Author: Patrick Maines

Posted on By Patrick Maines

Net Neutrality’s Poison Petition

For those in the communications policy business, perhaps the most jaw-dropping datum to issue from Tuesday’s elections is this: Of the 95 candidates for the House and Senate who signed a petition encouraging “net neutrality” regulation, all of them lost.  Not some of them.  Not most of them.  All of them.

It’s really quite remarkable.  Not even the Black Death killed everybody.  But there it is, a new world record for political toxicity.  The humorous aspects of this debacle aside, there is a serious lesson here: There is no appetite in this country for regulatory schemes whose effect is to promote government (and a few companies) at the expense of private-sector investment generally.

Yet this is precisely what net neutrality regulations, whether Lite or industrial strength, would do.  Intended or not, codified regulations would inevitably lead to government meddling in this freest part of the communications industry, and frustrate the kind of investment in the broadband infrastructure without which there can be no growth in this vital sector of the economy.

And for what?  As mentioned here, net neutrality is the condition that obtains today!  Nobody is being deprived or disadvantaged of anything worth talking about.  Indeed, a quick look at the kinds of organizations that have been promoting net neutrality pretty much says it all.

On the one hand we have groups like Free Press, whose interest in the subject is precisely because of the potential in governmental oversight to yoke communications companies to the agenda of the nation’s “progressives.”  While on the other you have a company like Google that, in the best tradition of crony capitalism, wants to tilt public policy in a direction that benefits its private interests.

It is widely believed that FCC Chairman Genachowski  would like the FCC to be relieved of the responsibility of taking on the task of codification of the net neutrality rules.  He is to be commended for his reservations, especially since he is under great pressure from the net neutrality lobbies to act.

The wise course now would be to let the clock run out on any kind of FCC action.  If the Republican gains in Tuesday’s elections don’t speak clearly enough about the matter, surely the fate of the hapless signers of the net neutrality petition does.

[Updated 11-4-10, 1:50 p.m. EDT, to reflect latest election results.]

                                                   

               
The opinions expressed above are those of the writer and not necessarily of The Media Institute, its Board, contributors, or advisory councils.
 

Posted on By Patrick Maines

Euripides Pants, Eumenides Pants*

So we turn now to the question on everyone’s lips: Will the Stewart/Colbert rally tomorrow be funny?  Or will it be a kind of medley, a skosh funny here and a tad serious there?  And whichever it is, does it really matter?

Judging by the published opinions of much of the chattering class, it does.  Writing in Politico, Ben Smith says: “Jon Stewart’s ‘Rally to Restore Sanity’ on the Mall Saturday has occasioned handwringing from some devoted fans who worry that he’s losing his outsider credibility, and celebration from some Democrats who hope to channel his energy to advance their electoral prospects.”

Meanwhile, over at the Washington Post, Carlos Losada writes that “this rally just doesn’t feel right.  When all is well with the universe, you’re the guy mercilessly mocking people who hold rallies, not the guy organizing them.  The (rally) just feels a little too – what’s the word – earnest for you.”

In what may be a preview of the Act on the Mall, Stewart interviewed President Obama on the “Daily Show” Wednesday night.  The comedic high point of the interview came when, in reply to Obama’s defense of his former economic adviser, Larry Summers (“Summers did a heckuva job”), Stewart said: “You don’t want to use that phrase, dude.”

Perhaps anticipating that there would be those, like Dana Milbank, who would see this remark as something less than hilarious, Stewart put on display the Full Monty of his political perspicacity.  Quoth the great man to the President: “ You ran with such, if I may say, audacity – yet legislatively it has felt timid at times.”

Never mind for a minute the mind-bending dissonance and transparent grandstanding in this observation – had Obama been any more aggressive he would have been characterized as a kind of latter day Visigoth – the really interesting question is how long would it take Stewart’s joke writers to come up with maybe a dozen parodies of this remark?

In the end, the guess here is that none of this matters much.  At a time when millions of people are unemployed or underemployed, and millions more are within a week or two of having their homes foreclosed, political humor is probably not going to be widely appreciated right now.

The choices available to Stewart and Colbert are to be funny but not relevant, or relevant (to some) but not funny to most.  Or, they can try to straddle the two, but at the risk that, at a bad time in the life of the country, they are seen as mostly just interested in aggrandizing themselves.

*What Aeschylus said to his tailor.
                                              

                
The opinions expressed above are those of the writer and not necessarily of The Media Institute, its Board, contributors, or advisory councils.

Posted on By Patrick Maines

Juan Williams and NPR

OK, so right off the bat let’s deal with what NPR’s firing of Juan Williams is, and what it is not.  It is a free speech issue, but it is not a First Amendment issue.  This is an important distinction because while many First Amendment issues involve freedom of speech, and many free speech issues involve the First Amendment, it is not the case that all free speech issues are First Amendment issues.

At bottom, the Speech Clause of the First Amendment is a proscription on what government can do to the media, not on what the media can do themselves.  As a practical matter what this means is that NPR’s management had the right to do what they did, and that, were this matter to go before a court, its resolution would not turn on First Amendment case law.

This said, the wisdom of the action taken, and what it suggests about the future of freedom of expression generally, are very much at issue here.

People of a certain age may remember the sad case of Jimmy (the Greek) Snyder, who was fired by CBS for some bizarre off-the-cuff comments he made about black athleticism while having a meal at a Washington restaurant.  Other similar cases are those of Don Imus, and more recently Helen Thomas and Rick Sanchez.

So while there are some important differences in these cases, we’re beginning to see a pattern here: When reporters and commentators say things that arguably offend minorities (and thereby disturb the politically correct equilibrium) they get fired.  And the question is whether this is the right, or even the intelligent, way to deal with such issues, especially for media companies?

It used to be believed that the best way to handle speech that is unfair or false was for more speech, not less, and by that measure a better way to have resolved many of these matters would have been for management to issue comments that mock, or directly challenge the falsities, in the offending comments.

Though the dust hasn’t even begun to settle, it’s already clear what many people, of varying political stripes, think of the way NPR has handled the Williams affair: They think it’s a disaster.  As Howard Kurtz, formerly of the Washington Post, put it in a Daily Beast piece: “His firing has backfired, handing FOX a victory and making Williams a symbol of liberal intolerance — on the very day NPR announced a grant from George Soros that it never should have accepted.”

Indeed, the Soros revelation, combined with Republican and (especially) conservative antipathy for taxpayer support of PBS and NPR, guarantee that the Williams flap is not going away any time soon.  As lamented here, there has been a coordinated and richly financed effort underway for months that has, as part of its aim, a substantial increase in government funding for public media generally, and that would oblige PBS member stations to redirect their news programs to more local coverage — the very thing that Soros’s contribution is designed to facilitate at NPR.

But that is a story that will play itself out in days to come.  Front and center now is the question of the impact of the Williams affair on NPR, in which regard it might be useful to examine a couple statements; the offending one, made by Williams, and another, made after his firing, by the president of NPR, Vivian Schiller.

Here’s Williams’s comment: “Look, Bill, I’m not a bigot.  But when I get on a plane, I got to tell you, if I see people who are in Muslim garb and I think, you know, they are identifying themselves first and foremost as Muslims, I get worried. I get nervous.”

And here’s Schiller’s: “Juan Williams should have kept his feelings about Muslims between himself and his psychiatrist or his publicist.”

Under pressure, Schiller later apologized for her remark, but going forward that may not mean much.  Put it this way, of these two comments which one do you think is the most mean-spirited and intemperate?  And of the acts at issue — Williams’s comments or his firing – which one do you think does more damage to NPR?

Yes, I think so too.

                                                                           

The opinions expressed above are those of the writer and not necessarily of The Media Institute, its Board, contributors, or advisory councils.

Posted on By Patrick Maines

‘Citizens United and Its Critics’

The Yale Law Journal has just published online an article by Floyd Abrams.  In language that is stirring in the power of its logic and elegance, yet solemn as a wake, the famed constitutional lawyer writes of his dismay over the way so many scholars and journalists have treated the Supreme Court’s decision in Citizens United, which largely overturned the law commonly called McCain-Feingold.

Abrams is neither surprised nor disappointed that these critics didn’t like the decision; his despair stems from their failure even to acknowledge the most obvious First Amendment aspects of the case.  They have, he says, treated the ruling “as a desecration.”

Many people will review this article narrowly, in that they will focus their comments, pro and con, on the law and facts of the case at issue.  But I view it from a wider perspective.  I think it’s one of the grandest examples in recent memory of the courage that’s required these days to defend and promote free speech even-handedly.

More than this, I think it guarantees, if any such were needed, that Floyd Abrams will go down in history as the greatest First Amendment champion of our era.

In part it has to do with the gentleman’s style.  Far from engaging the critics with language (like their own) that vilifies, Abrams flatters some of them for their scholarship.  Rather than retreat to the safety of quiescence or worse, he calls out even such as The New York Times, his client in the celebrated Pentagon Papers case.  And rather than indulge in any sort of self-pity, Abrams doesn’t even mention the scurrilous attack on him (because he wrote an amicus brief in opposition to McCain-Feingold) by Keith Olbermann, who predicted that Abrams “will go down in history as the Quisling of freedom of speech in this country.”

Summing up the essence of his argument, Abrams writes: “When I think of Citizens United, I think of Citizens United.  I think of the political documentary it produced, one designed to persuade the public to reject a candidate for the presidency.  And I ask myself a question: If that’s not what the First Amendment is about, what is?”

But enough of this.  Abrams’s piece is so powerful that nothing I say can embellish it.

Read it, and learn.
                                   
                
The opinions expressed above are those of the writer and not necessarily of The Media Institute, its Board, contributors, or advisory councils.

Posted on By Patrick Maines

‘The Ladykillers’ and the Critics

It’s with great trepidation that I say something that may offend.  Let me apologize, in advance and profoundly, if that’s the case.  I know I’ll have to live with this for the rest of my life.  This said, here ’tis: I like blues and gospel music.  More than this, I prefer African-American blues and gospel music.

I don’t know why this is, but I’m pretty sure it isn’t because I’m biased against whites.  I think it could be because it sounds good.  Anyhow, I was powerfully reminded of this, and other things, when I caught AMC’s premiere last month of the remake of the 1950s British comedy classic, “The Ladykillers.”

Directed by the Coen brothers, Ethan and Joel, and starring Tom Hanks, the American version had its U.S. theatrical debut in 2004, and has since been dubbed “one of the best Tom Hanks films you’ve never seen.”

For those not familiar with the British version starring Alec Guinness, of which the Coens’ film is a “retelling,” “The Ladykillers” is the story of a band of ne’er-do-wells who, in the guise of a “classic music ensemble,” rent a basement flat that abuts the counting room of a nearby riverboat casino.  The group’s intention is to tunnel into the casino’s vault, under cover of the (recorded) sound of their instruments in practice.

So that’s the storyline.  But the point here isn’t so much to provide a review as it is to register a few paragraphs in criticism of how a film as good as this could go six years before most people had even heard of it.

A lot of the problem, I think, has to do with the reviewers.  Reading now what they wrote then raises the question: Who are these people?  Even accounting for the fact that their reviews were of the theatrical version, and not the edited one shown on AMC, it’s almost beyond belief that most were so negative and that virtually none of them even mentioned the music.

This omission is remarkable because “The Ladykillers” is filled, not just on the soundtrack but also on camera, by fabulous gospel singing.  Sung by such as the Soul Stirrers, Rose Stone (sister of Sly), The Venice Four, and the Abbot Kinney Lighthouse Choir, featured performances include rousing renditions of “Trouble of This World” and “Let the Light From the Lighthouse Shine on Me.”

Credit for the inclusion of these groups belongs to T-Bone Burnett, who was the music producer on “The Ladykillers” and also on the earlier Coen brothers’ production, “O Brother, Where Art Thou?”

Never mind for a minute the joy of seeing Tom Hanks as you’ve never seen him before, or a spot-on performance by Irma P. Hall; the music in this production is among its most prominent features, and for reviewers to have ignored it completely says much more about them than anything they have to say about the movie.

It’s always a risky thing to attempt a remake of a classic, but it’s made nearly impossible when, as here, the reviewers are tone deaf.

                                                           

The opinions expressed above are those of the writer and not necessarily of The Media Institute, its Board, contributors, or advisory councils.

Posted on By Patrick Maines

Squirrels: They’re Not Just for Breakfast Anymore

The lugubrious data just keep pouring in.  Despite interest rates at zero, the economy is barely moving.  Unemployment is high and seemingly intractable.  The national debt and federal deficit are at all-time highs.  States and municipalities are on the cusp of bankruptcy.  Housing prices are flat or declining.  And the price of gold, that uncaring indicator of calm or calamity, has now risen to a new high.  In the year 2000 it sold for $300 per ounce.  Last week it closed at $1,275.

It’s against this background that we can be grateful that there are journalists in our midst who have both the assignment and the knowledge to write informatively about our national travail.  I refer, of course, to financial journalists.

As mentioned in earlier posts, however, these  reporters are mainly to be found in business publications, or the “business” sections of general interest publications, and to that extent are walled off from the general public.  And the reason this is a problem is because most of today’s political reporters don’t know enough to write informatively about things economic.

There are, of course, opinion writers who have knowledge of such matters – Paul Krugman and Robert Samuelson come to mind – but the great need for those of us trying to understand the nature of our crisis, and the way forward, is for coverage of these issues by news reporters.

Today’s economic problems, after all, transcend the arcane worlds of finance and macroeconomics; they are the reason for the unprecedented fear and anger afoot in the land.  Indeed, they have led to the spontaneous creation of the powerful Tea Party movement.

Given the stakes in all of this, one would like to think that the mainstream news media would see the need for more reporters with economic backgrounds.  In the meantime, though, here’s a salute (listed alphabetically so as not to show favorites) to all those “ink-stained wretches” who ply their trade, in coverage of commerce and finance, at the following: Barron’s, Business Week, The Economist, Financial Times, Forbes, Fortune, Investor’s Business Daily, and The Wall Street Journal.

May all of you survive and prosper. The nation needs you more than ever.

                                                                           

The opinions expressed above are those of the writer and not necessarily of The Media Institute, its Board, contributors, or advisory councils.

Posted on By Patrick Maines

Jane Mayer and the Brothers Koch

If your taste in journalism and politics runs to artless screeds and hatchet jobs, you might want to read Jane Mayer’s “Covert Operations,” published in the Aug. 30 issue of the New Yorker.  Having earlier pilloried such as Dick Cheney and Clarence Thomas, Mayer now does the remarkable – she pillories some more conservatives.

Her latest targets are the wealthy Koch brothers, Charles and David, who together run Koch Industries, the country’s second largest privately held corporation.  Make no mistake, it’s not their wealth that Mayer dislikes, it’s their politics.  This becomes clear (early on and without surcease thereafter) by the sources she quotes and by her strained attempt to brand the Kochs’ philanthropy as something not merely conservative (and therefore wrong) but venal and surreptitious as well.

But never mind.  Other people (as shown here and here) have already undertaken the easy job of deconstructing Mayer’s fable, and in any case, with their kind of money and influence the brothers Koch can take care of themselves.  The objection here is with something Mayer writes virtually in passing, not about the Kochs but about another politically active philanthropist, albeit one with very different political views – George Soros.

Here’s the offending text:

Of course, Democrats give money, too.  Their most prominent donor, the financier George Soros, runs a foundation, the Open Society Institute, that has spent as much as a hundred million dollars a year in America.  Soros has also made generous private contributions to various Democratic campaigns, including Obama’s.  But Michael Vachon, his spokesman, argued that Soros’s giving is transparent, and that “none of his contributions are in the service of his own economic interests.”  (Emphasis added.)

How many things are wrong with this paragraph?  Let’s count the ways.  First, there’s the very brevity of it.  Here we have what purports to be an expose of extraordinary and dangerous influence on the political process, and George Soros is treated to precisely 74 words – in an article that totals nearly 10,000.

The second problem is the false claim, unchallenged by Mayer, that Soros’s contributions are “transparent.”  As the head of an organization that every day has to contend with the misrepresentations and outright lies of one of the Open Society Institute’s grantees – Free Press – let me report that nothing could be further from the truth.  In fact, the amount and kind of Soros’s (and OSI’s) funding of groups like Free Press is unknown (and of no apparent interest to reporters, “investigative” or otherwise.)

There’s yet another problem with the quote attributed to Soros’s spokesman, namely, the assertion that none of his giving benefits his economic interests.  Not to put too fine a point on it, how would anyone know?  After all, the gentleman made his bones in international finance as a currency speculator.  And as recently as March of last year, in the middle of the recession, he was quoted as boasting that he was “having a very good crisis.”

Point being, of course, that hedge funds and other investors often profit by going “short” on securities as diverse as bonds, equities, commodities, and currencies.  In other words, it’s entirely possible, if he’s been making bearish bets, that Soros’s investments have been enhanced by his philanthropy, such have been the disastrous economic consequences of the public policies and politicians he supports.

This said, the thing that’s most wrongheaded about the paragraph at issue is the notion that people’s political views are suspect only when they’re (arguably) motivated by some economic interest.

This canard has been so widely circulated for so long it’s rarely challenged, but it should be.  This, because as anyone who has ever worked in policy circles knows well, those people who are the least objective and truthful are political activists, of whatever cause or political stripe, whose satisfactions come not so much from financial rewards as from the psychological satisfaction they gain as warriors in political crusades.

Consider, again, the example of Free Press.  This noxious organization, whose founders’ political views are in fact incompatible with a free press, makes much of the fact that it doesn’t receive funding from for-profit corporations.  But it gets lots of money from ideologically motivated groups like the Open Society Institute.

That this financial circumstance is treated by so many journalists as thereby absolving Free Press, and kindred organizations, from the kind of skepticism and scrutiny they visit on those that derive some or all of their funding from for-profit entities, amounts to a double standard of some considerable moment.  Because the fact is that, however much the Kochs and other businessmen may contribute to non-profit organizations, it’s a pittance compared to the kind of money provided to left-leaning organizations by the country’s major grant-making foundations.

And what’s the upshot of that?  If you’re a left-of-center activist you have a good chance of scoring big bucks from foundations with a keen political interest in your activities, and as a bonus you can go about your business free of worry that Jane Mayer, or some other reporter, will ever accuse you of being a mouthpiece for “vested interests.”

As in the title of the movie, it’s a wonderful life!

                                                           

The opinions expressed above are those of the writer and not necessarily of The Media Institute, its Board, contributors, or advisory councils.

Posted on By Patrick Maines

Sen. Franken Opines on Net Neutrality (or Something)

There’s no intelligent life elsewhere in the universe, but chowderheads abound there.  We can infer this from the cosmologists’ predictions of Earth-like planets, and from the way our elected leaders demonstrate the density of Homo sapiens.

Take, for instance, Sen. Al Franken.  In an opinion piece written last week for CNN.com, the gentleman unburdens himself of what may be a record number of non sequiturs per column inch.  For those of you who’d like to judge this for yourself, here’s the whole of the thing as written.

For those who haven’t got the patience (and you know who you are), here’s an abridged version with commentary.

 “Our free speech rights,” says Al, “are under assault — not from the government but from corporations seeking to control the flow of information in America.”

(And what’s the evidence of that?)  “Telecommunications companies want to be able to set up a special high-speed lane just for the corporations that can pay for it.”

(And what has that got to do with our free speech rights?)  “Perhaps,” says Al, “those companies will discriminate based on whose political point of view conforms to their bottom line.”

(And what’s the evidence of that?)  “In the 1990s, Congress rescinded rules that prevented television networks from owning their own programming,” and afterwards the networks started favoring their own entertainment programs.

(And this is evidence that telecom companies will discriminate on the basis of non-conforming political views?)  With all these mergers “we’ll end up with a few megacorporations in control of the flow of information.”

(And so, Senator, what’s the moral here?)  “Net neutrality … it’s the most important First Amendment issue of our time.”

Posted on By Patrick Maines

The DISCLOSE Act Creeps Along

Sometime before the end of the world (which is to say any day now) it’s going to occur to our congressional leaders that the United States is facing some actual problems that might usefully be addressed.  In the meantime, though, the expectation is that they’ll just keep lobbing into the hopper things like the DISCLOSE Act.

As mentioned in an earlier blog, the legislation is formally titled the “Democracy Is Strengthened by Casting Light on Spending in Elections” Act.  And right there you have a measure of the collective wit of the bill’s sponsors.

Having cleared the House last month, the legislation is now in the Senate where its fate is unclear.  There’s talk of a Republican filibuster and of Democratic weariness.  But never mind the horse race aspects; we can trust our political reporters to handle that.  Of much greater importance are the myriad things that are wrong with the bill, divisible in parts between those that are just routinely outrageous, and those that are uncommonly so.

Among the former are the carve-outs exempting special interest groups like AARP and the NRA, and the transparently political rush to pass the legislation before the fall elections.  But the worst aspects of the bill are those that are also the most constitutionally infirm.

The bans on direct expenditures by government contractors and TARP recipients (with no similar limitations put on unions), and the speech-chilling threat of harassment inherent in some of the disclaimer and disclosure obligations, are sure to be challenged in court if the DISCLOSE Act is passed and signed into law.

It’s rarely a prudent thing to predict the outcome of any matter before the Supreme Court.  But considering what appears to be the support there for the notion that the speech at issue enjoys constitutional protection, it’s hard to see the Court upholding a bill that, for instance, restricts the First Amendment rights of organizations just because they happen to be government contractors.

In the main, The Media Institute’s opposition to McCain-Feingold has focused more on that legislation’s impact on “issue ads” rather than direct political contributions.  But given the mischief, not only inherent in but positively intended by the bill’s sponsors, the hope here is that, whether by filibuster or force majeure, the DISCLOSE Act will be put to rest in the Senate.

As they say in the ad, “Just Do It.”

Posted on By Patrick Maines

Free Press and the Huffington Post

As some have noticed, a few pieces on this blogsite were originally published on the Huffington Post.  I started writing at HuffPo, in November of last year, because I wanted to occasionally write things that I felt were inappropriate for the Media Institute’s blogsite, and because I knew there were a few regulars there who, like me, were unhappy with the illiberalism of today’s “progressives.”

So it was that the first piece I wrote was a kind of introduction to all such called "The Orphan of the American Political System," in which I argued that it was a strange and unfortunate thing that liberals and libertarians were not allies.  (Because this piece had nothing to do with the media, and was overtly political, it wasn’t cross-posted, until now, on this website.)

Published in HuffPo’s “Politics” section, "Orphan" attracted a fair number of supporters and detractors — in other words pretty much what I expected, and all was well.  It wasn’t until I wrote blog number six, in February of this year, that the trouble began.

"The Intrinsic Menace in ‘Media Reform,’" published on Feb. 22, was a criticism of the “media reform” movement generally, and of the Knight Foundation, the FCC, and the group that calls itself Free Press specifically.  Among the subsequent commenters were Charles Firestone of the Aspen Institute, who challenged my characterization of the Knight Commission (a collaboration of Aspen and the Knight Foundation) and Timothy Karr of Free Press.

Karr’s comment was a classic.  In the finest tradition of political activists everywhere, Karr dealt not at all with the substantive points in my piece, but instead resorted to ad hominem attacks on me and The Media Institute, and faulted the editors of the Huffington Post for publishing it.

This last bit turned out to be a thing of some moment, about which more later, but Karr had more to say.  Lot’s more.  Just one day after the publication of "Intrinsic Menace," Karr wrote a piece for his own blog (Media Citizen) titled "When Corporate Shills Attack."  And three days after that he published, on the Huffington Post, a piece titled "Announcing the (Unofficial)Post Shill Watch," and cross-posted it the same day at Daily Kos.

The burden of both pieces, if that’s the word, was two-fold: HuffPo was allowing “corporate shills” (like me) to enter its progressive sanctum sanctorum, and it was not requiring said bloggers to state their organizations’ sources of support.

Had this been all that Karr said it wouldn’t have been an issue. Criticism by Free Press, after all, is considered by many, myself included, to be a thing of no importance, such is that organization’s tedious and transparent “mission.”  But it wasn’t all that he said.  In his Media Citizen blog, Karr also said that I personally had blocked publication of comments he had submitted to HuffPo — that in fact I had blocked his comments no less than five times.

And that was a lie.  Not only had I not done so, I wouldn’t have done for the simple reason that, as the head of one of the country’s leading First Amendment organizations, censorship is not my thing.

So this was unacceptable, and the only question was what to do about it.  After considering other approaches, I decided to ask HuffPo for their help.  As I put it in an e-mail to an associate editor there:

(Tim Karr) is saying on other sites that I have blocked him from commenting on my post at HuffPo.  He claims that he has been blocked five times.  I don’t know if he has in fact been blocked — he has a comment up there now, to which I responded — but I know, as you know, that I certainly didn’t block him.  Since, however, you are the only people who can prove my innocence of Karr’s charge, I hope you’ll find the time and a way to do so.

Thus began a frustrating exchange of notes that went on for eight days.  To my point that Karr had accused me of blocking his comments, the editor initially suggested that Karr was referring to someone else.  To Karr’s claim that I had blocked him five times, the editor suggested I write a piece for HuffPo with a link showing that one comment had been published.  And because Karr had published his accusation on his own blog (Media Citizen), well, there wasn’t much that HuffPo could do about that.

Finally, on March 5, I got a reply to a note I had sent the day before, in which I bluntly questioned why HuffPo was reluctant to tell Karr that I had not blocked his comments.  Much as I had expected, the editor’s note revealed that it was HuffPo itself that had blocked his comments, that they had done so because his comments were critical of HuffPo’s editors, and that Karr had been informed of this in a phone conversation.

I was relieved to hear this, and I thanked the editor and told him it was all I needed, but this affair left a bad taste in my mouth.  It would, after all, have been an easy thing for HuffPo to reveal Karr’s lie by commenting on his "Shill Watch" post on HuffPo itself, though of course that would have required that they publicly own up to blocking his comments themselves.

The bad taste got worse less than a month later when, on March 31, HuffPo announced “new blogging guidelines.”  As described on their website:

In an effort to be as transparent with our readers as possible, we require HuffPost bloggers to disclose any financial conflicts of interest related to the issue they are writing about.  If a blogger receives payment or income from a company, organization, group, or individual with a financial stake in the issue he/she is weighing in on, that information must be disclosed at the bottom of the applicable blog post.

For those who have opened the hyperlinks provided above, these words will sound familiar.  In fact, they sound exactly like what Karr was demanding. As he wrote in his Media Citizen blog:

I respect Huffington Post for building a home for many of us who seek an alternative to the mainstream mouthpieces that dominate news and commentary.  But they do not, unfortunately, require the kind of disclaimer I’d like to see regarding a new crop of contributors who are using the site to push corporate agendas.  I’m hoping that will change soon.  (Emphasis added.)  

Apart from the appearance of an inordinate amount of influence that Free Press has at the Huffington Post, there are many things wrong with this guideline, the most obvious being the way it lumps together people who work for organizations as diverse as law firms, corporations, PR firms, and nonprofit organizations, and implies moreover that bloggers’ opinions amount to “conflicts of interest” wherever they derive any income from entities that have a “financial interest” in the subject being blogged.  It also has the (deliberate?) effect of letting people whose contributors have an “ideological interest,” like Karr and the Free Press funders, off the disclaimer hook altogether.

If, as appears to be the case, HuffPo’s new disclaimer guidelines are a consequence, in whole or in part, of lobbying by Free Press, about whose funding we know next to nothing, the irony is almost too rich for human consumption.

But for the Huffington Post, this is not the worst of it.  Despite its left-leaning editorial slant, one can see in HuffPo the potential for dialogue.  It’s inherent in the openness of the site itself, and it’s implied by Arianna Huffington’s history and in her published views.  But at Free Press dialogue and debate are treated as bourgeois concepts, best abused or neglected, and if the Huffington Post allows them to influence their editorial policies they stand to lose not just a diverse readership but their credibility as well.