Notice something odd in the recent news?

Yesterday, former New England Patriot football player Aaron Hernandez apparently committed suicide in prison. His family and their lawyer have already called for an investigation because they do not believe Hernandez would have killed himself. After all, a few days ago, he was acquitted of some serious charges. And they presumably knew him best. On the other hand, Hernandez was serving life in prison without parole and his ex-teammates visited the Trump White House yesterday.

This news seemed especially unusual to me because a number of other prominent -- even notorious -- convicted killers and sex offenders have been found dead in prison in recent days and weeks. Locally, an 86-year old ex-priest convicted of sexually abusing 29 children died in prison in early March. 

That death seemed like natural causes given the age, but a series of recently reported prison deaths seems weird...perhaps statistically improbable:

Remember the Washington (state) mall shooter? He died earlier this week. April 17, BBC:

A man accused of killing five people at a shopping mall in Washington state has been found hanging inside his prison cell, say officials. 

Arcan Cetin, 20, who had been awaiting trial for the mass shooting in 2016, was found dead in the Snohomish County Jail on Sunday night.

Remember that Utah doctor who killed his wife, the former beauty queen? Washington Post, April 10:

61-year-old MacNeill was found unresponsive and declared dead at the Olympus Facility at the Utah State Prison in Draper, where he was doing time for his 2014 conviction of first-degree murder, second-degree obstruction of justice and second-degree forcible sex abuse. 

Prison officials said in a statement that MacNeill’s death is being investigated, though there were “no obvious signs of foul play.” 

This next case did not involve prominent killers or offenders, but it did involve multiple deaths. Thus, it made the national news less than two weeks ago. CNN, April 7:

Four inmates were found dead at a South Carolina prison, a spokesperson for the Department of Corrections said. 

Guards found the four men at 10:35 a.m. in a dorm at Kirkland Correctional Institution, a state maximum security site outside Columbia that holds approximately 15,000 offenders, said Sommer Sharpe.... 

The deaths "don't appear to be natural," Richland County Coroner Gary Watts told CNN affiliate WIS.

Three weeks ago, the locally-notorious "Angel of Death" serial killer (March 30):

A former nurse's aide dubbed the "Angel of Death" after he admitted killing three dozen hospital patients in Ohio and Kentucky died Thursday, two days after he was attacked and beaten in his prison cell. 

Donald Harvey, who was serving multiple life sentences, was found injured in his cell Tuesday afternoon at the state prison in Toledo, officials said. A patrol report said the 64-year-old was beaten when an unnamed person entered his cell.

Trying to recall the details of these recent incidents, I searched on Google and found a surprisingly long list of prison deaths. I'm not going to link to more of them.

Many of these deaths are first reported as suicide and some happened to older men, who seemingly died of natural causes. However, at least a few of the deaths seem suspicious, involving murder or under-explained violence in prison. Examining this string of deaths seems like (a) a potentially interesting question for a social scientist or student; (b) an important question for public policy makers responsible for securing prisons; and/or (c) the makings of a conspiracy-laden movie.

I should note that some investigative reporters have been down this road.

For anyone interested, here are other prominent examples I found in a quick search:

In 2015, an infamous California prisoner was killed after being moved into the general prison population.

Also in 2015: an Olympics gymnastics coach accused of child porn and molestation was found dead in prison.

In 2013, the Cleveland man who infamously held multiple women hostage for years in his home was found dead in prison.


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ISSS-ISAC Austin 2014

Last weekend, I traveled to Austin, TX, for the annual joint meeting of the International Security Studies Section of the International Studies Association and the International Security and Arms Control Section of the American Political Science Association. Luckily, the groups had not previously shortened the name to ISIS. It is still known as the ISSS-ISAC meeting.

The event opens with a keynote speaker and a reception. These sessions occurred on Friday night, but during some past meetings they have occurred on Thursday with the conference ending Saturday at noon. The opening evening is followed by a full day of panels, concluding with another guest speaker and a dinner in the evening. Indeed, all the meals during this long day are provided as part of the registration fee. The final day ends at noon, but breakfast is also provided. This year, the panels were on Saturday-Sunday.

Because the conference is brief and relatively small, attendees seem to feel obliged to remain at the event and attend panels or network with other participants. Dining together probably also contributes to the social environment. The meetings definitely provide a nice opportunity to catch up with colleagues who share an interest in security politics and meet graduate students and junior faculty from around the country. Next year's conference is in Springfield, MA, and will be hosted by Jon Western of Mount Holyoke and Duck of Minerva.

On Saturday afternoon, I participated in a panel on “Images of Terrorism and Counter Terrorism” and delivered my paper, "The Dark Knight and the National Security State." This is a significantly revised version of a paper I delivered in August at a humanities conference in Scotland. Yes, I delivered yet another academic paper on Batman and the war on terrorism.

This latest version of the paper considers the conversation around a popular film like The Dark Knight as a potential public sphere, conceivably igniting important discussions about otherwise unchallenged national security issues and assumptions. I have long been interested in public deliberation and thus some of the paper might seem familiar based on my past blogging. I discuss the well-known problems about public debate on security issues, particularly during conditions of crisis (high threat and "state of emergency"): secrecy, executive branch dominance, lack of participation, etc. Even the mass media is stymied by these factors, which means that the coverage in the media is framed around war and security (the Copenhagen's "securitization" literature is relevant here). The media also "indexes" their reports to executive branch sources.

Comments on this paper would be welcome.

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Cliché Time: Lies, Damn Lies & Statistics

If I had more time, I'd examine this June 25 Courier-Journal op-ed by John David Dyche in more detail. Dyche fills his paragraphs with "facts," implying that this means it is not biased or distorted in any way.

Wrong.

Here's a sample of the mediocy:

The Urban Institute-Brookings Tax Policy Center estimates that 46 percent of households will not pay federal income tax for 2011. The Heritage Foundation asserts that in 1984 only 14.8 percent of the population paid no federal income tax.

Obviously, Dyche is trying to imply that the U.S. has so expanded the social welfare state that few Americans now pay income taxes. Compared to 1984, that is obviously untrue. Rather, the problem is that since 1984, the wealthiest Americans have acquired a far greater share of the country's wealth and capture a very large portion of annual income. Just between 2002 and 2007, the wealthiest captured two-thirds of all income growth. The data over the last 30 years is particularly depressing. And since 2008, the Great Recession has further concentrated wealth and massively increased poverty at the bottom.

Moreover, the Earned Income Tax Credit explains some of the change as well.

Dyche also ignores the payroll tax.

This set of "facts" from the op-ed is also misleading:

NPR, using inflation-adjusted dollars, reports that, “In 1962, federal spending was $707 billion and accounted for 18 percent of U.S. GDP. In 2011, federal spending was $3.1 trillion and accounted for 24 percent of GDP.” As recently as 2008, total federal spending was about $2.5 trillion, and the long term, historical average of federal spending is 20 percent of GDP.

Why pick 1962 as the baseline? That was before Johnson's Great Society, so it ignores Medicare, Medicaid, etc. Does Dyche mean to suggest that America was a better place when those social welfare protections were not in place? The "long term, historical average" is fairly ridiculous since the U.S. had fairly limited federal spending until the Great Depression. The social safety net that is in place helps protect against the wild economic swings capitalism periodically suffers.

One fact Dyche did not note: federal revenues (thanks to tax cuts, as well as the recession) are now lower than they have been as a portion of GDP in over 60 years. Obviously, deficits would be much lower if taxes on the wealthy had not been repeatedly reduced. What was the top rate in 1962? Answer: over 90%!!

Incidentally, a significant portion of current spending is debt service, meaning that higher revenues over the past 30 years would have meant a lot less government spending now.


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Media bias

Does mass media have a liberal bias? Conservatives, of course, frequently claim that it does have such a bias.

However, as I've taught my students in American Foreign Policy for many years, talk-radio is dominated by the right, newspapers and television are increasingly corporate, Fox News is obviously right-leaning, and "regular" liberal reporters embrace norms of fairness that cause them to report balanced information even when there's no justification -- such as on climate change.

I previously meant to blog this Paul Waldman item, which speaks to media quoting of conservative or liberal think tanks. From The American Prospect, October 2010:

Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR), a progressive group that opposes media bias and censorship, reports that progressive groups have seen their proportion of media citations steadily rise in recent years.

But the left is still chasing the right. The Center for American Progress is probably the signature success of recent liberal institution building; its 2008 budget was $26.3 million. But the Heritage Foundation, its closest competitor on the right, spent $64.6 million that year. The left's think tanks get quoted more than they used to, reports FAIR, but the right's think tanks still get quoted more than the left's. In 2008, conservative think tanks made up 31 percent of all think-tank citations, while progressive think tanks made up 21 percent. The gap has narrowed but not disappeared.

Waldman actually provides a good deal of interesting information about progressive attempts to build a media network to counter the conservative successes. However, as Waldman notes, Air America's failure demonstrates one huge hurdle faced by those making the effort to build liberal counterparts to Fox News and Rush Limbaugh. Progressives

seek out outlets like National Public Radio that are less combative and more factual. It shouldn't be surprising that a substantial body of social-psychological research has found that conservatives tend to be less tolerant of ambiguity than liberals.

In one of my college Communications classes, the professor gave students a test that determined one's degree of dogmatism. It turned out that I was the least dogmatic person in the class.

My debate colleague at the time, incidentally, was the most dogmatic person in the class -- though he wasn't a conservative so far as I know.


Note: This item was pulled at random from my huge stack of "to-be-blogged" material. Sorry for the lack of blogging lately. I've been fairly active on Twitter, which makes me a better reader, but I just have not been in the mood to blog. I'm going to try to reduce the stack of items pulled from magazines and newspapers because it would be nice to have someplace to find these items when I try to recall where I put something.




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Squashfest 2011

Tonight was Squashfest in Louisville. Courier-Journal reporter Ron Mikulak, who recently wrote an article about the annual event, was in attendance along with several dozen others -- newbies and veterans alike.

Question from the event: Should published poets get credit for their creative work -- even if the work under discussion is simply a silly Haiku about squash? From the 2010 event:

“Eat the squash,” I said.

“No, I do not like it, Dad.”

“Fine. More squash for me.”

This year, attendees played Squash Jeopardy. A bit of silliness pervades Squashfest.

My wife and I made a curried pumpkin soup -- though it was a very warm 72 degrees in Louisville today.


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Palin in Iowa

Photo credit: Dave Davidson (2008 campaign)

Who writes Sarah Palin's speeches? Saturday, in Iowa, she spoke out against crony capitalism:

Sarah Palin did not say whether she would seek the Republican presidential nomination, but...in a 40-minute speech before a Tea Party rally here, which was one of her most expansive addresses since she accepted the Republican vice presidential nomination three years ago, she railed against “crony capitalism” in both parties.

“I want all of our GOP candidates to take the opportunity to kill corporate capitalism that is leading to this cronyism that is killing our economy,” Ms. Palin said.

Does she understand the meaning of "crony capitalism"? From Investopedia:

What Does Crony Capitalism Mean?

A description of capitalist society as being based on the close relationships between businessmen and the state. Instead of success being determined by a free market and the rule of law, the success of a business is dependent on the favoritism that is shown to it by the ruling government in the form of tax breaks, government grants and other incentives.

In Iowa Saturday:

[Palin] outlined economic proposals for creating jobs, including the elimination of all federal corporate income taxes. She said the cozy relationship between political contributions and government favors needed to be exposed and eliminated.

And as a reminder, consider Sarah Palin's multi-million dollar job working for Rupert Murdoch at Fox News. From The Nation's Eric Alterman in the September 5 edition:

One key factor must always be kept in mind when discussing Rupert Murdoch: he has a lot of money ($7.6 billion, according to Forbes) and makes even more for other people. Between 1977 and 2001, News Corporation outearned every other blue-chip company save Berkshire Hathaway and Walmart. And while money might not buy you love in America, it does buy a great deal of special favors and improper indulgences from powerful people.

Being a billionaire media mogul is even more fun when it comes to politics. Not only do politicians need your cash; they need your newspapers, magazines and TV networks too. It is this unholy nexus that Murdoch has mastered...

Murdoch regularly uses book deals, television contracts and columnist gigs as bribes to the powerful, just as he uses these same properties to punish those who refuse to go along. Don’t forget that until recently, Murdoch had four potential Republican presidential candidates on the Fox payroll. One of them—Sarah Palin—even got a state-of-the-art studio built in her home, gratis. And each of these powerful people has a pretty strong incentive to look the other way every time one of Murdoch’s properties or employees feels it necessary to break a law here or there in the service of the great man’s power, profits and influence.

Either Sarah Palin is a brilliant ironist, or she represents the dénouement of a horrifying Orwellian nightmare.


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Olbermann

I very rarely watch Keith Olbermann's television program any more, though I certainly understand how it serves a purpose in America's political discourse. Arguably, it served a much bigger purpose when it was launched during the Bush era. Few people in the media gave much real scrutiny to the Iraq war and Olbermann was willing to poke at some of the weaker claims.

Olbermann has now been suspended from his job for donating to several Democratic political candidates in 2010.

As it happens, I had a debate case many years ago about the harm of employer's requiring employees to forego constitutional rights. Given how the U.S. Supreme Court has equated political contributions with political speech, this is a troubling case. Moreover, it is difficult to see how an opinionated journalist like Olbermann is allowed to say almost anything (loudly) on-air without violating his network's ethics standards, but cannot make private political contributions.

Olbermann works for MSNBC, which apparently overlooked Republican colleague Joe Scarborough's donations in 2006. Apparently, those were reported in advance, which hardly makes the double standard less of a double standard given that the ethical concern is that media members shouldn't appear to have conflicts of interest when reporting about politicians they support. If transparency is the issue, I'd think public FEC reports would suffice.

Indeed, in 2007, MSNBC identified nearly 150 journalists who gave to political campaigns. A 2010 report by OpenSecrets.org found 235 media donors this year -- giving nearly half a million bucks!

Olbermann's "crime" isn't exactly unique in his field.

Media Matters has documented that Fox News "personalities" operate by a different ethical code altogether:

In recent years, at least twenty Fox News personalities have endorsed, raised money, or campaigned for Republican candidates or causes, or against Democratic candidates or causes, in more than 300 instances and in all 50 states.* Republican parties and officials have routinely touted these personalities' affiliations with Fox News to sell and promote their events.

The list is not merely former Republican politicians like Newt Gingrich, Mike Huckabee, Sarah Palin, Karl Rove, etc. (and those are just the stars). Rather, it also includes Fred Barnes, Glenn Beck, Monica Crowley, Sean Hannity, Michelle Malkin, etc.


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Reynolds on Journolist

Instapundit conservative blogger Glenn Reynolds (also a law professor at the University of Tennessee) published a provocative op-ed about Journolist in Sunday's Knoxville News.

Reynolds begins by pointing out that J-List was merely a list service, and "like most email lists, much of the content was profane or sophomoric." However, Reynolds quickly references a few selective (and incendiary) quotes and implies that they are all attributable to journalists. Then, he makes a few hasty generalizations about the list (and media) from these few selective quotations. Remember, the list members exchanged well north of 10,000 postings since 2007.

Yes, some of the quotes are embarassing. In turn, some of the people who wrote what was quoted have apologized for their remarks. All of the participants thought they were contributing to an off-the-record forum that they did not expect to become public.

Furthermore, some of the most incendiary quoted postings were not written by journolists, though Reynolds emphasizes at the very beginning that the list included "reporters at top publications like the Post, the New York Times, Newsweek, Politico, PBS, Time, etc." Reynolds never mentions that the list additionally included academics (like me), policy wonks, social movement and labor activists, etc. I don't know how many of the 400 members were working journalists, but then again neither does Glenn Reynolds. Listowner Ezra Klein long ago disabled the function that allowed members to see the email identities of the other members. Only people who posted were known to everyone else -- and many members were silent parties on the list. There's no way of knowing if they even read the content.

Moreover, many of the journalists on the list were bloggers or people who work for opinion outlets like Mother Jones, The Nation, The New Republic, etc. This is an important distinction since many listmembers are being criticized for lack of objectivity when their job is to provide opinions. Given academic freedom, scholars like Reynolds and I are likewise free to express our opinions in private email lists or in public newspaper columns. Are the J-list critics like Reynolds saying that journalists of all types should not be free to talk privately to each other and to academics, activists or wonks?

In any case, let's consider Reynolds's discussion of what he sees as the list's worst offenses to journalism:

Some JournoList members talked about getting the FCC to shut down Fox News, or about denying web traffic to rivals deemed too conservative. And, most troubling, there were concerted efforts to choose a storyline and spread it across the outlets for which they all worked, so as to manipulate the public's perceptions. When John McCain chose Sarah Palin as his running mate, JournoList participants coordinated their attacks.

Should I begin by pointing out that Instapundit primarily links to and blogrolls fellow conservatives? His blogroll doesn't include Daily Kos or Ezra Klein, for instance, and just last week Reynolds declared that he won't send traffic to particular websites.

As has been reported, the single member who asked a question about whether the FCC could shut down Fox News (“but is there any reason why the FCC couldn’t simply pull their broadcasting permit once it expires?”) was in fact a law professor -- and working journalists replied that it was a bad idea. Nobody actually advocated the idea. It was an hypothetical question about what might be possible, working from a assumption that Fox is an arm of the Republican Party rather than a genuine news network.

Professors -- even Reynolds -- sometimes conjecture about ideas that are quickly viewed as incredibly dumb by others with more expertise in the subject area. That doesn't mean the forum hosting the idea is to blame.

As for the remaining attacks, Reynolds provides no evidence for them. Yes, individuals on Journolist may have urged colleagues not to write about specific stories, or to emphasize other important stories in their blog posts or opinion outlets in order to shape a particular news cycle -- but there's no evidence that these posters were non-opinion journalists and no evidence that the ideas were overlooked in the media (even by J-listers). Where are the smoking guns?

Daily Caller originally quoted Chris Hayes of The Nation and some other opinion journalists arguing that the Jeremiah Wright story was a distraction from the real issues in the Clinton-Obama primary campaign and that many right-wing media outlets (like Fox) were trumpeting the Wright videos for partisan purposes. Not even Hayes's colleagues at The Nation listened to his advice as the magazine posted dozens of stories about Wright in 2008. Indeed, many J-listers undoubtedly wrote about the Jeremiah Wright story regardless of what colleagues were urging: Ezra Klein pointed out his own post the very next day after being encouraged to go silent.

By contrast, when any overtly political activism appeared on J-List, Klein shut it down.

The idea that J-list was the source for Sarah Palin attacks is mind-boggling. Andrew Sullivan was not on the list. So far as I know, no one associated with television programs featuring Katie Couric or Charlie Gibson was on J-list. Tina Fey (or SNL writers) never posted, so I presume no one from SNL was a listmember. And Sarah Palin herself provided plenty of new ammunition on a daily basis from the campaign trail. She's the one that emphasized Alaska's proximity to Russia, supported the bridge to nowhere, talked divisively to the "real America" about Barack Obama's "socialism," and claimed "Obama sees America as imperfect enough to pal around with terrorists."

The attacks on Palin practically wrote themselves. The Daily Caller posted first reactions by members of J-list who (like the American people) had very little idea of Sarah Palin's identity. Most of the participants in the thread responded to her words and ideas in any case -- and several slimey lines of attack that did appear in other political outlets were dismissed in the thread by various J-list members.

Daily Caller reproduced this email and many J-list critics have referenced it as proof that an "unofficial campaign" of journalists was secretly backing the Obama campaign:

Daniel Levy of the Century Foundation noted that Obama’s “non-official campaign” would need to work hard to discredit Palin. “This seems to me like an occasion when the non-official campaign has a big role to play in defining Palin, shaping the terms of the conversation and saying things that the official [Obama] campaign shouldn’t say – very hard-hitting stuff, including some of the things that people have been noting here – scare people about having this woefully inexperienced, no foreign policy/national security/right-wing christia[n] wing-nut a heartbeat away …… bang away at McCain’s age making this unusually significant …. I think people should be replicating some of the not-so-pleasant viral email campaigns that were used against [Obama].”

First, Levy is not a journalist, obviously.

Second, Levy was talking about the very large group of people (including bloggers) who openly advocated for Obama in specific domains even though they were not in any way coordinating with the campaign -- or even with each other. That's why he talks about "viral" outlets. And third, Levy thought national novice Palin provided an opening for the exact kinds of attacks that unknown Obama experienced. And he was right. Andrew Sullivan's infatuation with Trig (shared by others) proves the point.

As Kathleen Parker opined last week, the J-list controversy is "weak tea— a tempest in Barbie's teacup."

Ironically, and perhaps hypocritically, Reynolds previously coauthored a book on "the appearance of impropriety," which argued that many contemporary Washington ethics battles are "tempests in ethical teapots." The book criticized the press and bureaucracy for focusing on "regulatory minutiae."

Maybe Reynolds should give it another read.


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The Right's Journolist

Daily Caller leaks of private Journolist emails continue, now focusing on the fact that one or more "political operatives" were apparently on the list, sometimes spamming colleagues with appeals to pay attention to their message, issue, or candidate. Anyone on a political listserv of any type has received this kind of email -- I often receive them even on academic lists.

The Journolist problem seems to be that such "networking" was conducted by email. After all, the political right has long brought together political operatives, journalists, bloggers and members of think tanks (or interest groups). On July 26, Joe Conason wrote an excellent piece for Salon about one such regular meeting.

Specifically, Conason wrote about the weekly Wednesday meetings hosted by Republican political operative Grover Norquist.

Specific, orderly, disciplined, ideological coordination -- and not the freewheeling blather to be found on Journolist -- has been proceeding every week for nearly two decades at the "Wednesday meetings" convened by lobbyist Grover Norquist in the Washington offices of Americans for Tax Reform.

Conason includes a couple of long quotes from people who attended these meetings and I'd encourage everyone to check out his piece.

Of course, it's actually fairly easy to find information about these sessions. For example, journalist Patty Reinert (Mason) wrote an informative article in 2008, when she worked at the Washington Examiner:

It’s 10 a.m. on Wednesday and Grover Norquist, founder and president of Americans for Tax Reform, and 150 of his closest center-right allies have packed the second-floor conference room at his L Street office for their weekly invitation-only, off-the-record meeting...a whirlwind hour-and-a-half meeting in which speakers on the agenda get three minutes each. The rules are simple: Get up. Talk about what you are working on. Answer questions. Surrender the microphone and sit.

...The “Wednesday Meeting,” which began in 1986 and has since spawned conservative strategy sessions in virtually every state and in many countries around the world, is Norquist’s signature creation

Norquist himself is quoted describing the flow at the meetings:

“The point of the meeting is to get everybody who is center-right to tell each other what they’re doing, to share technology, share tactics, share strategy, tell stories,” Norquist explained during an interview. “You don’t get to talk about mistakes somebody else has made. ... It’s a positive meeting, not a negative meeting.”

Perhaps more importantly, here's how Daily Caller editor Tucker Carlson described Norquist in a New Republic article he wrote ("What I Sold At the Revolution") June 9, 1997 (I have EBSCO access):

Norquist is more than your garden-variety Washington lobbyist. He's one of the most influential conservative strategists in America--an intimate of Newt Gingrich, a small-government radical, the Che of the Republican Revolution.

...The purpose, he [Norquist] says, is not simply to influence specific pieces of legislation, but to build and strengthen what he calls the Leave Us Alone Coalition, a nationwide alliance of conservative activists. The coalition is Norquist's version of the Bolshevik vanguard, and, like the early Soviets, Norquist envisions a day when this revolutionary cohort will lead the proletariat to rise up, crush the corrupt liberal ruling class and reorder society along radically new lines.

Finally, consider the money paragraphs from the piece, highlighting the hypocrisy in Carlson's current journalism:

Today, the [Norquist-hosted] meetings draw a group of anywhere from fifty to eighty people--think tank analysts, members of Congress, sympathetic journalists and Hill staffers--who gather every Wednesday morning at 10:30 to talk about how to advance the Movement. The meetings are worth going to, says someone who attends, "if you want to know what The Washington Times and National Review will be writing about next week."

Norquist's meetings were influential partly because he himself was considered above ideological reproach, a man wholly and single-mindedly devoted to the Movement.

Journolist was nothing like that.

Nothing.


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Ackerman: Absence of malice?

On Journolist in 2008, Spencer Ackerman offered some disturbing advice to other list members in the wake of the Reverend Wright scandal that was starting to dominate the news cycle. Ackerman suggested,

"If the right forces us all to either defend Wright or tear him down, no matter what we choose, we lose the game they’ve put upon us. Instead, take one of them — Fred Barnes, Karl Rove, who cares — and call them racists."

This was reported last week in the Daily Caller and it has been getting a lot of play in the blogosphere and even in some mainstream media outlets.

Former Richard Viguerie attorney Mark J. Fitzgibbons claims today in the American Thinker that Ackerman's line shows libelous malice and could be grounds for legal action:

Ackerman skipped the intermediary suggestion of even asking loaded questions of Obama's conservative critics and proceeded directly to proposing false accusations against figures -- "who cares" -- on the right...

The malice exhibited in the e-mails is about more than journalistic ethics, and it may have legal consequences, with the immediate potential to cause jitters in the bars of Georgetown and Manhattan...

Malice is not designed to get to the truth. Quite the opposite: Malice is designed to harm without regard to the truth. Malicious libel against public figures is not a protected press freedom.

Conservative talking head (and Chapman University Law Professor) Hugh Hewitt says that Ackerman committed slander -- and that the other members of Journolist are complicit because they stood by in silence about the attack.

In a giant leap of logic, Hewitt compares the incident to a famous crime from the mid-1960s:

On March 13, 1964, New Yorker Kitty Genovese was attacked and killed near the entrance to her Queens home. The murder remains a much discussed incident because of the number of ordinary New Yorkers who are thought to have heard her cries for help or in some way to have observed all or part of the assault on her and yet to have done nothing.

Are Fitzgibbons and Hewitt on to something important?

To get at this, let's consider Fitzgibbons's initial point: Did Ackerman suggest labeling people as racists without reason? Few of the stories about the remark quote Ackerman's next line, which provides a justification for his claim:

Ask: why do they have such a deep-seated problem with a black politician who unites the country? What lurks behind those problems? This makes *them* sputter with rage, which in turn leads to overreaction and self-destruction.

For all I know, Ackerman had a particularly bad Barnes CSPAN appearance in mind when he wrote about him on J-list. As Ackerman's then-roommate reported,

"A right-wing caller to C-SPAN identifies himself as a big Fred Barnes fan and asks a question during the course of which he refers to Barack Obama as “monkey boy.” Barnes doesn’t bat an eye and just moves to answer the question."

Or maybe Ackerman recalled an unfortunate Barnes suggestion about racial profiling from 2001.

As for Karl Rove, you don't have to spend much time on Google to come up with a dubious pattern of words and deeds suggesting racial undertones.

Lay discussions of libel and slander generally say that the claim has to be false.

Additionally, both Fitzgibbons and Hewitt ignore the fact that these were private comments made on an off-the-record listserv. Can someone commit libel or slander under such circumstances? I don't know, but I'm not the lawyer breathlessly talking about libel or slander. Again, lay discussions of the law tend to emphasize the public (even published) nature of the malicous attack.

Finally, neither of these attorneys offer any examples of Ackerman or anyone else actually following the young scribe's advice on Journolist. Did J-listers try to distract attention from the Wright story by labeling conservatives as racists without cause? Where are the published claims from the Wright affair?


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Journolist: Reading the comments so you don't have to

Daily Caller has been cherry-picking embarrassing emails from thousands (probably tens of thousands) of Journolist emails written over a period of about three years. Publisher Tucker Carlson admits they have to cherry-pick because "a lot of the material on Journolist is actually pretty banal."

Keep in mind that Journolist was an off-the-record listserv that Carlson tried to join ("I can promise you I have no interest in flaming anyone or even debating"), so the leaks are pretty sleazy.

After the Daily Caller hypes the material (frequently on Fox News), the right-wing blogosphere has been referencing these examples as if they reflected the typical conversations of Journolist and the views of the 400 or so members of Journolist.

Daily Caller emphasized one tasteless post from someone working in public radio being unwilling to help if she suddenly confronted a suffering Rush Limbaugh and another from a better-known columnist sneering at NASCAR fans just after the 2008 election results. Suddenly, all list members are guilty-by-assocation. It's not a lot different than the "real America" campaign of 2008.

Clearly, the message seems to be that J-listers are not part of the "real America."

I've read a lot of the right-wing blogs "reporting" on Journolist this past week and have been appalled at how the writers so often generalize from the same few examples -- even when they are pretty weak tea. Fellow former J-lister Kevin Carey explains:

For example, in the course of a long string of Journolist emails about Fox News, a law professor wondered whether the FCC could legally decide not to renew Fox's license. A journalist from Time responded by saying, in essence, "that would be a terrible idea." Nobody mentioned it again. Yet this exchange produced a gigantic 60-point Caller headline: "FOX HUNT: Liberal journalists suggest government shut down Fox News." It was an obvious lie: no journalist, much less journalists, plural, had suggested any such thing.

Much more disturbing, however, are the comments left on these right-wing blog sites. Posters are only too willing to reveal what should happen to non-real Americans.

For example, take a look at a recent FreeRepublic post, which alleged that it had identified 107 J-listers:

MindBender26: At the risk of being called an anti-semite, (which I am the opposite of, I am very pro-Israel), has anyone noticed that this list seems to have a very large percentage of Jewish names?

detective: Thanks for the list. Can we add party affiliation, sexual orientation and a short bio? I have never heard of most of these people and it would be nice to be able to put them in context.

oldbrowser: What is curious is that these are mostly Jewish names with white faces.

Tallguy: I probably could have come up with at least 30 of them right off the top of my head. We're not talking about center-left political writers here... these people are flaming communists.

hosepipe: Look at them.. A whole generation of traitors.

From an American Thinker post:

wbhickok: get all 600 something names of these slimy JournoLists... I'm sure it goes much deeper. This is an impressive list of the old communists and red-diaper babies. But there is more...Lot more will come out and more, and more of these people will be exposed as evil anti-American Marxists that they are.

Syrin: Holy ****ing cow. The grand list of traitors of the state. "Journalists" in favor of censorship. These people should ALL be tried for treason and given the appropriate penalty.

Cynthia: Are any of the names associated with Saturday Night Live? A sad reality, another one, from 2008 is that an unseemly number of people got their news, their NEWS from snl. pathetic. It's as if the masses have had a frontal lobotomy.

rashputin: The companies represented by these people are ignoring so they're actually admitting that they're a single monolithic propaganda machine, not multiple competing organizations.

Pete: Treason.What they have conspired and done is undermine the freedom of the press, and subvert the Constitution. They have conspired and lied to the public, they have broken the trust. Since they have gotten together to defraud the public, they should be prosecuted under the RICO act as a minimum. Treason, or high crimes against the Constitution, seems more appropriate.

From Patterico's Pontifications:

Aaron Worthing: My big takeaway is how much these people sound like the idiots at Daily Kos.

JosephD: This isn’t just scheming to spin the news. This is fascism.

Journolisters have been taken to task for talking privately and sometimes making intemperate comments that seem indefensible (especially when taken out-of-context).

By contrast, these members of the right are willing to make intemperate comments anonymously on public blogs.

I can see why that's so much better [sarcasm -- OFF]. J-listers have been vilified for not publicly rebuking the list members who made dumb remarks. Where are the right-wing blog posts condemning their reader reactions?

There's more vile invective in these few threads than I recall in nearly three years on J-list. Some J-listers strongly disliked some of the views on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict held by the publisher of The New Republic, but they didn't really say anything much different on the list than what they were willing to defend in public.

Of course, Journolist occasionally hosted heated debates -- but they were generally civil and genuinely dedicated to what Habermas might call "the forceless force of the better argument."

We've seen nothing made public about the long 2008 primary campaign debate threads about which kind of health care system was needed. And the Hillary Clinton supporters certainly backed their candidate against the lists Obama backers. I'm interested in climate change politics, but even I sometimes felt overwhelmed by long (and well-linked) discussions of the merits of cap-and-trade versus carbon taxes versus regulatory approaches.


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Journolist fantasies

Sorry, a bit more on Journolist.

What's bothered conservatives most?

First, list member Spencer Ackerman privately used violent rhetoric to try to inspire fellow J-listers to distract from the Reverend Jeremiah Wright controversy in 2008. He suggested playing a "racism" card.

Second, a number of conservatives see conspiracy (or groupthink) in some listmembers' attempts to form the "line" on Sarah Palin -- someone largely unknown to the American public when named as John McCain's running mate in 2008.

Some rebuttal:

Conservatives seem to have forgotten the public threatened violence emanating from members of their own team.

And in regards to conspiracy, they forgot the leaked post-2006 election memo from a VP at Fox News.

And the Iraq war news, supported by paid Pentagon operatives.

Kudos to John Tabin of The American Spectator (a conservative outlet) for his genuinely more balanced views on all of this.

See James Fallows too.


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Journolist: Conservative hypocrisy

Conservatives have penned a number of outraged responses to the Journolist hullabaloo, but the most hypocritical response I've read so far was written by Fred Barnes:

Until JournoList came along, liberal journalists were rarely part of a team. Neither are conservative journalists today, so far as I know. If there's a team, no one has asked me to join. As a conservative, I normally write more favorably about Republicans than Democrats and I routinely treat conservative ideas as superior to liberal ones. But I've never been part of a discussion with conservative writers about how we could most help the Republican or the conservative team.

This appeared in the opinion pages of the Wall Street Journal.

Is Barnes unfamiliar with the so-called "vast right-wing conspiracy"? That phrase likely reflects a measure of hyperbole, but there's clearly intense overlap and message commonality among Republican party operatives and right-wing media outlets.

In fact, as noted at the end of his column, "Mr. Barnes is executive editor of the Weekly Standard and a commentator on Fox News Channel." The Journal is owned by Ruport Murdoch, who also owns Fox. Barnes went to work for Fox in 1996.

It's a media trifecta!

What about the links to Republican party politics?

The Weekly Standard is edited by William Kristol, who came to fame in part (aside from family connections), because of his work for Dan Quayle and more importantly, his leadership of the concerted effort to stop the Clintons' health care initiative.

The December 1993 memo, "Defeating President Clinton's Health Care Proposal" was penned under the auspices of the Project for the Republican Future. The memo was "his first of what would become legendary strategy memos circulated among Republican policymakers." Kristol published some parts of the memo in the Wall Street Journal in January 1994.

Brad DeLong helpfully posted the full memo in March 2009:

These four pages are an attempt to describe a common political strategy for Republicans in response to the Clinton health care plan.

The coordination was certainly effective. Media Matters, June 2009:

As Haynes Johnson and David S. Broder documented in The System (Little, Brown and Co., 1996), during the battle over President Clinton's reform plan, "a loose confederation of special-interest groups nationwide ... united for one purpose -- to kill what they termed derisively 'Clintoncare.'"

I've searched archives of The New Republic (Barnes employer) in 1993 and 1994 and he frequently cited Kristol's analysis on health care and other issues. On April 4, 1994, Barnes wrote, "Kristol makes a strong case, but few Republicans are willing to join him in attacking universal coverage."

Barnes seemed to be a team player even before he joined Fox in 1996.

After Clinton-care was defeated, "The Project [for the Republican Future] was disbanded and the staff incorporated into the operations of the magazine The Weekly Standard when it was begun by Rupert Murdoch and the News Corporation in 1995."

Barnes now seems to be fully committed to the Kristol-Murdoch-Republican cabal.


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Journolist updates

The Journolist leaks continue this week.

Last month, I failed to notice how former listmember Dave Weigel (forced out of his position at the Washington Post) was criticized for accurately using an inflammatory term with origins in Republican party politics dating to the Watergate-era. I'd say "shame on Jonathan Strong," but that's redundant.

I also originally missed former listmember Scott Winship's interesting speculations about the likely leaker. The post brought several new suspects to mind.

List founder Ezra Klein outed former listmember Gautham Nagesh, who used to work for Tucker Carlson's website that is leaking the emails. Former listmember David Dayen notes that Carlson asked to join Journolist shortly before he started publishing the leaks. Carlson was not asked to join. Nagesh says he is not the leaker -- and confirms that the list was wonkish and not a place for birthing conspiracies.

Klein demonstrates that the latest sensationalist headlines are very misleading and the stories reference individual emails often taken completely out of context. Here's a nice overview of the situation, written by a former listmember, who does not think the tentacles from this story are fully extended. If that's true, Matt Welch of Reason explains that Carlson and Strong have some serious work to do ahead:

The real spade-work on the JournoList trove is not just fishing for a single chunk of Drudge-bait, but tying an off-the-record listserv conversation with a coordinated flurry of on-the-record commentary. Locker-room trash-talk can be fun to spy in on (in a train-wreck kind of way), but if there's a real opinion-journalism scandal underneath any of this it will lie in attempts, concscious or unconscious, to foist political message discipline on disparate and unsuspecting audiences. This ain't that.

Media Matters pursues the fairly obvious conspiracy to make Journolist look like a conspiracy.

BTW, full disclosure, I'm not on Cabalist.

I'd probably like to be.


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To the 400: I miss you

Last spring, I wrote a post on Duck of Minerva concerning a controversial leak of private emails from an off-the-record listserv called JournoList. Membership was said to include left-of-center journalists, bloggers, academics, policy wonks from think tanks, etc.

I didn't acknowledge my own membership, but I did use "open source" information about the list to defend it against charges that it served as a conspiratorial echo chamber.

Frankly, it's only been a few days since JournoList was shuttered, and I'm already experiencing significant withdrawal. I feel like I've been cut off from an invaluable community of smart, funny, and interesting people. Since sometime in 2007, the list had replaced blogs as my first place to read reactions to breaking news. List members also frequently recommended books, evaluated films, cheered their favorite sports teams, or wrote other posts that one might expect in a conversation among hundreds of bright and talented people.

There were also many lurkers on Journolist who never (or rarely) posted and the latest targeted leaks (aimed at a member who covers the conservative movement and media), might have originated from a lurker who violated members' trust. However, as other members have pointed out in various blog posts, it could have been any disgruntled member, or a hacker, or someone else who gained access to an account without permission.

Though I didn't save copies, my posts tended to be about international affairs, presidential elections, baseball, or Kansas basketball -- my areas of specialization or greatest interest. I mentioned my much-linked post on John McCain, political celebrity, on Journolist and some list members kindly linked to it. In the end, many non-members also linked it too, so forget trying to get me to identify those who wish to remain unidentified.

In any event, I already miss JournoList because I came to rely upon group members' reactions to news like the US soccer loss to Ghana, the death of Senator Robert Byrd, or the Elena Kagan hearings. It's a lot more work to track down all their blog posts and articles, believe me, as I've been doing some of that today.

If the list is reconstructed, I hope I'm fortunate enough to be included again.


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Duck snorts

Today, at Duck of Minerva, I blogged "Academia and 'JournoList,'" which discusses a left-leaning listserv for journalists, policy wonks and academics. Are you, or have you ever been a member...

March 7, I blogged "Israeli threat inflation?" The post is about whether Iran has crossed a nuclear threshold on the way to making weapons.

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CSM: No more dead tree edition

The Christian Science Monitor, a fine paper with particularly good coverage of international affairs, announced that it will soon be available exclusively on-line. The story appeared in the NYT:

The paper is currently published Monday through Friday, and will move to online only in April, although it will also introduce a weekend magazine. John Yemma, The Monitor’s editor, said that moving to a Web focus will mean it can keep its eight foreign bureaus open.

The CSM website had these detail:

In 2009, the Monitor will become the first nationally circulated newspaper to replace its daily print edition with its website; the 100 year-old news organization will also offer subscribers weekly print and daily e-mail editions.

I suspect other papers will be doing this eventually.

One of my favorite magazines went web-only earlier this month. I hope it is a viable business model.


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