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Media Analysis of the Day

From Marc Ambinder comes this comparative list of Mitt Romney and healthcare headlines:

Romney favors national health care modeled on Massachusetts plan, Glen Johnson, AP

Romney Won't Adapt Mass. Plan, Perry Bacon Jr., Washington Post

Romney's Federal Prescription, Mary Jacoby and Sarah Lueck, Wall Street Journal

Romney to Pitch a State-by-State Health Insurance Plan, Michael Luo, NY Times

Romney to detail his healthcare Rx, Lisa Wangsness, Boston Globe

And liberals wonder why people can't understand the complexities and nuances of the healthcare debate.

TNR: To Suck or Not to Suck?

Kathy G is pretty pissed off about how much the New Republic sucks. Matt Zeitlin calls her "hyperbolic," writing, "of all the times to bash TNR, NOW IS NOT THE TIME. They are trying to make a deliberate, concerted move to the left under Frank Foer...Shouldn’t we be welcoming TNR’s turn to the left, instead of looking to the past and their occasional counter intuitive silliness as if we want to hate them?" I think there's something to be said for the fact that TNR very much is moving left, but at the same time I also think it's pretty hard not to be continually upset over the magazine's recent history. I mean, really, her examples are pretty good. If you want the ultimate listing of The Sins of The New Republic, this article is it: enough bigotry, white privilege, male-focused just about everything, and smug counter-intuitivism to make anyone want to shake their heads, not too much mention a remarkably thorough history of supporting any number of bad government policies and opposing any number of good ones.

Zeitlin is right that Republicans are 99% responsible for these things, but TNR in fact is a really, really influential magazine, for just the reasons Kathy G nails: While pointing out some of the good writers and interesting articles that do come from TNR, she writes:

But if you focus on the high points of TNR, you miss the forest for the trees. As a journalistic institution, TNR plays a unique role in the development of policy and politics. Its circulation has always been low (and in recent years has declined drastically), but many of the people who read it are very powerful: media elites, D.C. lobbyists and activists, and policymakers in the White House and the Senate, and on Capitol Hill. If TNR supports a particular policy or idea, that carries serious weight, especially when what it supports is conservative. It enables the right to say, “Even the liberal New Republic endorses X,” and that has tremendous credibility and resonance. It doesn’t matter if 19 out of 20 articles in a given issue are liberal; the one wingnutty one out of the 20 will, by virtue of its setting, be all the more influential.

And that's sort of the dark side, if you will, of the magazine: Despite its degree to which it is continually interesting and worth reading, all too often the higher-ups hire people to write things that really shouldn't be written in any magazine left of The Weekly Standard. And whenever some crazy, wingnut idea gets into the pages of TNR, suddenly it's "bipartisan" or "moderate" instead of just crazy.

When Bloggers Nerd Out

Dude, Andrew Sullivan just linked to my last article.

The Growing Irrelevancy of Alexander Cockburn

Alexander Cockburn is possibly the single most irrelevant writer on the left today. Sure, there are some lesser names that are certainly crazier, but Cockburn actually gets his name in a prominent publication, which I think pushes him ahead: People actually read what he has to say. The August 27 issue of The Nation has an article by him called "How the Democrats Blew it in Only 8 Months." Now this certainly is almost nothing compared to his occasional global warming denial, but it stands out on this day for just being, well, kind of stupid and whiny.

Cockburn opens by writing, "Led by Democrats since the start of this year, Congress now has a 'confidence' rating of 14 percent, the lowest since Gallup started asking the question in 1973 and five points lower than Republicans scored last year." True, but similar polls show that the public has a significantly higher view of the Democratic members of Congress than the Republican ones, which pretty much ruins whatever point he's trying to make here. "So are we better or worse off since the Democrats won back Congress?," he later asks. He doesn't say, but the obvious implication is we're worse. But that's just stupid. This sort of pre-Florida-in-2000 leftist mindset is tired and old at this point. If you really think there aren't important differences between the two major parties, you should really stop being a political pundit because you've effectively become political useless.

To Cockburn's credit, however, he does make one absolutely accurate point:

People didn't like it when I wrote here a month ago that the antiwar movement was at a low ebb. They invoke the polls showing that 70 percent of Americans want the troops to come home. This is presumptuous, like a barking dog claiming it made the moon go down. It didn't take an antiwar movement to make the people antiwar. People looked at the casualty figures and the newspaper headlines and drew the obvious conclusion that the war is a bust.

On that note, at least, Cockburn is completely correct. But it's an apt critique of the slightly crazy left, of which Cockburn is himself a member.

Making Careers out of Being Safely Wrong

Ross Douthat writes:

In other words, careerism doesn't shape what people write so much as it shapes what they don't write. I certainly notice this in my own writing: I can't think of any opinions I've expressed that I didn't wholeheartedly believe (at least at the moment I expressed them), but I can certainly think of opinions that have gone unexpressed because I'm more circumspect about what lines I cross (and what people I risk offending) than perhaps I should be. And I'm a wannabe pundit, with a much weaker set of "don't break ranks" career incentives than someone who's angling for a government job.

But this is a complicated issue, of course, because sometimes a kind of careerism is the better part of valor: If you have an opinion that will push you beyond the pale of whatever circle you hope to influence, then it's not always obvious that expressing that opinion is the right way to go. This is more true for politicians than for policy wonks, and more true for wonks than pundits, and for pundits in the age of the blogosphere, which has widened the spectrum of "acceptable" debate a bit, it's less true than it used to be. And of course, it depends on how important the issue in question happens to be, and how settled the debate on the question is. I wouldn't think less of a conservative think-tanker hoping for a job that requires Senate confirmation for keeping his views on, say, the gold standard or the constitutionality of Brown vs. Board of Education to himself; on the other hand, if you were a left-of-center foreign policy analyst who thought the Iraq War was an awfully bad idea and didn't say so, I think it's fair to say that your "discretion" erred too much on the side of careerism.                                                    

Clearly it's correct that there are degrees of careerism, but I think that obscures the point somewhat.
Matthew Yglesias has gotten some criticism not for discussing the first kind of careerism, but for the Really Major Issues second type. The problem, of course, is that it's difficult to differentiate between the calculating careerists who screw up the country and the True Believers who screw up the country. But in the end, the country is screwed just the same.

Brad Warthen: Media Cliche

Brad Warthen knows John Edwards is a "big phony." How does he know this? Because he saw Edwards looking tired before a campaign appearance and then proceed to put on a big smile when he went on stage. Then when Edwards came to The State seeking an endorsement he eventually got, Edwards didn't stay long enough to greet all the staff, unlike Howard Dean. And once while he was schmoozing with other press types, he heard Edwards went jogging while people were waiting for him at a rally. Warthen admits that Edwards  probably really believes all that stuff about helping the poor, but Brad Warthen doesn't believe it. As such: phony.

The American Prospect: As Bad as Scott Beauchamp

Who, it turned out, wasn't actually so bad. But such trivial details do not hinder bastions of conservative intellect like the National Review's blog from denigrating another liberal source: The American Prospect, in fact. "As the Beauchamp scandal winds down," Michael Rubin writes, "it's important to realize that outright fabrication for the sake of politics is not uncommon." Apparently Mark Goldberg made fun of him in TAP Online a few years ago. Being a tad sensitive, Rubin claims that "his lack of integrity marks any publication for which he writes." Then there's some bit about Robert Dreyfuss and a strange line where he calls TAP"advocacy journalism" in a derogatory tone. Peculiar, since the last I recall, NR doesn't exactly claim objectivity.

Cross-posted at TAPPED.

Who Am I?

The folks over at ABC's All My Children message board are trying to figure out who I am after someone linked to a post of mine about Rudy Giuliani and Mitt Romney's aversion to the CNN-YouTube debate. My favorite response is from ny_viewer, who calls me "Barry's brother," which I am tempted to make my new headline. But northfanz28 brings me back down to reality: "Who he is doesnt matter. He's just a political blogger."

Quote of the Day

"Do they imagine there was an editorial meeting where Brad Plumer said 'let's run an editorial about how the US should withdraw from Iraq' and Foer countered, saying 'nah, too obvious, instead of coming out against the war let's make up a story about killing dogs' and everyone cheered while Lawrence Kaplan sulked in the corner?" -Matthew Yglesias on certain right-wingers.

What Obama is Reading

Barack Obama's campaign subscribes to, among other things, The American Prospect, The National Review, Sojourners, Foreign Affairs, and The Washington Monthly.