Adam Nagourney has his hit piece up on the Yearly Kos conference. It’s not hard to see his disdain for what it is going on here in Vegas. He calls the choice of Las Vegas ‘unlikely’. He calls the ballroom ‘dowdy’. He claims Markos is walking around with a media advisor (if he is, I haven’t seen him). I’ve given a couple of interviews, but if you believe Nagourney, we’re all being told what to say and fawning over bigfoot reporters.
And for whatever disdain that could be picked up toward mainstream politicians and news media, it seems fair to say that the bloggers and the people who love them were fascinated by their favorite targets. Jennifer Palmieri, a deputy White House press secretary under President Bill Clinton, held a “pundit project training,” where she told bloggers how to present themselves in television interviews — what to wear, how to sit and what to say.
Finally, he compares us to the likes of Rush Limbaugh, G. Gordon Liddy, and Sean Hannity.
As became clear from the rather large and diverse crowd here, the blogosphere has become for the left what talk radio has been for the right: a way of organizing and communicating to supporters.
Nagourney is an idiot.
Yes, he is. But what else did anyone expect?
btw, I haven’t seen Maureen Dowd getting mobbed by anyone. People just walk right by her. Same with Markos. Really, Joe Trippi is getting more attention than anyone else I’ve seen. MSOC is getting more mobbed than Dowd is.
I can tell you THIS for sure: no one’s mobbing Nagourney. Because we don’t mob total hacks.
Msoc is the future superstar. Mark my words. She will be a TV talking head long after anybody remembers of cares about this Moulitsas fellow….her face transcends the blogoshere.
It screams TV!
If not MOVIES!
PS for an alternate live blogging of these same events, go to my diary NOW!
If you want to I mean…
I saw your title and thought to myself, “What else is new?”
LOL
Glad you guys are there for the real scoop. But you know, the miracle is that the “Old Grey Lady” thinks this is worth 3 articles, one yesterday, and two today (one form Maureen Dowd).
As Marcus said we (bloggers) have ARRIVED!! NOW we have to train these idiots to speak truth rather than fiction. Of course they are suffering from 6 years of Rovitis, and we need to find a vaccine that will innoculate them against that dread disease.
Imo, the Times under BushCo is now ‘the old grey mare’ . Unfortunately, there’s no vaccine against systemic decay.
He’s probably just pissed over some gambling losses. 😉
So: the Times set up a focus on the convention earlier so that Nagourney could then take a few smacks at it. Naturally, a very silly & boring piece — though the comparison between Kos & Wayne Newton is inventive, at least.
In any case, both Nagourney & the Times are irrelevant here. Enjoy!
I have to wonder what he means by that. I remember some of the discussion when YearlyKos was first being planned out. The two sites in the running were Chicago and Las Vegas. I thought Chicago was a better idea because it’s a big transportation hub and in the center of the country. I don’t remember for sure, but I think Las Vegas primarily prevailed because of ample and relatively cheap convention space and airfares designed to entice people to travel to Disneyland In The Desert. Not that the thought of going to Sin City didn’t encourage more than a few people.
The fact that he tags the idea of holding YK in Vegas “unlikely” merely shows that he doesn’t understand the truly small-d democratic nature of blogging any more than he understands any of the rest of it.
or he understands it, but doesn’t care to portray it that way to the nation’s readers.
BTW- C-SPAN2 is carrying a conference on Blog Theory with Chris Bowers, Tim Tagaris and a few others. I think it is starting now and being shown live.
CabinGirl and I are in the front row. We’re plotting how to effectively heckle them.
What? You didn’t think to bring lemons to suck on?
Great idea, Omir! Our own ‘Lemon Kids’.
I remember a story — I think Captain Kangaroo used to tell it — about a man who disrupted a band concert or some similar civic function by sucking on a lemon in the front row so everybody would pucker up and nobody could play. The hero of the story was a kid who couldn’t talk, but I think he played the harmonica to get everybody’s mind off the lemon.
Give me some time and I could probably come up with some more fun stuff. For instance I assume BooMan has his laptop there with him. He could open up a word processor and then type out, in letters big enough for those on the stand to see, SMILE IF YOU’RE NOT WEARING ANY UNDERWEAR.
I just saw you. No Speedo?
it’s under my jeans.
Hey, just saw you both, too.
Like my shirt? 🙂
Yup.
But they had technical problems and CSPAN cut away shortly thereafter. 🙁
It’s not online, unfortunately. They were running some deal from a Chicago book fair last year. Interesting, about American expansionism and racism and how people were once worried that someday the speaker of the House might be calling on the congressman from Cuba or the Philipines or (gasp) Hawaii.
There is a lot of envy in Nagourney’s writing. He doesn’t like being cut out. The thing about the Blogostan that these guys don’t like is that a lot of us are smarter, and in our own chosen field of endeavour more successful than they are. Nagourney’s got to the top of his profession, but with what? What analytical and research skills do you need nowadays to make it to the top at the NYT? Not too many, to judge by what we see on its front page.
I think that Nagourney (and Friedman, and Cohen) are pissed because they see a lot of people who they know are really good who are not paying attention to them. Well Boohoo. Grow up and forget what your mama told you about what a great little genius you are, Adam. This is a big country. There are a lot of very smart people in it. You might just not be one of them.
BTW, I think youhave too many free highballs. This is a hit piece? The “odious” comparison he makes to right wing talk radio seems….actually to make some sense….and he terms it a “large and divrse” crowd.
What an asshole. He should have termed it a “small and insular” crowd?
You seem pretty sensitive today for a philly guy…if you want a hit piece, go read mine….
I have to say, regardless of Nagourney, the bit I watched on C-Span had Markos talking all egalitarian about wanting more voices on the blogosphere but DailyKos banned me for expressing views from the left that were too critical of the Democratic leadership. I was treated to accusations of being a troll. With the word ‘troll’ being used in no less a derogatory way than any southern red neck tossing about the ‘N’ word.
The supposed liberal blogosphere is more often just a proxy for and filter of status quo Democratic Party conventional thought. right wing Democratic Party conventional thought. Talk about those Democratic Party right wing proclivities and you get banned, denounced and locked out of the conversation at DailyKos and too many other self proclaimed “progressive” blogs.
The Democrats have been shoved so far to the right for so many years that they don’t know that they are no longer really the “liberals” that the right wing denounces them as being. They simply believe everything the right wing tells them to believe. Democratic liberals of today are the Nixon Republicans are 1970.
The n word was used while people were getting murdered.
And, btw, is a northern use of the n word somehoe polite? Like in Detriot with history’s deadliest race riots?
Don’t make comparisons that embed self-aggrandizement via dismissal of centuries of other people’s suffering. It makes you appear to be a white, male, northeastern, unexamined bigot.
Banning is not oppression.
It seems that reporters are having to deal with something scientists have to do everyday- peer review. Bloggers can fact check, note “data” left out and call foul. Reporters are being called on their slant and having to defend their conclusions. I don’t feel the least bit sorry for them, only embarassed at their peevishness.
… a very tiny man. He’s like 5’1″. I’m serious. Tiny. Who knew?
He was walking with Anne Marie Cox and, in heels, she looked like she was 7′ tall compared to him.
BTW, around here most people I talked to didn’t read it as a hit piece. I guess most thought it was better than they expected.
One thing to mention about the comparison to hate radio — he’s at least partially right in the communication model. Right wing radio, like the right wing in general, is top-down orientation: A handful control what’s said; under careful control, carefully selected members of the public are allowed to agree with the power figures, and dissenters are quashed ruthlessly and immediately.
Progressive blogging turns on a much more open and egalitarian model, like leftist-progressive politics. As such it’s chaotic, noisy, confused… but there’s useful interaction going on rather than groupthink.
With a couple of VERY notable exceptions.
Dunno so much that he’s an idiot, Boo, as I think he just doesn’t get it. MoDo doesn’t, either. They are working in a business that’s still operating on a 19th-century, movable-type, hard-copy model. The rest of us, even those of us who started in that older model, have moved on to newer methods, which allow us to use things like fact-check and peer review that are pretty much precluded by the deadline print style of communication.
That, and a lot of those guys who work for major metros think they’re pretty hot stuff. So you get a byline in the New Yawk Times. That and a token, as they used to say, will get you on the subway.
(Justification: I can be dismissive, she says casually, because I have had my byline in said newspaper.)
All along I thought he was a major league, big time asshole. Silly me.
“Rush Limbaugh, G. Gordon Liddy, and Sean Hannity.”
why yes we are a large audience.