Jay Carney

I just learned from Talking Points Memo that Time magazine's Jay Carney is set to become Joe Biden's communications director. I don't follow Carney's word closely, but I knew I had written something about him...somewhere...that was awfully critical. I found the below on my hard drive; it ran on the New Republic' website, which doesn't have archives. So I'm bringing it back to light. For all I know Jay Carney is the most brilliant choice for vice-presidential communications secretary since John Adams was veep; maybe Team O welcomes a flack who insults bloggers even when they're right—it puffs up the prejudices of the legacy media, which is part of a flack's job (or maybe, paraphrasing FDR upon appointing stock-manipulator Joseph Kennedy as SEC chair, it takes a hack to catch a hack). Still and all, I reprint the article in the interest of reminding Carney that knee-jerk disrespect for bloggers does not serve the public interest, and that in the republic of letters, merit must outrank rank.

"Reality Bytes: Bloggers upstage the mainstream press yet again," Feb. 7, 2007

By Rick Perlstein

Chalk up 7:22 a.m. EST on Tuesday, January 23, 2007, as the moment a
milestone was passed. On Time's new blog, "Swampland," D.C. Bureau
Chief Jay Carney posted a pre-assessment to the State of the Union
Address comparing President Bush's political position to Bill Clinton
in January of 1995. Like Bush, "President Clinton was in free fall. …
His approval ratings were mired in the 30's and seemed unlikely to
rise."

Moments later, a writer identfiying himself as "Tom T" pointed out an
error in Carney's "nut graf" that would have earned a failing grade
for a first-year journalism major: "Clinton's approval rating in
January of 2005 was 47 percent. It was not mired in the 30s." At 9:12,
the blogger Atrios, also known as Duncan Black, alerted his readers to
the gaffe, and they descended on the Time blog like locusts--and, to
mix the Biblical metaphor, served Jay Carney's head up on a charger.
They tabulated several more boneheaded errors: Carney wrote that 1995
was Clinton's first State of the Union "with Newt Gingrich and Bob
Dole seated behind him as Speaker and Senate Majority Leader"; but, of
course, it is the Vice President, not the Senate Majority leader, who
sits behind the president. He also wrote of Clinton's "recovery …
during Monica, in 1999"--but, as a commenter reminded him, "Clinton
never had to 'recover' from Monica, unless polls in the high 50s and
60s are something you have to recover from."

Then the commenters unraveled the entire foundation of Carney's
argument. He had said that, because "Americans reward presidents who,
even in the face of enormous distractions, focus on issues that matter
to them … Bush won't spend much time tonight talking about surging
troops in Iraq or the Global War on Terror." But, as writers
identifying themselves as "jjcomet," "dmbeaster," and "Newton Minnow"
pointed out, the issue of greatest concern to the nation "is far and
away the war in Iraq, at 48% the only issue in double digits." Another
made a similar point, shall we say, more qualitatively: "The Iraq War
is a DISTRACTION?? Are you serious? Am I wrong or did he compare the
Lewinski scandal to Iraq??? What is the matter with you!?!?"

At which Carney snapped back so churlishly ("the left is as full of
unthinking Ditto-heads as Limbaugh-land") that, for a moment, it was
hard even to remember--why was it, again, that we were supposed to
defer to the authority of newsweeklies (and the mainstream press) in
the first place? Carney was rude and wrong. The barbaric yawpers of
the netroots were rude and right.

All in all, a rough day for Jay Carney. It inaugurated a rough week
for those who still wish to uphold a model of cultural authority in
which the fact that someone is a professional with a famous name--
credentialed by other professionals with famous names--can serve as a
reasonable proxy for trustworthiness. It marked one more step in the
arrival of our new, more uncomfortable media world--one in which, to
judge a piece of writing, we must gauge not the status of the writer,
but his or her words themselves, unattached to the author's worldly
rank.

That's all right by me. In his brilliant 1990 study The Letters of the
Republic: Publication and the Public Sphere in Eighteenth-Century
America, literary scholar Michael Warner argues that this is precisely
why so many founding fathers insisted that public debates be carried
out by pseudonym. "Publius," he points out--the pen name under which
the newspaper arguments for ratifying the Constitution collected as
the "Federalist Papers" were published--"speaks in the utmost
generality of print, denying in his very existence the mediating of
particular persons." In other words, it wasn't supposed to matter that
the author was the distinguished gentleman Alexander Hamilton, John
Jay, or James Madison. You were just supposed to judge according to
the words on the page.

Or on the screen. January 23, the day Carney landed on his own petard,
was also, as it happens, the first day of testimony in the perjury and
obstruction of justice trial of former vice-presidential Chief of
Staff Scooter Libby. And some of the distinguished gentlemen and
gentleladies of the press have seemed none too pleased that the
journalistic pace is being set by the rotating cast of "live bloggers"
at Firedoglake.com (FDL), who, thanks to a press pass secured by
Arianna Huffington, have been providing a near-transcript-quality
record in real time of the proceedings, interwoven with
contexualization by writers more expert in many cases than the cable
news legal commentators, wrapped up each afternoon by a video summary.
By phone from her home in Chicago, Christina Siun O'Connell, FDL's
part-time press secretary (yes, blogs now have press secretaries; full
disclosure: she is also my friend) lists the names of the team, some
of them who write under pseudonyms: Pachacutec; TRex; Swopa ("Plame
geek extraordinaire"); ERiposte ("who, I think, is male"). The most
expert among them, Marcy Wheeler--a former academic from Ann Arbor
whose book Anatomy of Deceit was published to coincide with the case
by a brand new book imprint, Vaster, established by bloggers (the book
is already in a second printing)--has only recently come out of the
shadows. (She used to be known as "emptywheel.") She received a
backhanded compliment on the live-blogging from Ana Marie Cox, who, as
Time's online editor, bears editorial responsibility for Jay Carney's
blog posts: "All the big people are really glad to have it."

The "big people" thus prove themselves small. Not least because many
of the "small people" would actually be quite big if they chose not to
surrender themselves to pseudonymity. Wheeler's partner at her site,
The Last Hurrah, calls himself Meteor Blades, nothing else. And he
used to be a top editor at the Rocky Mountain News and the Los Angeles
Times. "We've been beating them," Wheeler notes of The Last Hurrah's
coverage of the CIA leak scandal. "The New York Times can't cover the
story. They're constitutionally incapable."

She puts it even more bluntly in her book: "[T]he CIA leak case is a
story about how our elected representatives exploited the weakness of
our media." Part of that weakness was their overweening self-regard.
At first, in the eighteenth century, when an anonymous writer launched
charges against "gentlemen"—quite often in the rudest language
imaginable--it was a scandal "in a social order of deference," Warner
writes>. But, by striking down deference, pseudonyms forced arguments
to be stronger; Warner even argues that the anonymous culture of print
is what made republican consciousness possible. Like "jjcomet,"
"dmbeaster," and "Newton Minnow," our Founding Fathers only had only
their words to rely on for their authority. Every day, I find faceless
netroots citizens reprising their wisdom, as against gentlemen and
gentleladies of the press who sometimes seem more interested saving
face than doing sound work.

Views expressed on this page are those of the authors and not necessarily those of Campaign for America's Future or Institute for America's Future