Talk Radio Liberals Watch: Always Right
by Brien Jackson
With the budget coming out and some more substantive things in the hopper, I promise I’m going to scale back these type of posts, but this missive from Jane Hamsher is simply too egregious to let go. The matter in question goes back to the run-up to the fiscal responsiblity summit, when a lot of progressives, notably Hamsher and Digby, were absolutely foaming at the idea that the Obama administration was going to cut social security. Someone in the administration talked to Ezra Klein, and told him that social security was not going to be on the table, and that they were going to explicitly argue that healthcare reform was a much more pressing need than anything related to social security, which, coincidentally, is exactly what happened.
Without sugarcoating things, what Hamsher is doing is straight out of Orwell. Ezra’s source was completely accurate, at multiple points, but Hamsher makes multiple references to Ezra being “lied to.” Karl Rove couldn’t pull off that sort of up-is-downism with a straight face. Moreover, Hamsher references a completely unsourced, even anonymously, throwaway line from a New York Times report about Obama’s relationship with labor as evidence that she is really right, which is, obviously, pretty ironic, but also underscores the real point to Hamsher’s post.
Hamsher is employing an old right-wing trick, in which the writer is always right, no matter what happens. If it turns out that they’re spectacularly wrong, it’s really just proof that they’re right. Digby, I’m sad to say, has been using the exact same slight of hand to avoid facing up to, well, being completely, loudly, wrong. To wit, most people would look at the discrepancy between what Ezra reported and what Digby/Hamsher were screaming about and conclude that Ezra is well sourced, and Digby/Hamsher were somewhere between wildly inaccurate and slightly paranoid. But, to hear Hamsher and Digby tell it, they were never wrong, rather it was their efforts who forced the administration to change course. So, on top of being right all along, they’re also Very Important People. There’s a word for this; delusional. I like Digby as a writer (Hamsher not so much), but she doesn’t have the political influence to push a local state legislative candidate, let alone to move the White House. I mean c’mon.
I don’t really care much about the anonymous source question (and neither does Hamsher, as she lays bare, she ust picked up Greenwald’s critique to take another shot at Ezra because she’s pissed off he was right). I think Greenwald is being a bit flippant, and doesn’t seem to have considered the fact that the sources can always hang up on the reporter if the latter refuses to grant them anonymity. Or maybe Greenwald thinks that’s a preferrable alternative, although I wouldn’t agree. I also tend to agree with Ezra; there’s no reason to burn a source that’s giving you accurate information. If you feel like you have a source who is routinely lying to you, then yes, you should probably burn them, because that’s a story in its own right. But in this case, not only was Ezra’s source not lying, he wasn’t even mistaken. He was exactly right, something that is understandably a foreign concept to Hamsher. But what really disturbs me is the reaction. Hamsher’s post has nearly 70 responses, mostly uncritical of her ridiculous post (and glaring contradiction). Ezra’s response has 30 responses at the moment, nearly half of which are critical of him. And again, for posterity’s sake, in the initial question Ezra was right, and Hamsher was spectacularly wrong. But at least in the narrow segment of commentors on the matter, opinion seems to have lined up behind Hamsher anyway. And that’s very troublesome, and makes me question whether the progressive movement will crumble on itself even faster than the conservative movement did.
Tags: Ezra Klein, Glenn Greenwald, Jane Hamsher, Social Security, Talk Radio Liberals
There are really two methodological questions here. The first is whether reporters should agree to go on background (or off the record).
I don’t think there’s anything controversial about reporters having discussions that are not for attribution.
As a reporter, I probably have at least two conversations on background for every interview on the record. There are all kinds of reasons why a source might not want to be quoted, most of them mundane and legit. The most common reason is that they’re not authorized to talk to the media, period. This is true of most government employees and campaign workers.
If they want to talk on background, that’s fine. Your job as a reporter is to gather information. After all, the police don’t say upfront, “Either you’re willing to testify to this under oath, or we don’t want to hear it.”
So, you hear them out. You ask questions, you take notes. You try to identify contradictions in their account. Sometimes, you try to coax the person to go back on the record, or to point you to some independent evidence for their claims, or steer you towards someone else who will speak on the record. At the end of the day, they may still have given you useful information even if their name doesn’t appear in the paper.
If that’s what you mean by “granting anonymity,” Greenwald and Hamsher are a-OK with that.
The second methodological question is whether it’s okay to cite anonymous officials as the sources of key facts in your story. That’s what Hamsher and Greenwald have a problem with. Even then, it’s a case-by-case decision. Some health care official speculating about Obama’s agenda on social security is not Deep Throat.
If your scoops really are contingent upon agreeing to identify a source as an anonymous administration official, chances are, that person wasn’t really worth hearing from.
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.
The battle between Jane and Ezra illustrates why anonymous sources are so problematic. Just going by the reporting, there’s simply no way to know who’s right, or who’s arguing in good faith. Maybe everyone, maybe no one.
I assume that Jane believes that Ezra’s sources lied to him because she getting contradictory information from yet other unnamed individuals. I used to work for Jane and I’ve know Ezra IRL for years. I respect them both tremendously. Ditto Glenn. I have no inside information, but I’d be willing to bet that Jane’s sources at least as good as Ezra’s on this story.
The problem is that everyone’s making charges and counter-charges based on their inferences about what the other person must have heard. The exchange becomes ridiculous when the discussion is so under-determined by evidence.
We don’t even know what Ezra’s sources actually said to him, just the upshot that Ezra took away from the conversation, namely, not to worry too much about the upcoming entitlement summit, viz Social Security. The phrase “on the table” is beloved of politicians and spinners everywhere because it can mean whatever the listener wants to hear.
For all we know, the officials who talked to David Brooks were committed to floating SS benefit cuts at the summit. Maybe Ezra’s sources knew about these would-be benefit cutters, and maybe they didn’t. Parsing reporting based on anonymous sources is like trying to nail jello to the wall.
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.
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Brien, I think we agree on the main points that have come up in our discussion so far. I’m perplexed by Jane’s rhetoric. Based on what we can read on their respective sites, Jane seems to have been wrong and Ezra’s sources seem to have been right. But that’s what makes me go “hmmm.”
Jane knows that we know that Ezra wrote something that turned out to be correct.
Maybe she’s just overcompensating and lashing out. But I’m assuming that she’s better informed and more rational than that. I could be wrong. We’ve all got our White Whales, myself included. Still, everything I know about Jane as a boss and a friend, makes a WhWh hypothesis seem unlikely because it would be so far out of character.
Also, much more than Ezra, Jane’s an activist. She looks sees conflicts through a strategic lens, whether they’re disputes with fellow travelers like Ezra, or outright adversaries. From a purely instrumental standpoint, I don’t see why she’d be insisting that Obama wants to sell out social security if she didn’t think it was true. So, I find myself wondering, strictly from an outside perspective, whether Jane has heard something from someone whom we the public haven’t heard from, but whose pronouncements flatly contradict those of Ezra’s sources.
I’ll certainly grant that Jane is much more of an activist than Ezra, and there’s nothing wrong with that. But I think there’s still a certain amount of responsibility that comes with having an audience, and part of that responsibility, a very big part in fact, is owning up to your mistakes. And especially considering the supposed argument in question, it seems particularly important that Jane acknowledge she was mistaken and burn *her* source, if she had one, for giving her bad information. But, from an observation standpoint, I don’t really see any reason to conclude she actually believes it.
The larger point I wanted to make vis-a-vis Jane is that, ultimately, this is another footnote in something I’ve been watching with some degree of worry since last summer; the netroots is already cocooning itself just like the right-wing did, and it’s already becoming an echo chamber where a certain strain of paranoia prevails, those on the inside are constantly reinforcing each other, those outside trying to tamp down the paranoia are dismissed, and at some point the view from inside simply looks nothing like reality. That’s not a critique of individual, per se, so much as it’s a critique of political movements, and their inherent limitations, in general. I know it comes off as TNRish anti-netrootsism, and so I try to make clear every so often that it is, in fact, meant as a constructive criticism, the desire being to see the progressive movement avoid the mistakes the conservative movement made. And if I’d known you were going to stumble across this post in advance, I would have added that disclaimer here as well.
Finally, I just want to note that what Jane is doing is taking a page, to the letter, straight out of the conservative echo chamber’s playbook. I’ll allow that it’s possible that that’s a coincidence, but I don’t really think it is. The spinning away of the inconvenient fact that she was mistaken about the Social Security summit, right down to the way it hinges on the idea that she, or at least people who agreed with her, ultimately forced the White House to alter course is a classic card the right always plays to explain why their predictions never materialize. And the outlandish, up-is-down, repeated assertions that Ezra’s source lied to him is what Sean Hannity trades in for a living; a dubious claim that is ultimately pounded home by repetition (leaving the reader no room to pause to critically process it), and the refusal to allow that the conclusion might not be accurate. Project absolute certainty, and repeat it as many times as you have to; it’s stuff you learn from day one inside any Republican communications team.
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.