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| Tuesday, January 6, 2004 |
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There's something not happening here, and you know what it is, don't you, Mr. Jones? 
| | Driving around yesterday, I caught a couple minutes of Dick Morris on the Sean Hannity radio show. Hannity is a right-wing talk host of the Limbaugh school: good humored, simplistic, self-righteous, entertaining. For political fist pounders like Hannity, Howard Dean has become the new Bill Clinton: a human punching bag. And right now the target couldn't be bigger. Dean is on the cover of so many magazines — including both Time and Newsweek — that I lost count of them at the newsstand yesterday. Even the New Yorker called out Who is Howard Dean? with 60-point type from a promotional flyleaf on its cover. |
| | Hannity, of course, had been pounding Dean ceaselessly in the half hour leading up to the Morris call (and for who knows how long before that...I wasn't listening). Morris gave Hannity some of what the host wanted: a prediction of failure for Dean against Bush. But Morris also gave Hannity something the host had no idea how to counter: an unwelcome commentary on the bashing itself. |
| | The amazing thing about Dean, Morris said, is that he is strengthened rather than weakened by all the punches he takes — both from the media, and from his rival Democratic candidates, whose own punches are delivered again, repeatedly, by the same media. That strength, Morris said, comes from the source of his support: connected citizens on the Internet. |
| | In so many words, Morris dismissed Hannity and his breed — which included all the major media, including those doing their best to remain objective — as worse than irrelevant, worse than obsolete. They were detached from the new grass roots process by which Dean was only the first visible product. This guy not only gets rah-rah support from his consituency, Morris said. He gets money. Lots of it. When he gets bashed, he just takes it to the Net, and raises more money. Morris made it clear that he shared some of Hannity's opinions: that in fact Dean had made many gaffes, had flip-flopped on many issues, had spoken too soon or too late about too many topics, had given his rivals an endless supply of grist for the usual rival-bashing mill — and that none of those things mattered as much as the real story, which was that Dean's candidacy was made, and would continue to be made, by networked constituents with which Dean related. Dean was a "one to one" candidate, Morris said. He got his power from the people. Not from The Media. And not from the party apparatus that was busy spinning "Doubts About Dean" (the Newsweek cover headline). |
| | In years past, some part of me would have wanted to call the Hannity show and say something — to fantasize about my own small voice as one tiny lever, momentarily operating inside a vast machine. |
| | Instead I just thought I might write about it later, confident that whatever I might say would have whatever effect it might deserve, on its own merits, in the vast marketplace for voices we call the Web. |
| | On Saturday, Jay Rosen wrote Horse Race Now! Horse Race Tomorrow! Horse Race Forever!, about the prevailing breed of sports metaphor long favored by political insiders and major media alike. It points out the woeful inadequacies of sports as a master narrative framework for truly networked politics. How clueless, irresponsible and utterly predictible it is for political reporters to completely miss what's really going on with Dean. How the Net is innately far more supportive of democratic processes than The Media ever were, or ever will be. |
| | Jay draws a very insightful connection between "inside" reporting on politics and and "inside" reporting on sports, baseball in particular: |
| | How is it you know you're the press? Because you have a pass that says PRESS, and people open the gate. The locker room doors admit you. The story must be inside that gate; that's why they give us credentials. We get closer. We tell the fans what's going on. And if this was your logic, Bill James tried to bust it. Fellahs, said he to the baseball press, you have to realize that you are the gate. Your clichés, and the athlete's clichés and the clichés of the coaches are a barrier between fans and the beauty of the game. James was a radical. He was out to destroy and re-build. What he said was: access means zip. You can learn more from the outside. |
| | In a few hours, my own press pass will get me into the "media" corral at Steve Jobs' keynote at Macworld. If the room is set up like it was the last two years, the event will be broadcast live over Net media, but there will be no Net-connected wi-fi to allow those attending to write about the event in real time. In other words, the outside will be more inside than the literal insiders. Those watching the show from their own computers will be able to write about it long before the reporters who are on the scene. Interesting what that says about journalism, no? |
| | That irony notwithstanding, it's going to be interesting to see what new metaphors replace sports and war for describing Net-supported political processes, from presidential elections to the road-fixing mechanics of ordinary governance. War and sports won't go away. But some other metaphor will come to describe more of what's really going on in a field where networked citizens get smarter faster than the insititutions that that govern them. |
Remembering
| | I just put up the last of three galleries of pictures from Mom's life: the middle third, when we lived in New Jersey, from 1946 to 1974. These were the years of the family that was. It was a terrific, happy time. Mom and Pop truly loved each other, their kids, their lives, their family, their community. My sister and I were lucky kids. Still are, in fact. |
| | By one reader's request, here's a list of URLs from blogs last August when Mom came to the end of her long and happy life: |
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