And it gets quite interesting.
First off, the blogger they had write it up is Dave Weigel - a writer at Reason, amongst other places. Wasn't a great omen...
Anyway, the panel I sat on ("Three People Who Helped Change Congress") included Siddarth (Macaca) and Lane Hudson. It was moderated by Adam Green of MoveOn and will be televised on C-Span sometime this week.
Flip for an extended rant...
Weigel starts his piece off pretty uncontroversially... by calling me one of the most controversial bloggers and reciting some of my exploits. Unfortunately, he cites LGF for my CPAC work and for my most recent adventure, he cites the National Journal's Hotline blogger, Conn Carrol.
The latter was really too bad. The truth is, there's clear personal animus between Conn and I. I think he's a bastard and I've made that clear. He thinks I'm an asshole and he's made that clear to me. Why he's still writing about me is a question for the next Blogger Ethics Panel.
So I provided Dave with an alternative narrative:
weigel goes on:
...Stark argued that the media wasn't doing the dirty work of getting corrupt politicians to answer for their sleaze.
"I think when the mainstream media get a story," said Mr Stark, "they think: 'Is this interesting to Homer Simpson?'" In other words, is a story simple enough to appeal to stupid people? That obviously clashed with Mr Stark's argument that the media are too wimpy to ask hard questions of Republicans, as his George Allen smackdown got national attention. "The only thing I regret was that instead of saying 'Sen. Allen, did you ever spit on your wife,' I should have shouted 'Sen. Allen, tell us about your arrest records."
I left an extended comment in Weigel's blogpost, but I skipped over this and want to address it here. He says that somehow my idea that we've got editors evaluating news with an eye towards Homer Simpson somehow clashes with the idea that the George Allen "smackdown" got national attention...
Honestly, I'm dumbfounded. Or maybe just dumb. Can someone explain to me how the media's coverage of WWF meets politics doesn't prove my point exactly? How the fact that I feel the need to ask the most over-the-top questions I can so that I can push the media to cover the story doesn't play into the Homer Simpson theory?
The truth is that I've often been embarrassed to admit that many of the things I do amount to "JackAss" politics. I'm not so embarrassed for me - I know I'm stooping because I have to in this media climate... No... No... and No again... I'm not embarrassed for me... I'm embarrassed for our media and the mentally docile electorate they've trained. It's embarrassing that in the greatest country in the world one has to pull stunts to spark conversation. We shouldn't need people like me... like Michael Moore...
So yeah, the entire previous excerpt is pretty opaque to me...
There's a bunch more, but let me close with this bit:
I asked Stark exactly how he thinks that could change. Why would journalists who have to work stories every day irritate and alienate their sources?
"Look, the politicians need the media," he said. "They can't blow off everyone; they have to have that exposure. If every reporter was asking hard questions then they couldn't just isolate a Helen Thomas [the long-time White House reporter, now a columnist, whose seat in the White House press room was taken away after one confrontation] and make an example of her."
How's Mr Stark going to convert every reporter into a muckraker? "It's going to take a movement."
My answer (in his comments):
Second, re: irritating your sources... My point is that the powerful should not be your sources in an adversarial press relationship. Develop other sources. Your defense here indicates that you've got no problem with Judith Miller's stenography. She certainly didn't irritate or alienate Scooter Libby or any of her other neocon insiders... The ultimate disgust: the "aspens" letter from Scooter to Judith. Leaving all implications of conspiracy off the table, what this indicates to me and every other semi-conscious observer is that even now, Miller isn't angry that she was used as a misinformation tool of the neo-cons.
3700 dead in Iraq. and Judith feels no pain... That, to many of us on the left, is the penultimate complaint about today's DC insider circuit. All sense of duty and honor has been lost.
Instead, today's young reporters, reporters like yourself, trained in the DC method, think it is more appropriate to question my skepticism that to confront the powerful.
I had a really long drive today, and I'm really, really tired. But this caught my eye. I hope the interaction of some of these youngish reporters with the blogosphere eventually works to all of our benefits...