Power play

Matt Stoller's important criticism of local newspapers' political endorsement practices -- go read it first -- seems to miss one key fact: the meritless conservatives that tend to receive these endorsements are entrenched incumbents, who usually wield quite a bit of local power. If you run a small-market newspaper, one that gets jerked around both by its apathetic national parent company and its priggish local advertisers, the last thing you want to do is piss off an entrenched political network by endorsing its challenger. You're going to lose revenue and alienate a lot of important people.

Hence why, for example, the Rochester (NY) Democrat and Chronicle prints crap like this:

[GOP Rep. Randy] Kuhl for most of his time in Congress has been a strong supporter of the unpopular Bush administration. Now as a junior member of the minority, he can't boast of much Washington clout.

That's the backdrop. But it doesn't consider a key fact: Kuhl has grown in office. He has strengthened already strong ties to the district, which covers much of the Southern Tier and includes all or parts of nine towns in Monroe County. He's become a more confident, informed, less defensive lawmaker in sync with his district.

[Challenger Eric] Massa is encyclopedic on the issues but his scope is more national than local. This district can't afford politicians who fight the big battles but fail to connect adequately to the needs and aspirations of their constituents.

Kuhl can do it. He must do it. He is the Democrat and Chronicle's choice in the 29th District.

Basically, this says "Eric Massa's a sharp guy who knows what's right for America, but Randy Kuhl hangs around our advertisers' offices a lot, so he's our guy." Stoller's partially right to say that papers like to claim the centrist high ground -- but we shouldn't forget also that local politics, on the streets and in newsprint, are still driven by power as much as ideology.

UPDATE (10/22): Just while we're talking about him: Randy Kuhl is a huge douche.

Roundup -- Now With Exclamation Points! (!)

Boy oh boy has it been a rolling start here on campus -- Spring Break was all well and good, but there's nothing to get that blood pumping like good old-fashioned grey Cambridge drizzle for fucking days on end! Woo-eee! I'm so excited I'm mixing up my ironic exclamations!

Seriously, great roundup for you tonight. First a note -- to your left is the Peace Dollar, issued in the 1920s and 30s. I got one from my late grandfather last week; it's the most remarkable piece of currency I've come across (and I say this coming from a country that routinely puts beavers on its money). There's something comforting in the knowledge that, at one point, our government had no qualms about printing such hippie-ish designs; hopefully, in the next few years, we'll be able to use this wonderful image less wistfully. (And I'm sure President Kucinich would be up for a reissue.)

Meanwhile though -- to arms!

--Josh Marshall thinks that photo of John McCain in Baghdad is a latter-day Dukakis tank moment -- except way more substantial and significant. As usual Marshall's quite right. (Here's a sentence we never thought we'd find ourselves saying about John McCain: "if only they'd nominated him first...")

--In case you still need convincing that the electability argument is bullshit, Sifu Tweety of Poor Man has your back. Read it all. Then for dessert read the next post down, The Editors' hilarious demolition of Jonah Goldberg:

...in my head, I have a brain. Using this “brain”, I am able to determine that the conservative movement - meaning the people who control the White House, who until recently controlled the Congress, their political operatives, seamlessly integrated with the media apparatchiks who “work” at places like National Review - is a lot more important than what some dude I never heard of said this one time, particularly when the only reason I know this dude exists is because you douchebags won’t shut the fuck up about him. Hence my lack of interest.

--Speaking of The Corner: I guess when conservatives say "support our troops," they mean "support our troops, not the British troops, those pansies." I wish I were making this up. And I still haven't quite parsed Derbyshire's whopping statement that "whether or not I could stand up well to torture, I expect Marines to."

--Of course perhaps I'm just expecting too much from these people. We are talking about men whose reaction to the Iran crisis is -- quoting verbatim from Fred Barnes -- "Hey, they could use American ships!" (Kondracke later added that we should "put the whammy on them." Honestly, FOX News could just replace all its commentators with eight-year-old Hulk Hogan fans, it'd be a lot cheaper.)

--I was struck by this graph, posted by Jerome a Paris in an excellent Kos diary. Note that the last time the top few had such a large share of national income was the late 1920s, roughly 1928. History concentrators: what happened to our economy right after that? Hmm...

--Speaking of crashes, Chris Matthews has gone off the deep end. (Well... *further* off the deep end.)

--I should have known it existed: grammar blogging. Sample quote: "the understood verb phrase inside the though-clause has to mean something that does not correspond to a syntactic constituent in the antecedent main clause." I barely understand 1/3 of this blog and yet I can't stop reading it. For instance -- and here's another sentence I never expected to write -- this discussion of gerunds is hilarious.

--Over at Slate, hidden behind a sensationalistic title about Grand Theft Auto, is a thought-provoking article about liberal activist culture and the need for individual empowerment. This one will require some digesting.

--Fred Thompson's campaign is over; if he even hints at running, executives from Bravo will have to personally assassinate him. This is America, TV comes first.

--Did you know that Lee Atwater destroyed funk and invented gansta rap? Me neither! (Apparently MC Rove is just part of a long Republican tradition.)

--OK, one more shameless link to mockery of conservative bloggers -- Michelle Malkin has been reduced to delusional fantasies about Frank Capra, and it's really just too easy. HuffPo's Chris Kelly does a great job though ("Stirring words. It's like Pat Benatar wrote Braveheart").

--Apparently our generation is called "millenials," and there's a whole group of people dedicated to getting us more involved in politics. This introduction to the issues involved is worth a read, particularly in the way it (correctly) characterizes our understanding of community and and the public. More detailed writing is at Future Majority, a blog dedicated to youth-voter issues. Look forward to more from these people.

AND that's all I got. Let me close with a wonderful quote from Richard Nixon, as revealed in Henry Kissinger's secret transcripts; his wisdom still rings true today.

"Goddamn newspapers—they're a bunch of sluts," Nixon said. In another taped conversation, two weeks later, he said, "I don't give a goddamn about repression, do you?" "No," Kissinger replied.

Our President, ladies and gentlemen! (Slow clap.)

This is an open thread.

Tough times on Newsprint Row

In another sign that the newspaper industry is headed for a "forced realignment of expectations", the Boston Herald recently muscled a 26-month salary freeze out of its news union. This comes is part of a very bad decade for newspaper balance sheets across the country, with readership in decline and advertising revenues squirting blood.

Of course, this comes in contrast to the continually-profitable online arms of both newspapers (and the ballooning readership of the cutthroat, satire-drenched Dig). It's easy to see this as a Big Win for blogs and for sarcasm, and, as much as I would like to trumpet that line, I don't think it's so simple, and I don't think it's time for shit-eating grins from the armchair editors. Instead, I think it warrants some serious thought into what exactly media's going to look like in a few years—and how the citizen media will start to replace good ol' temperate media in the years to come.

I do worry, though, that Harvard hasn't caught on to this yet. I think the Crimson is starting to realize it, and there's certainly no shortage of campus would-be entrepreneurs looking to capitalize on this whole In-tar-net confab. But there's still a lot of people here who believe that journalism is going to look like the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal from here to eternity. Fact is, it's not—and that's regardless of what normative assessment you place on that change. Newspapers are in serious trouble, and we need to figure out how we're going to account for their decline.