Make Not the House of Murrow -- UPDATE

A house of merchandise.

Once upon a time, I enlisted in a revolution

At the revolution were good guys, bad guys and civilians walking the Earth like ghosts, oblivious to the fact that any of it was going at all.

The revolution had become necessary because for a very long time too many of the good guys had refused to understand the nature of the bad guys -- refusing to understand that their anti-science, anti-human, bigoted crazytalk was not metaphor, but a blueprint for the the world they wished to make.  Understanding that fact -- the fact that a substantial number of our fellow citizens are (and always have been) intractably opposed to America ideals we know and love and are willing to pay any price and bear any burden to snuff that America out -- carried consequences that made (and still makes) most people very uncomfortable.

So for a long time the good guys went into a defense crouch and set up camp on what they believed was unassailably high moral ground where they thought they could weather the storm.  They thought this was sufficient, because they believed that because the bad guys were so self-evidently bad and wrong and vicious and nuts, and just because their ideas were so cartoon-villain bad and kept blowing up in public...no one would seriously consider tossing them the keys to the ship of state for any extended period of time.

But the bad guys were clever: rather that fighting a war they would lose -- a war fought out fact by fact and idea by idea -- they spent an enormous amount of time and money redefining the battlespace.   Like the Romans at Masada, year by year they patiently built up an alternate high ground: an alternate moral universe so that, in the public arena, little by little, ideas no longer mattered.  Cause and effect no longer mattered.  Right and wrong no longer mattered.  On and on went the siege until the bad guys and their Centrist allies not only owned or influenced most of the government, but most of the media as well.

By patiently enduring failure after failure and by sparing no expense, bad guys laid successful siege to the terms off the debate until "debate" itself had become a slow-motion zombie nightmare:  a landscape thick with Conservative zombies who just screeched "Traitor!" at anything that moved, and Centrist zombies that screeched "Both Sides Do It!" at anyone who dared to take on the Conservative zombies.

Stopping the zombie hoard -- driving Conservatism back into its political grave and driving Conservatism's Centrist enablers back to doing the weather on local teevee -- was the revolution a lot of us signed up for.  Of course, from watching Michael Steele become a valued MSNBC employee to listening to Liberal media voices explain why boycotting the advertisers who prop up Rush Limbaugh's carnival of hate is a bad idea,  it turned out that the revolution we joined is not exactly the revolution we got :-) but most are us have been to this rodeo once or twice before and know that, for those of us not in The Club, we will always be "Mr. Atkins" when the heat is on and our dollars and voices are called for, and "Tommy this, an' Tommy that, an' "Tommy, wait outside" the minute our services are no longer immediately required:

You talk o' better food for us, an' schools, an' fires, an' all:
We'll wait for extry rations if you treat us rational.
Don't mess about the cook-room slops, but prove it to our face
The Widow's Uniform is not the soldier-man's disgrace.
For it's Tommy this, an' Tommy that, an' "Chuck him out, the brute!"
But it's "Saviour of 'is country" when the guns begin to shoot;
An' it's Tommy this, an' Tommy that, an' anything you please;
An' Tommy ain't a bloomin' fool -- you bet that Tommy sees!

Which is why I spent the last couple of days touring some of the old and less-well remembered battlefields of our on-again/off-again revolution.

For example, late-2005.

Overgrown with weeds, abandoned blogs and crumbing archives, nobody visits late-2005 anymore.  

It was a period of ugly skirmishes with Liberals still struggling to regroup after being flattened by reality that +60 million Americans were actually stupid enough to vote the Bush Administration back into power...and the Right struggling to contain its rising sense of panic that the Liberals had been right all along, and the flock of Republican chickens the Left had warned about were coming home to roost in numbers so vast that they blackened the skies above their 1000 Year Wingnut Reich victory parade.

In 2005, the air was white-hot.  This kind of rhetoric (via FAIR) was still the acceptable and everyday common tongue of the Right and the Center:

"These seem to be lonely days for the Birkenstock-and-beads set," reported Newsweek magazine (10/1/01). It's certainly true that anti-war activists, the apparent target of Newsweek's disdain, might have felt lonely--if they were counting on visits from mainstream news reporters.

In place of consistent coverage of the peace movement, some pundits and columnists sounded the alarm about the threat to America from within. New Republic editor Peter Beinart (9/24/01) thought critics of administration plans should either keep quiet or explain their loyalties: "Domestic political dissent is immoral without a prior statement of national solidarity, a choosing of sides."

...
Washington Times columnist Robert Stacy McCain (9/27/01) was even more threatening, implying that military force should be used against anti-war protesters: "Why are we sending aircraft carriers halfway around the world to look for enemies, when our nation's worst enemies--communists proclaiming an anti-American jihad--will be right there in front of the Washington Monument on Saturday?"

Right-wing provocateur David Horowitz (L.A. Times, 9/28/01) chided today's student activists with this reminder: "The blood of hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese and tens of thousands of Americans is on the hands of the antiwar activists who prolonged the struggle and gave victory to the communists." Horowitz added that "this country was too tolerant toward the treason of its enemies within."

At least one commentator blamed the left for the attacks themselves. Columnist Steven Schwartz (New York Post, 9/12/01) wrote that "the anti-globalist rioters seek to intimidate world capitalism into shutting down altogether, and the distance between breaking the windows of McDonald's to achieve that end and blowing up the World Trade Center is pretty damned narrow."

and this Andrew Sullivan

But the second temptation is to move the goalposts on this war and to expect the impossible. If someone had told me three years ago that by October 2005, Saddam Hussein's murderous tyranny would be over for ever, that Iraq would have a new constitution that emerged from a democratic process and that it will soon have a democratically elected parliament and government, I would have been thrilled. If I were further told that the inevitably embittered Sunni Arab minority had decided to throw itself into democratic politics to amend the constitution and protect its interests in a future Iraq, I would be amazed by how swiftly democratic habits can take root in a post-totalitarian country. If I had been told that, despite extraordinary provocation from Jihadist and Sunni Arab terrorists, the country had not dissolved into civil war, and that unemployment was dropping, I'd be heartened. If I had also been told that the United States had not suffered another major terror attack since the fall of 2001, I would have refused to believe it. The fact that the administration has made countless, terrible errors in the aftermath of the invasion and miscalculated badly on how the Baathists and Jihadists would fight back, should not distract us from these underlying realities. In 2002, I feared U.S. casualties approaching 10,000 in a brutal, urban war for Baghdad. The enemy gave us a simmering insurgency instead, shrewdly calculating that that was their best defense. They were right in the short term. But that makes it all the more imperative to prove them wrong in the long term. For the sake of the 2,000 who have already died; and the countless, innocent civilian Iraqis who have borne an even greater burden, let's do all we can to make this work.

and this Andrew Sullivan

New Republic columnist (and former editor) Andrew Sullivan had a more ominous warning (London Sunday Times, 9/16/01): "The middle part of the country--the great red zone that voted for Bush--is clearly ready for war. The decadent left in its enclaves on the coasts is not dead--and may well mount a fifth column."

had not yet sloughed off his skin to become this Andrew Sullivan:

It would be lovely to believe that we can do more than wipe out al Qaeda in Afghanistan, that we can somehow tame the Taliban, or get the current government to be less than corrupt two-faced, or make Pakistan less ambivalent about our success. But our cultures are far too far apart to mesh; and the more we insist on succeeding with an unwinnable transition, the deeper into the mire we go.

In 2005, liberal teevee was virtually non-existent (having been stomped into oblivion by station management because it presented a "difficult public face for NBC in a time of war", the severed-head of "The Phil Donahue Show" was still on a pike outside the MSNBC as a warning to anyone who dared cross the Bush Regime) and the fledgling Air America was still in that fragile phase between finding its voice and being "improved" to death by the ham-fists-of-Death of Marc Green. And then, in the middle of the all of this virtually uncontested Conservative sturm und drang -- smack at the intersection of free speech, Rush Limbaugh, Andrew Sullivan, ad boycotts and kicking Michael Steele in the balls -- came this:

Blog Attack on Steele Decried

By Matthew Mosk
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, October 28, 2005 

A racially charged image of Maryland Lt. Gov. Michael S. Steele on the Web site of a liberal blogger brought recriminations from both Democrats and Republicans yesterday.

The doctored photo of Steele (R) as a minstrel, and accompanying slurs, prompted Virginia gubernatorial candidate Timothy M. Kaine (D) to pull an ad from the site, stevegilliard.blogspot.com . Kaine's campaign had purchased the space through a broker that put his advertising on numerous liberal-leaning blogs.

More than that, the posting sparked a broad and heated discussion -- much of it on other blogs -- about the evolving role of the Internet in politics, and even about the ability of bloggers to maintain fierce independence while depending on advertising revenue.

Not surprisingly, the strongest reaction came from Steele, who recently announced a bid for the U.S. Senate seat being vacated by Sen. Paul S. Sarbanes (D).

"The Democratic Party has finally reached a new low with the worst kind of racist gutter politics, and it's the kind of racism that people in Maryland reject, regardless of their political party," said Leonardo Alcivar, the campaign spokesman.

Democrats disavowed any connection to the News Blog, which typically includes liberal political content. The site is maintained by New Yorker Steve Gilliard, who is African American, and it has been up for two years. He estimates that it gets about 15,000 hits a day.

The Steele depiction was "extremely offensive and distasteful and has no place in politics or in any other aspect of public discourse," said Derek Walker of the Maryland Democratic Party. Joe Trippi, who is credited with using the Internet to reinvent campaigning while managing Howard Dean's 2004 presidential bid and who is advising Democratic Senate candidate Kweisi Mfume, said the incident highlights a pitfall of the medium. But he said he was shocked that Steele would blame Democrats.

"That's almost as bad as what the Web site did -- to try to smear an entire party with what one random person threw up on the Web," Trippi said.

Gilliard defended the item in an interview, saying Steele invited the portrayal by failing to criticize Gov. Robert L. Ehrlich Jr.'s (R) decision to hold a fundraiser at an all-white country club.

"That's the kind of thing that says to black voters that black Republicans are untrustworthy and unreliable," Gilliard said.

Other liberal bloggers defended Gilliard and took after Kaine for pulling his ad. Markos Moulitsas, editor of the blog Daily Kos, said that advertisers should expect edgy content and that Kaine's actions could threaten their editorial independence.

"I don't want bloggers to be afraid to say things because they don't want to offend an advertisers," Moulitsas said.

This all took place after an initial dust-up which included a series of shrill denunciations by Rightwing pundits who, hilariously, had no idea that Gilly was, y'know, "black" and which included  Andrew Sullivan giving the story long legs by posting it at his very well-trafficked site under the heading of "The Racist Left."

I leave it to professional historians to bind the whole thing up in acid-free paper for future generations to roll their eyes at, but one thing I do remember well was that almost no one thought the idea of an advertiser yanking their ads away from controversy was in any way controversial.

Not Ezra Klein, as he wonked away on TypePad:

...Gilliard dresses Michael Steele up as a black-faced minstrel. Kaine's campaign pulls ads. Sounds about right to me. Kos and Gilliard are, at most times, hard-nosed, realistic guys. They know what the stakes are, they know how the smears work, and they know what the Republicans will do. Kos is worried about a "chilling effect," concerned bloggers will censor themselves for ad money. Well, yes, if you open yourself up to ads, you're going to have to be a bit careful when trotting around controversial topics. You can get around that by not accepting campaign ads, seeking out more aggressive advertisers, or letting folks pull ads when you want to paint people in blackface.

I think Gilliard went a bit too far -- but I don't advertise on his site, and really don't care what he does. I do, however, understand that advertising is a business, and were I an advertiser I would not have the same laissez-faire liberties. 

... 

Gilliard might have been right on the merits with Steele, but you're in dangerous territory when you paint anyone a minstrel, whatever color you are. And you know where campaigns never want to be? Dangerous territory. Blogging is, as Gilliard said, a business. But so is politics. Gilliard can say whatever he wants, and advertisers can pull whenever they want. Gilliard got too controversial, Kaine's sponsorship would've looked bad in the papers, and Kaine's campaign backed away. Good on everyone. Gilliard isn't censoring himself, the Kaine operation is remaining disciplined, and we can all go home friends. If we want to folks to keep buying ads and we want to keep speaking our minds (and god knows I do), some will slip through our fingers. Rejoice -- it just proves you're not a tool yet.

Not even the late Mr. Gilliard:

... I am not mad they pulled the ad.

What I am outraged about is that his people didn't ask my side of the story first. They just reacted to a Sullivan e-mail campaign WITHOUT TALKING TO ME.

All they had to do was send an e-mail saying "Steve, we have a problem with the Steele picture, "

I've worked in campaigns, I know they would have pulled the ad, just to avoid controversy by association. WHICH I AGREE WITH. I don't want anyone to think I expected them to keep the ad up after the crap they got. I'm hardly that full of myself. I'm not going to censor myself, but they don't have to keep their ads on if it hurts them. Although that seems to be OK for Republicans.

But this is ridiculous. How many blogs will be attacked this way? No one pulls ads from the racist Malkin or LGF, hell Charles Johnson is forming Pajamas Media with people like David Corn. But we're supposed to be suppine when something comes up.

Look, I know I write things which sometimes make people squirm. And I certainly didn't expect any advertiser to endorse my words.

But what I do expect is to treated like an adult. And when adults have problems, they discuss them. Too many people, especially in politics, think all bloggers are 20-something kids ranting. I've been writing for 20 years, I know when I will give offense. A couple of days ago it was on homework.

If they had even given me the courtesy of an explaination, which they didn't, I would have explained why the ad was gone and that would be that.

It's not about the money, or the pull, but the utter lack of respect shown by the Kaine campaign. This site supports Democrats and liberals, which is why they bought the ad. My goal is not to harm campaigns. But I am not 20 years old. I am an adult and I would expect that the Kaine campaign would show me basic courtesy in explaining their actions. It was absolutely cowardly to handle it in such a way, and I think Mr. Rohrbach understands that now.

...

In 2005, no one in a position to be heard by the wider world wrote multiple, passionate paeans to Free Speech that began "As much as I disagree with Steve Gilliard", but ended with "The right way to counter his speech, in my view, is with speech, not threats to his livelihood" or "But I don't like the desire to silence someone through economic pressure. It comes from an illiberal place."

Instead, as one of Ezra Klein's commenters presciently noted at the time, the Liberal grassroots learned once again how the real world really works:

Politicians have to remember the value of bloggers like Gilliard. The GOP would never make this mistake. No matter how controversial Rush Limbaugh may be, GOP politicians would never consider distancing themselves from him. Staying loyal in the face of controversy can send a message to the grass-roots that you believe in the movement and will fight for the cause. I wish more Democratic politicians understood this.

Posted by: space | Oct 27, 2005 8:48:42 PM

Of course, trying to live at the intersection of commerce and conscience has always been precarious  It was hard to do 2,000 years ago when Jesus kicked over the tables of the money-changers (because however many jobs they created, however much traffic they drove and however cozy everyone had gotten with their presence, their existence was grossly and existentially offensive to the Temple's true purpose) and it was hard to do 50 years ago when Rod Serling wrote this:

“It is difficult to produce a television documentary that is both incisive and probing when every twelve minutes one is interrupted by twelve dancing rabbits singing about toilet paper.” 

Neither the difficulty of the enterprise nor the timorousness of many of our "allies" relieves us of our obligation to fight on, but if we ever expect to carry the day, we absolutely must take the vocabulary of the battlespace back from those who have defiled it.

If we are in this to win -- to drive the bad guys back into their political sewers so we can begin to heal all that they have crippled and rebuild all they have destroyed --  then we will need to upend the tables of our media money-changers.  And that means that, despite the inevitability of collateral damage to the advertising revenues of Liberals in the media, Conservatives and their Centrist enablers need to be kicked where it hurts, over and over and over again.

Because if we do not do this -- if we do not take back the terms of engagement from those who have made it a mere profit center -- then we are doomed to live forever in the world described by Charlie Pierce today:

This is what happens when the people running politics accept as axiomatic that spin is everything. This is what happens when, because of that, courage is defined by keeping your own job.

And in the world of spin and accommodation, the medium of our political and cultural exchange will always have this face stamped on it.



UPDATE:  In my haste to finally get this out of my head and on "paper", I forgot to mention this masterful coverage of the entire, Steele punch-up -- "Dems Join GOP To Muzzle Black Speech" --from "The Black Commentator".  The whole thing is worth your time, but here is just a little snip to show how far and wide their analysis ranged:

Tweed Vultures 

Harpers, 1871 “Let us prey.” 

Thomas Nast drew his potent pictures in powerful publications like the New York Times and Harper’s Weekly – and ultimately undid Tweed and his gang. In Tweed’s downward spiral, the Boss wailed: “"Stop them damned pictures. I don't care so much what the papers say about me. My constituents can't read. But, damn it, they can see pictures!"