC comedies Yes, Minister and Yes Prime Minister prepares to deliver a Prime Ministerial televised address to the nation. But what, if anything, should he say? And how should he say it? Plus, reflections on media management, clothing, make-up and much much more in this classic clip. Verily, the more the times change, the more they remain the same...

Press Management By Dummies

Say what one may about the Blair-Brown years but I'm not sure even they would be mad brazen enough to try something like this:

The Federal Emergency Management Agency's No. 2 official apologized yesterday for leading a staged news conference Tuesday in which FEMA employees posed as reporters while real reporters listened on a telephone conference line and were barred from asking questions.

"We are reviewing our press procedures and will make the changes necessary to ensure that all of our communications are straight forward and transparent," Vice Adm. Harvey E. Johnson Jr., FEMA's deputy administrator, said in a four-paragraph statement.

"We can and must do better, and apologize for this error in judgment," Johnson said, a view repeated yesterday by press officers at the White House and the Department of Homeland Security, who criticized the event.

FEMA announced the news conference at its Southwest Washington headquarters about 15 minutes before it was to begin Tuesday afternoon, making it unlikely that reporters could attend. Instead, FEMA set up a telephone conference line so reporters could listen.

In the briefing, parts of which were televised live by cable news channels, Johnson stood behind a lectern, called on questioners who did not disclose that they were FEMA employees, and gave replies emphasizing that his agency's response to this week's California wildfires was far better than its response to Hurricane Katrina in August 2005.

Unbelievable, non? And yet so very, very unsurprising.

GOP convention to be brokered? Ooooh, you are a tease...

On, the other hand TNR's John Judis wins the prize for being the first (I think) to speculate upon the likelihood of us all actually being able to enjoy the delicious pleasure of a brokered convention:

With former Senator Fred Thompson's entry into the presidential race, the Republicans now have at least three candidates who could have the money and votes to compete, if necessary, all the way to June 2008. And they might have to do so. Indeed, when the Republicans meet in Minneapolis-St. Paul in September 2008 to choose their nominee, they might be looking at a brokered convention.

Of course, the party has had multiple strong candidates before--in 1980, for instance, and 1988 and even in 2000. But the old schedule of primaries and caucuses was designed to winnow down the field. By March, the field was invariably reduced to two candidates, one of whom would eventually gain enough delegates through the primaries and caucuses to win the nomination. But the 2008 schedule concentrates two-thirds of the primary and caucus votes in the first month, which ends February 5. If there is no clear frontrunner by then, the primary and caucus race will probably go down to June, and perhaps to the convention.

Colour me unpersuaded. This is a quadrennial journalistic fantasy. I suspect one could find folk putting their hopes into their predictions at some stage during every presidential election cycle. Don't mean it's gonna happen.

Which is a shame because, god knows, something needs to be done to liven up the actual conventions. There was a moment in one of the early seasons of The West Wing in which Toby Ziegler berated the TV executives who had proposed cutting back their convention coverage to little more than the candidate's acceptance speech. This, apparently, was un-American and a threat to democracy itself. Or something like that. But of course the TV people were right. The conventions are nothing more than an infomercial for the political parties - and, frankly, are much less weirdly compelling than the standard infomercials one sees on TV for miracle knives or life-saving gloves.

Even the nominee's acceptance speech is something of a bore. It needs to pass one test only: does the candidate look "Presidential". If they can't manage that on this sort of set-piece occasion they're doomed.What they actually say is of less importance than how they say it. But since they'll never have a friendlier audience or setting they're always going to pass this test, rendering even it less than useful as a means of judging their electoral viability.

So, yes, a brokered convention replete with arm-wrestling in (sadly) smoke-free rooms would be wonderful. But will it happen?  That's too much to hope for.

Press bias revealed!

Matt Yglesias sees Fred Thompson jump into a tie with Rudy Giuliani, despite having next to nothing to offer the country beyond shop-soiled platitudes and observes:

All-in-all I continue to find it surprising that the press seems more interested in the Democratic primary (and I've heard conservatives complain about this, so I'm not making a partisan complaint), which seems frozen in a locked pattern, than in the much more fluid and objectively interesting GOP race.

But there's a simple reason for this: the press assumes that whoever wins the Democratic nomination will also be the next President.

Additionally, the Democratic campaign is at a more advanced stage than th Republican one in as much as the Democrats occasionally show signs of actually talking about issues and even, ye gods, disagreeing on them. From time to time one sees actual debate between Edwards, Clinton and Obama in ways that have not yet happened on the GOP side of the aisle where, oddly, battle has yet to be really joined. (Which is also why Fred can join the race at this lateish stage and not be laughed off the court).

Why you don't want political journalists to write like baseball hacks...

Via Kevin Drum, I see that, in one of his regular plangent calls for a better press corps, Brad DeLong has highlighted an extraordinary suggestion from one of his readers. Namely that:

I repeat my previous suggestion for the "baseball test." A reporter should not be assigned to cover subject X unless he has as good an understanding of X as a baseball writer is expected to have of baseball.

I assume that Professor DeLong's reader does not intend reducing the quality of political coverage in this country but it seems unavoidable that this is indeed what he is proposing. I mean, has this chap ever read Bill Plaschke? Or Murray Chass? Both these men are members of the Baseball Writers Association of America (though typically, being stuffed shirts, they decline to cast Hall of Fame ballots).

Here's Chass listing some of the things he didn't want to hear about this season:

Statistics mongers promoting VORP and other new-age baseball statistics.

I receive a daily e-mail message from Baseball Prospectus, an electronic publication filled with articles and information about statistics, mostly statistics that only stats mongers can love.

To me, VORP epitomized the new-age nonsense. For the longest time, I had no idea what VORP meant and didn’t care enough to go to any great lengths to find out. I asked some colleagues whose work I respect, and they didn’t know what it meant either.

Finally, not long ago, I came across VORP spelled out. It stands for value over replacement player. How thrilling. How absurd. Value over replacement player. Don’t ask what it means. I don’t know.

I suppose that if stats mongers want to sit at their computers and play with these things all day long, that’s their prerogative. But their attempt to introduce these new-age statistics into the game threatens to undermine most fans’ enjoyment of baseball and the human factor therein.

This man, ladies and gentlemen, is the senior baseball writer for The New York Times. It's not clear to me why he's so proud of his ignorance, but there you go. Still, you might think someone would have a word and suggest that learning about the value of statistical analysis might help Chass write about one of the two biggest changes in baseball these past twenty years (the other being the internationalisation of the game).

Not to be outdone, here's a representative sample from Mr Plashke, poet laureate to the unfortunate Los Angeles Times. The story is headlined, if you can believe it, There's Trust In His Eyes:

Around the hotel table sat Dodgers executives discussing trades.

In the corner sat the old scout watching television.

Around the hotel table they were talking about dumping Milton Bradley and wondering whom they should demand from the Oakland A's in return.

In the corner sat the old scout who has never worked with radar gun, computer or even stopwatch.

Around the hotel room table, someone mentioned an unknown double-A outfielder named Andre Ethier.

In the corner, the old scout jumped.

"Wait a minute!" shouted Al LaMacchia. "I know Andre Ethier!"

In a gait slowed by years of climbing bleachers, LaMacchia walked over from the television to the table.

With Dodgers executives staring at him in amazement, the old scout began to sell.

He was on the phone, and it sounded as if he was crying.

"You're writing something about an old fella like me?" said Al LaMacchia.

He's 85, and he's been scouting for 51 years, and he can't believe anybody still cares.

I tell him I am writing the story because the Dodgers still care.

For the first time since Fred Claire was their last world championship general manager, the Dodgers are listening to their older scouts again.

They are reading reports scrawled in aging penmanship. They are evaluating players based on dusted-off instincts.

I should make it clear that I have not changed the punctuation. Plaschke really does write in one sentence paragraphs. Even if you can ignore the sheer gawd-help-us-ness of the writing, you might want to be bear in mind that the story is, essentially, a fraud.

As the invaluable firejoemorgan.com noted, Andre Ethier was so unknown that he was the Oakland Athletics' Minor League Player of the Year in 2005. Perhaps Plaschke thinks Billy Beane was employing the old Purloined Letter Strategy?

Chass and Plashke are not unrepresentative figures. There are, of course, diligent beat writers sprinkled across the country, but in general terms the quality of sports writing in this country's daily newspapers is appalling. Much of it is sentimental pap drenched in cheap perfume. That's bad enough, but to make matters worse baseball writers are proud of their ignorance. Most of these fellows still talk as though batting average and wins and RBIs were a meaningful measurement of a players' ability or contribution. You do not need to be a stathead to realise that these are junk statistics.

There's a wider point to be made here too, however. The political blogosphere is still, in some ways, catching up with the sporting blogosphere. Sports fans crashed the big media gates some time ago. In any major league city or any significant college town the chances are that the best, sharpest, most detailed and comprehensive coverage of big league baseball or college football is to be found online, not in the traditional mainstream media.

To give just a few examples: Bronx Banter beats the NYT's Yankees coverage every day.; John Perricone's Only Baseball Matters is required (and provocative) reading for San Francisco Giants fans. In college football, Brian Cook's Mgoblog does a better job covering Michigan football than any newspaper, while Sunday Morning Quarterback provides better and more useful college football analysis than ESPN and Sports Illustrated combined. The point isn't that these blogs are especially good, but that there are dozens more just like them. 

Now in some ways it is easier for bloggers to cover sports than it is for them to record politics. After all, the sport is delivered to your home. You're limited only by your Tivo capacity and the number of hours you 're prepared to spend on your site. Nonetheless, we can see something of the same beginning to happen to the political blogosphere too.

Magazines and newspapers embracing blogging is one thing (and my bet is that blogging will have an even greater impact on the style of reporting as time goes on an as more readers leave the inky edition behind); more significant, it seems, is the rise of enterprises such as Josh Marshall's Talking Points mini-empire. Who knows how many similar ventures will find the space and the backing they need? The point is that the market is responding to demand, eliminating a market inefficiency.

The big papers and the TV stations will still matter, but there'll be more and more original, accessible and dependable reporting online. That's a good thing, I believe, just as the boom in new voices and fresh perspective afforded by the internet has massively improved sports fans' ability to find worthwhile coverage of their favourite teams. It's happening; it's just a question of how quickly...

Come friendly bombs and fall on NRO?

Oh please. Rick Brookhiser thinks it wrong for John Derbyshire to adapt John Betjeman's most famous line - Come friendly bombs and fall on Slough/To make it ready for the plough - and, even more remarkably, that it was wrong for Betjeman to even write his poem, complaining about:

"...the sheer bad taste of calling on bombs a few years before the Battle of Britain, and during the Terror War when cities have already been bombed. (Betjeman didn't know exactly what was coming, but aerial bombardment was widely feared in the late thirties)."

You gotta love that "exactly", don't you? Still, presumably we can now add the poet to the ever-lengthening list of appeasers who invited the Luftwaffe to do their worst/best. Also: clearly Mr Brookhiser has never been to Slough.

What is it with this tedious literalism at National Review these days? Jonah Goldberg was at it only yesterday, still pretending - or perhaps, if one is to be charitable, believing - that anyone who suggests that many conservatives will indulge in the "stab in the back" theory once the United States withdraws from Iraq is explicitly comparing conservatives to Nazis. That's piffle of course, not least because the "Stab in the Back" explanation for Germany's failure to prevail in the First World War actually predates the foundation and rise of the NSDAP.

Putting that to one side, Mr Goldberg complains that there's no "there" there; that the "Stab in the Back" explanation for defeat is unpersuasive. Which does make it rather odd that he should then go ahead and, well, produce a version of that complaint:

This is not to say that I think blaming the liberal media is a particularly persuasive explanation on the merits for failure in Iraq (if we fail), but it's far from clear that an American defeat in Iraq helps those Democrats who seemed, fair or not, determined to make failure a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Can I make it clear that I don't think Jonah Goldberg is a Nazi? Good. But in as much as the "Stab in the Back" theory that proved appealing in Weimar Germany can be compared to the looming conservative fury and resentment over failure in Iraq, it's in the sense that failure can be attributed to a lack of will and the corrosive impact of internal dissent that weakened the state's ability to see the mission through and prevail rather than to any sense that the war was a mistake from the start or that, post-1916, the chances of German victory reduced considerably.

Mr Goldberg complains that Ross Douthat embraces the "Stab in the Back" theory "uncritically" and wonders why he does so. Perhaps because it's not very difficult to find evidence of conservatives' willingness to blame defeat upon domestic fifth columnists? Presumably those conservatives do not consider themselves Nazis, and it seems equally unlikely that Ross could be so described, so perhaps Mr Goldberg should rethink his oddly literal interpretation of the comparison with German reaction to the armistice in 1918?

Whisper it, but Rupert Murdoch is not in fact the Devil...

What is it about Rupert Murdoch that inspires such terror? The standard response is that he's not a serious journalist, that  - oddly! - he thinks owning newspapers gives him the right to have say as to what those papers should publish. What cheek! What affrontary!

Alongside this terrible prospect, there lies Murdoch's cheerful partisanship. Here, however, one cannot help but feel that it is the colour of the Dirty Digger's stripes that offends tender-hearted Americans more than the existence of those stripes.

Ken Auletta's New Yorker piece on Murdoch's battle to win control of the Wall Street Journal is quite a piece of work. In 7,500 words he manages to avoid quoting anyone who is relaxed about, let alone in favour of, Mr Murdoch's takeover bid.  I have no problem with this fair and balanced approach of course, but suspect that an article so slanted in the other direction - ie, a pro-Rupert piece - would have brought howls of outrage from the New York/Washington media cognoscenti. That's just a hunch however.

Then again, Mr Auletta's case is not altogether persuasive. It is, of course, possible that Murdoch will allow his other commercial interests to interfere with the Journal's coverage. It has, as the New Yorker and Slate's Jack Shafer have each demonstrated, a question upon which Mr Murdoch has previous form. But the Journal is not The Sun or The New York Post. It is not even The Times. A management or editorial strategy perfectly appropriate for those newspapers might not be the most advantageous way to run the Journal. And since the only thing Mr Murdoch likes more than playing with his newspapers is making money, one might think he would probably appreciate that the Journal's profitability  rests, in large part, upon its reputation for honest and, in as much as this can ever be achieved, impartial reporting.  That being so, it would not be in his interests to dent that reputation. (The test will most likely be seen with the Wall Street Journal Asia, rather than with its US edition). Now it's true that tycoons are not immune to foolishness, but it does seem silly not to at least allow for the fact that the Journal's unique place in American journalism might mean it would be treated differently from Mr Murdoch's other properties.

Still, Mr Auletta's article is often amusing, though unintentionally so. Do you think it shocking that Murdoch likes to talk to his editors? Or that he likes to appoint editors who, broadly-speaking, share or are sympathetic to his worldview? You are shocked? My, you're a fragile soul aren't you? And, yes, many of those editors are indeed of a conservative persuasion. Too bad there ain't (at least not yet) a law against that.

Of course, it's a nonsense to pretend that the Sulzbergers or the Grahams don't interfere at the New York Times or the Washington Post either. Indeed, Mr auletta admits they do: Arthur "Pinch" sulzberger lieks to have a say in more appointments than you might imagine, including, according to former ombudsman Daniel Okrent, the post of foreign editor. Naturally this is presented as a matter of proper, concerned, paternal interest: were the anecdote told about Mr Murdoch you can bet it would be interpreted as the vicious interfering of a bullying tycoon.

There's nothing wrong with this of course. But those who faint any time any of Mr Murdoch's papers take a political view on any subject might pause to remember that the much-vaunted cathedrals of American journalism are only notionally more independent than Mr Murdoch's papers. You try running a campaign against affirmative action at the New York Times and see how long you keep your job.

The people who come off worst in Mr Auletta's piece, however, are the ghastly Bancroft family themselves. The Journal's owners, rather remarkably, seem keen to sell to Mr Murdoch on the condition that they, not he, continue to run the company. Who do these people think they are?

[At the meeting between the Bancrofts and Murdoch] discussion focussed on whether Murdoch could be trusted to keep his distance from news coverage, and what kind of independent board could assure this. The Bancrofts wanted a board that the family would control in perpetuity, with the power to hire and fire the editors and the publishers, and leverage to protect employees from Murdoch—an extraordinary proposition. It is a measure of Murdoch’s discipline that he did not explode at the implication that he was some sort of uncaged vulgarian or at the idea that the Bancrofts would control the paper after selling it. Instead, Murdoch said—gently, by all accounts—that he could not invest five billion dollars of his shareholders’ money in order to become a mere spectator.

Of course, most of the rest of Mr Auletta's piece is precisely designed to endorse the principle that Mr Murdoch is indeed an uncaged vulgarian. The Bancrofts are fools however: if they wanted to encourage Mr Murdoch to gut the Journal by way of revenge or just to show them who the new boss really is, then this would have been exactly the attitude I would have advised them to strike. If their nightmares come true then they'll have deserved everything they get.

(Disclosure: I've written about this subject before, but I should also say that I've never worked for a Murdoch-owned company, though I do know plenty of people who have, some of them in senior positions.)

What happens when the barbarians are actually quite civilised?

Ezra Klein explains the new media universe to "traditional" journalists who don't understand it. As a neophyte blogger who also paddles in inky waters, I'd say Klein is right and, more importantly, it's a good thing that he's right. If it didn't so clearly reek of self-interest it might be curious that journalists who have, often for good reason, spent the last thirty years undermining institutional authority should be so put-out when the same forces are suddenly applied to their (our) grubby trade. As it is, it's just amusing.