One of Time magazine’s star columnists blew up over a seemingly minor incident several weeks ago. Personal animus can’t explain the outburst, but internal turmoil certainly could.
For more on pruning back executive power see Pruning Shears.
No Associated Press content was harmed in the writing of this post
Awhile back aimai posted about an encounter with Joe Klein at a beach party. It was an amusing first person account written with bloggy flair and attitude, and it raised a number of important points as well. One of the main ones was, in the internet era it is possible to search archives and keep close track of both good and bad journalism. Someone who gets something wrong is less able to ignore it and have it recede into the past than it was, say, fifteen years ago. Aimai’s post was by all appearances an interesting but minor story – the political junkie’s equivalent of celebrity snapshots of a famous actress taken at the grocery store.
It clearly was much more than that to Klein, because on Monday Glenn Greenwald posted (on his personal blog) several of Klein’s messages attacking him on Journolist, a site described by Greenwald as “a secret club composed of several hundred journalists, editors, bloggers and other peers and colleagues.” The encounter got to him so much that he went out and started attacking someone else in front of not just hundreds of people, but hundreds of journalists. In response to Greenwald’s post Klein went completely round the bend, publishing an unhinged diatribe against him and claiming his writing on Journolist was private. (His myopic attack on the wrong target helps explain his support of the Iraq war as a response to 9/11, though.)
Let’s take a step back and remember the reason the enmity began to build in the first place: Greenwald accurately accused Klein of incorrectly reporting details of the FISA debate in a November 2007 Time magazine article. At the time Scott Horton somewhat regretfully wrote, “Not only was the substance of this description factually inaccurate in almost every respect, it was the very core of the piece.” Klein then updated with a correction that, Horton noted in his own update, did not actually correct anything. Then Crazy Pete Hoekstra announced that he was the source for Klein’s story, which really undermined Klein’s credibility. (Klein memorably challenged critics the following May, “Tell me where I’ve been misled by my sources.” See aimai’s criticism of columnists expecting their readers not to remember anything. Also, Hoekstra’s revelation led to my favorite Photoshop ever.)
Klein then took another stab at getting it right and failed. Tried again, failed again. And that’s pretty much where the episode ended – with Klein uncritically passing along the incorrect talking points of a right wing extremist, then issuing a couple of intellectually dishonest rationalizations masquerading as corrections. The official record of Joe Klein’s reporting on this issue is somewhere between egregiously misleading and outright falsehood. Clearly this gnaws at him: Nearly two years later he goes into a frenzy when a moderately prominent blogger reports on her challenging him on it.
Digby refers to the Washington DC media and political elite as the Village in order to give a sense of its insular and provincial outlook. Klein could be the most interesting journalist there because he seems to occasionally be aware of the world beyond it. That creates a certain amount of cognitive dissonance you don’t see in, for instance, David Gregory. For instance, he took on the still-ascendant (in the Village) neoconservative outlook last year. By virtue of his good standing there he was able to confront the neocons in a way few others could, and he took a beating from them over it. From a professional standpoint it was at least a little risky. No matter how obvious his points seemed to those of us out here in the hinterlands, in the circles he runs in they were very provocative.
Klein appears to at least dimly understand that this isn’t all a game, that what happens on the streets near his home can have a profound effect on hundreds of millions of his fellow citizens. But he also seems to have fundamentally bought the conventional wisdom on journalism and politics as practiced by his peers. So he veers between lazy repetition of what passes for centrism in the capitol and spirited critiques of such bland assumptions elsewhere. He can’t seem to muster the majestic contempt of a George Will or Bill Kristol towards the unwashed masses, but can’t dismiss the importance of those same people’s opinions for fear of diminishing his standing in the Beltway. When he’s fought the good fight he’s come across to me as a somewhat sympathetic (and maybe even slightly tragic) figure, but weeks like this he just seems like another soulless hack.
