Klein and Terrabytes of Florid Concern

WhoisIoz has an interesting blog. It combines clever and insightful with cynical and smug. He is dismissive of efforts to expose Joe Klein as a hack because Joe Klein is a) only doing the job he is paid to do, b) is incredibly insignificant, and c) the government is an imperfect beast that is essentially necessary but irredeemable. To give full credit to his argument, I’ll cite it in full.

Greenwald’s schtick is increasingly terrifying. His neverending epiphany, which arrives each day and without fail, like the rising of the sun–is that, holy shit, the media propogandizes on behalf of the government. (The government, Glenn, not the GOP.) Finding a gloss on some new police-state tactic in Time magazine, of all places, should not shock a man. It’s like being surprised at a well-reviewed military parade in Pravda. I mean, not to suggest that the state is only a network of power structures, needless to say, best understood holistically and organically, not as a machine but as an organism, simultaneously divided against itself and unified in the common purpose of survival and growth, capable of mediating internal tensions and disagreements to that point, able to acquire new skills and competencies, adaptive and intelligent, sometimes rational and sometimes reactionary, instinctively but not universally territorial, with some physical centers of great importance and others of vestigial uselessness, a totality of abstract powers ideated and actualized by the collective action of human beings, themselves only the material functionaries of a self-perpetuating, self-referencing, self-defining, self-circumscribing, suprahuman entity. How do you like them fucking apples, Gleen Greenwald? To look at the state of human affairs right now and conclude that the real problem is that people like Joe Klein are willing to swallow a government line, when obviously the very purpose of the entire economic sector for which the Joe Kleins of the world toil is precisely to mold, variate, amplify, and disseminate a very particular kind of information, is to find yourself not only missing the forest for the trees, but the trees for one moldy leaf rotting in a puddle on the lee side of a dank Appalachian hill.

It’s all very clever, and it’s pretty much true. It’s very easy to adopt a kind of helpless holistic cynicism. It’s easy to feel contempt, if not pity, for poor saps that take to the streets with silly anti-Bush signs thinking they’re going to change the course of the energy wars.

But there is another way of looking at it. Joe Klein isn’t insignificant. As opinion leaders go, he’s pretty high up the totem pole. And he’s dangerous precisely because he is not what he appears to be. It’s simply not true that every columnist/reporter at Time or similar outfits is acting/performing like Joe Klein.

Klein’s role is ‘concern troll‘. Here’s one definition:

Concern Troll: A person who posts on a blog thread, in the guise of “concern,” to disrupt dialogue or undermine morale by pointing out that posters and/or the site may be getting themselves in trouble, usually with an authority or power. They point out problems that don’t really exist. The intent is to derail, stifle, control, the dialogue. It is viewed as insincere and condescending.

That is exactly what Klein does. He takes on a role as a concerned Democrat. He then accuses the Democrats of doing things that they are not doing, or repeats dishonest Republican critiques. And the idea is to get the Democrats to act more like Republicans, or cave in to whatever it is the Republicans want. IOZ thinks we’re clueless.

holy shit, the media propogandizes on behalf of the government. (The government, Glenn, not the GOP.)

But that is precisely wrong. Joe Klein was playing the exact same role during the Clinton administration, only against the government. If Klein has hidden masters, they aren’t ‘the government’.

It’s important to educate people about BOTH features of corporate news. Yes, there is an inherent bias in favor of whatever the government says, especially on matters of foreign policy and national (even internal) security. This is combined in an unhealthy way with an unreflective (Hugo Chavez is Hitler) pro-corporate bias. We should expect nothing but self-serving crap from Bigfoot corporate reporters when they report on these areas. People need to know that.

But, they also need to know that there are charlatans out there that are playing a role as members of the left, yet are really just serving as inept sidekicks in a faux left/right debate. To put it in scientific terms, it’s like having a debate about astrophysics, where one side is represented by Steven Hawking and the other by your garbage man. Only…your garbage man is posing as a PhD. (see Alan Colmes).

This kind of stacking the deck is endemic, if not at all unpredictable, and it’s an important and essential job of the blogosphere to expose it and educate people about it. And it’s not just about Klein being a phony. It’s about the infrastructure of the media that allows him to get away with printing lies and inaccuracies. If you call up his editor, you get this:

I’ve spent all morning on the phone trying to figure out who the editor at Time Magazine was on Joe Klein’s FISA column (the one Klein has now written about five times, fully admitting he never read the original bill). I finally confirmed that the editor was Priscilla Painton, and called her and identified myself. I asked her what the editing process was, and how a piece with so many errors made it into print.

“That assumes that there are errors,” she said. And hung up on me.

Her number is 212-522-2022.

Understanding Priscilla Painton is important. What the hell is her problem? Is she self-consciously aware that her job is ‘precisely to mold, variate, amplify, and disseminate a very particular kind of information’ and that that information is false and serves Republican interests?

Or is she just somehow a puppet whose invisible strings are pulled by an “an organism, simultaneously divided against itself and unified in the common purpose of survival and growth, capable of mediating internal tensions and disagreements to that point, able to acquire new skills and competencies, adaptive and intelligent, sometimes rational and sometimes reactionary, instinctively but not universally territorial, with some physical centers of great importance and others of vestigial uselessness, a totality of abstract powers ideated and actualized by the collective action of human beings, themselves only the material functionaries of a self-perpetuating, self-referencing, self-defining, self-circumscribing, suprahuman entity”?

And, regardless of how you answer that question, shouldn’t she be fired for her lack of journalistic standards? Or is that as “uncannily idiotic as any sentence among all the terrabytes of florid concern from the many mouths of Donkledom”?

Update [2007-11-27 13:33:50 by Steven D]: For those of you so inclined the managing editor of Time Magazine, and presumably Joe Klein’s boss, is Richard Stengel. If you would like to email Mr. Stengel regarding the serious lapse of journalistic ethics and practices evidenced by Joke Line, his email address is richard_stengel@timemagazine.com. My email to Mr. Stengel follows:

(cont.)

Update #2 below the fold.
Dear Mr. Stengel,

Like many readers of Time magazine, I was shocked to see that one of your columnists, Joe Klein, produced a factually inaccurate column regarding the current FISA legislation put forth by Democrats in the House which gave readers the incorrect impression that the proposed bill would require the government to get a warrrant before eavesdropping on communications between two non-US citizens. As Glenn Greenwald at Salon.com and others have pointed out, the proposed bill does nothing of the sort. Indeed, it specifically indicates that warrants would not be required under such circumstances. Yet Mr. Klein, apparently quoting unnamed sources from the Republican Party, castigated the Democrats in the House as being weak on National Defense based in his false reporting regarding the bill’s contents.

Now it appears that Mr. Klein has publicly admitted he did not even read the bill in question, that his column was (or may have been) factually in error, and that he was in his own words “confused” about the terms of the bill. This seems rather disengenuous of him, however, as his column specifically stated that the bill required warrants for communications solely between foreigners. To quote from the column itself:

Unfortunately, Speaker Nancy Pelosi quashed the House Intelligence Committee’s bipartisan effort and supported a Democratic bill that — Limbaugh is salivating — would require the surveillance of every foreign-terrorist target’s calls to be approved by the FISA court, an institution founded to protect the rights of U.S. citizens only. In the lethal shorthand of political advertising, it would give terrorists the same legal protections as Americans. That is well beyond stupid.

My reading of that excerpt is that Mr. Klein intended to portray the Democratic leadership as “stupid” because they wanted to give “terrorists” the same rights as American citizens. Obviously he wasn’t confused about his view regarding the Democrats in Congress. His column paints them as reckless and foolish, and seriously out of step with what is required to protect America. In short, his column was a straight forward attack on the Democratic Party and upon anyone, such as myself, who believes that protecting our civil liberties and respect for our constitutional rights should not be mistakenly sacrificed on the altar of National Security.

Certainly, Mr. Klein is entitled to that opinion, but at the very least, he should not support his views in his nationally published column in Time Magazine with demonstrably untrue statements and assertions, and I am surprised and dismayed that his editor allowed him to do so. Clearly, his errors in judgment and journalistic integrity have severely damaged the reputation of your magazine. I can’t claim to know if he acted out of malice, deceit, or simply sloppy journalism, but surely his editor, when she fact checked his column should have required him to rewrite those portions of it which made false statements of fact.

By the way, just for your edification, here is the portion of the proposed bill which Mr. Klein did not read before publishing his column, which clearly indicates that the claims he made are completely without merit. For your convenience I have placed in bold text the relevant portions of the bill which refers to the fact that no warrant will be required from the FISA court (or any other court) in order to wiretap communications between persons located outside the United States who are not known to be US persons:

CLARIFICATION OF ELECTRONIC SURVEILLANCE OF NON-UNITED STATES PERSONS OUTSIDE THE UNITED STATES’

(1) IN GENERAL – Notwithstanding any other provision of this Act, a court order is not required for electronic surveillance directed at the acquisition of the contents of any communication between persons that are not known to be United States persons and are reasonably believed to be located outside the United States for the purpose of collecting foreign intelligence information, without respect to whether the communication passes through the United States or the surveillance device is located within the United States.

I hope you will take the appropriate action with respect to Mr. Klein, and that a retraction of the false information in his column will be published in the next edition of Time Magazine. I also hope that appropriate measures will be put in place to ensure that written material in your magazine (in print or online), whether by your staff reporters or columnists, will be fact checked and any factual errors corrected prior to publication, so that egregious mistakes such as these which Mr. Klein committed, which besmirch the good name of your organization, will not reoccur in the future.

Sincerely,

Steven D

Update [2007-11-27 17:50:13 by Steven D]: Stengel’s form letter response:

Thank you for your email, I appreciate your comments.

TIME Columnist Joe Klein made a reporting error, which he swiftly addressed in his blog postings on TIME.com. In addition, TIME will run a correction in his column in this week’s issue of the magazine.

Thank you very much,

Richard Stengel
Managing Editor
TIME