Below The Fold

I didn’t really want to get too far into the anonymous sources question, because I think that’s amore complicated matter, and I don’t think Jane really cares about it to be honest. From a strategy standpoint, the leaking mechanism in this case is pretty straightforward: the Obama administration was trying to couch the message they were going to unload in the language of the center-right establishment, in an effort to get the media to hype his fiscal responsibility summit ahead of time. Some elements of the left were unnerved by the language, and so someone went to a writer for The American Prospect who specializes in healthcare issues to reassure them of the actual strategy in play, but you don’t want to go on record with that (especially if you’re a senior official) because that would catch Big Media eyes, and undercut the entire strategy. It’s pretty basic political tactics, and, at least in this case, I don’t see anything wrong, especially in retrospect, with Ezra running it; there was ample reason to find the substance of the information credible based on past statements and positions of the relevant players in the administration, it made political sense, and in the end it turned out to be totally accurate. In this case, Ezra’s readers were more informed for the quotes, and Ezra has plenty of reason to reward his source for good information. Are there instances where anonymity creates problems, or gets a reporter rolled? Of course. But that doesn’t seem to apply to this case.

My larger point, one that’s something of a series here, is that Hamsher just isn’t making a good faith, serious, argument. She goes from castigating Ezra for using an anonymous source to citing something that’s not only anonymous, but uncredited, as evidence that she was right all along. On top of that, she repeatedly accuses Ezra’s source of “lying” to him even though the source wasn’t even inaccurate. Long stry short; she’s peeved that she was wrong on the substance of their earlier tift, and I suspect she might be somewhat resentful that administration officials don’t talk to her. And, ultimately, she’s using old conservative movement tricks to avoid admitting she was wrong, and to make a lot of noise to get a lot of attention. And my fear is that that’s working, and that the progressive movement is going to cocoon themselves in an echo camber the same way the wingnuts did, and they’ll lose touch with reality altogether the same way the wingnuts did. I think you’re already seeing some of that, with things like Chris Bowers bragging about Open Left raising $12,000 for Tom Geoghegan.

Well that’s all well and good, but much like political prognosticating, at some point objective reality kicks in. I can predict Barack Obama will win the election and someone else can predict that John McCain will win, but at some point one of us is wrong. Similarly, at some point there’s an objective reality involved here, given that the summit happened. And, with that in mind, it’s just total up-is-downism to run around claiming that Ezra’s sources lied to him, given that what they told him is exactly what happened. You can argue these things up to a point, but at some point you have to accept what’s actually happening, and Hamsher & Digby simply aren’t doing that. Rather, they’re continuing to insist that they were right, that you can’t believe your lying eyes, and that the only reason we think they were wrong is because they forced the White House to alter their position. It’s the same way the conservative movement treats the Fairness Doctrine; whenever someone points out Democrats don’t have any interest in it, they respond, sooner or later, by implying that that’s only because THEY are making it impossible for them to do it. And that’s what worries me about the netroots; they’re already quoting and reinforcing and citing each other the same way the conservative echo chamber has done for years now, and they’re already having trouble seeing when they were wrong.

But the anonymous source question is a different one entirely, and one I don’t really have a good answer too. If Ezra had demanded whomever he talked to go on the record, the official would have hung up and that would be that. Ezra could have printed it or not, and then his readers would have been less informed for it. There’s no particularly good alternative for these sorts of “leaks,” because the officials can just play it tighter to the vest. Which is why I think demonstrated accuracy *has* to be taken heavily into account; if someone is using a lot of anonymous sources who are the reporter accurate information time and time again, that’s quite a bit different then someone who’s printing things that consistently turn out to be wrong based on anonymous sources.

As to the Brooks question, I don’t think it’s that hard to figure out what’s going on; David Brooks is a center-right, Republican leaning, former National Review and Weekly Standard employee who writes Op-Eds and does punditry, and the White House is spinning him.

For a little background on the tail end of that last post, I’m a former Republican political operative/strategist who worked on roughly 2 dozen campaigns between 2002 and 2006, before I left the GOP, got burnt out on the political operative game, and decided to switch career paths and attempt to break into political writing. So I tend to approach these things, especially the media, from the other side of the fence, so to speak, and that’s the perspective I’m bringing to the more nakedly politcal aspect of these things.