From the Economist, July 18th, the Lexington column:
“Atheists are broadly disliked in America. Only 5% of Americans admit that they would not vote for an otherwise qualified black presidential candidate, but 53% say they would shun an atheist. That makes the godless less popular than Muslims, Mormons or gays.”
Last fall we had some leadership training offered in my division. It was aimed at first-level employees who were interested in promotion. I sat in on the first couple of hours to see how it was going.
The instructor started by asking each of us to name a person who influenced us as a leader or was a personal hero of ours. The hero could be anyone, family, historical, fictional. Many people named a teacher or a former boss. Many, a majority, mentioned one or both of their parents.
There were 30 people in the room, and about one-third were hispanic. At least seven of my hispanic workers mentioned parents as heroes or role models and said their parents had been immigrants. They talked about the lessons they had learned; that they could succeed, they could make a difference, that they should have goals and work hard to achieve those goals. One young woman in the training said that she was youngest of six, and all six of them had been to college.
I was looking around the room, doing the math. Many of my workers’ parents must be about my age, maybe a handful of years older. That means they might have come here in the late 1970s or early 80s. Maybe they came legally. Maybe some weren’t legal at first, and took advantage of the amnesty program in the ’80s.
I don’t know. I only conjecture. There are some things I do know, though, if I may generalize. I know they worked hard. I know this because I used to see many of them working, while I was on my way to school or work. I know they lived in cheap places, sometimes, with dirt floors, and had family picnics in public parks on Sundays because that was what they could afford to do. They drove old cars. They didn’t go to movies or the mall. They saved money and got better jobs and raised their children to see that.
Now those children work for me. They’re smart. They’re compassionate. They work hard. They show a welcoming face to people who come to my offices to get help—people who have lost their jobs, discovered they have a serious disease, assumed the care of a sick relative or family member, and don’t know where else to go.
One of my skills as a manager is that I recognize talent, so I’d already had my eye on a few of these seven. They won’t work for me forever. Some I will promote, of course. Other divisions in my agency will lure some away with more money. Some will leave to spend more time with their own children, especially when they’re young. When the economy gets better, some will leave to try their luck in the private sector. Maybe some will open their own business, maybe an internet company or a restaurant, or maybe invent the next luscious dessert or snack. Maybe some will go into politics.
At least one, in the next several years, will leave work to take care of a parent who can no longer live alone.
For now, though, I’ve got them. They are part of my wonderful staff who plow through an unbelievable volume of work each day, who protect the interests of citizens and taxpayers by making sure that people who are qualified for benefits get those benefits, who treat people with compassion, courtesy and respect even when those people are not returning the favor.
America has a well-established history of importing people to do our work and bad-mouthing them while they do it. I do understand that illegal immigration is a problem. In my opinion, a big part of that problem is that someone who is not here legally is vulnerable to exploitation.
When I look at the seven who spoke about being the children of immigrants, and I think of the flexibility, vibrancy and power they give to my workforce, though, I have one thing to say. And I want to say it to their immigrant parents. It’s just this: Thank you.
From firedoglake, I think:
“While extolling the virtues of a balanced budget during a PAYGO debate on the floor of the House, Rep. Marsha Blackburn exclaimed:
Let’s agree that we’re going to have PAYGO enforcement. That we’re not going to cry ‘emergency’ every time we have a Katrina, every time we have a Tsunami, every time we have a need for extra spending, that we don’t go call for a special appropriation that allows us to circumvent the PAYGO rules.”
Representative Blackburn? About that children’s story you’re thinking of? It’s okay to cry wolf when there really is one.
If you like mysteries, here is a website for you: www.gravematters.com.
I found out about them when I ordered a book from them, via abebooks.They e-mailed me the next day to tell me my book was in the mail. Then I went and checked out their site. It is well-organized and well-written. They not only have a great selection of used books but some interesting photos, some especially nice ones of Alice Ann’s quilts! Alice Ann Carpenter and John Leininger are the proprietors. Browse and enjoy!
Lark’s Lament
Alan Gordon
2008, St Martin’s/Minotaur
Lark’s Lament is the 7th or 8th book in Gordon’s Fool’s Guild series. These historical novels, set in the late 12th and early 13th centuries, follow the professional jesters Theo and Claudia on their adventures in various medieval cities and courts.
Theo, who used the name Feste, is the “professional” of the pair, while his wife, who goes by Claudia, was once a duchess. Really. Her birth name is Viola and she was married to the Duke of Orsino. When her husband was murdered, it took the help of a wandering fool to solve it. These names may seem familiar to Shakespeare fans, and with good reason. (The first book in the series is called Thirteenth Night.)
Many years have passed since those initial events took place, and now Theo and Claudia have a toddler daughter of their own as well as a young apprentice named Helga.
Theo’s peregrinations around Europe are not as random as they might seem. The Fool’s Guild is dedicated to the preservation of jesters and the occasional nudging of events, to keep governments running smoothly, no matter how strange those governments are. Fools carry messages and share information, not only with other guild members (who share a secret sign of recognition) but from court to court as well.
In Lament, Theo has been charged with persuading a prominent abbot, formerly a troubadour of renown, to intercede with Pope Innocent III, who has begun attacking the Fool’s Guild. Theo and Abbot Folquet meet once, but before Theo can bring him around, a murder interrupts. Folquet insists that Theo solve the murder before he will agree to help them with the Pope.
The story moves to Marseilles and Montpellier, and back to the abbey. Theo and Claudia soon discover that the murder was personal, that it is aimed like a quarrel from a crossbow at Folquet, and that it involves the mysterious death of an aristocratic lady nicknamed the Lark for her beautiful voice.
The book is filled with acrobatic action sequences and clever word-play. Traditionally, jesters could speak the truth to anyone in power without fear of retaliation, much like, unless recently at least, late night TV talk show hosts. Gordon clearly shows us that this “immunity” is more of a convention than a magical shield. Fools live lives of danger. The scenes in the courts, whether they are Claudia’s private conversations with Countess Marie, or the family’s public performances at banquets, are funny and fraught with risk, making for a suspenseful read.
After the previous book, Death in the Venetian Quarter, which was set in Byzantium, Lament seems remarkably linear, so much so that some readers will see the shape of the mystery and even identify the villain well ahead of our clever heroes. Gordon also dumps the reader out of the wagon at regular intervals with his first-person point of view shifts. They tend to come at chapter breaks, but it is not always clear whose POV we’re in, especially since Claudia’s authorial voice sounds very much like Theo’s.
But how can you not love a book that has an exchange like this with a threshold guardian of a city with sturdy gates but no walls?
“‘. . . Hey, now that there’s more than one fool in town, maybe you could form your own guild.’
‘There’s an idea,’ said Theo, smiling at me. ‘What do you think, wife?’
‘Not a good idea at all,’ I said firmly.
‘Why not?’ asked Reynaud, disappointed at my quick dismissal of his plan.
‘Because if there was a Fools’ Guild, then we would have to take a turn guarding the gates,’ I said. ‘You wouldn’t want your city to be guarded by fools, would you?’ (AG, p 120)”
Followed moments later by:
“He walked over and swung [the gates] open easily. Theo flicked the reins and Zeus pulled us though.
‘No lock on the gates,’ Theo noted.
‘What would be the purpose?’ asked Reynaud. ‘People can just go around them.’ (AG, 120)”
Alan Gordon is, or was, a legal aid lawyer in New York. It seems clear to me that, in his heart, he sees his legal aid comrades in the same light as his characters. The fools, with their motley and painted faces, don’t have gold, military might, or political power, either spiritual or temporal. They have only their wit, their wits, a sense of solidarity and of the absurd, as they face the powerful in their own courts. That pun is intended. Sometimes, through their curiosity and courage, they solve the mystery. Sometimes they speak truth to power, and power actually listens.
Go to this link and read this story. This is a thing that will be overlooked by many/most unless they are Sarah Palin watchers (of either stripe)or they are somehow involved with providing care to the elderly and/or disabled.
This seems like a so-what kind of thing but it is serious. The program described here is a crucial one to many people. The idea that a state as rich as Alaska couldn’t staff it properly and had a backlog so severe that CMS is closing the program down is scary.
We’ve all seen/heard/read the “wise Latina” remark made by Judge Sonia Sotomayor in a 2001 speech given at the UC Berkeley School of Law. Here’s the actual sentence the Republicans have been hopping up and down about: “[Second], I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn’t lived that life.”
The Republicans want you to think that this sentence proves that Sotomayor is partial, or has “a prejudice issue.” They really, really hope you didn’t read the rest of the speech, especially the sentence that comes four paragraphs later: “I am reminded each day that I render decisions that affect people concretely and that I owe them constant and complete vigilance in checking my assumptions, presumptions and perspectives, and ensuring that to the extent that my limited abilities and capabilities permit me, that I reevaluate them and change as circumstances and the cases before me requires. I can and do aspire to be greater than the sum total of my experiences but I accept my limitations. I willingly accept that we who judge must not deny the differences resulting experience and heritage but attempt, as the Supreme Court suggests, continuously to judge when those opinions, sympathies and prejudices are appropriate.”
It seems that two things have Sotomayor’s detractors upset. The first is that she honest about the human experience, acknowledging that everyone comes to the table with a wealth of experiences, ideas, fears, hopes, schools of thought, and belief systems, and that we each function from that rich matrix. The difference between Sotomayor and some others is that she tries to be conscious of that in her daily job.
It also seems, however, that the subtext, at least for Republican senators and professional talkers, is that, somehow, they are mad at Sotomayor because she is proud of her upbringing.
In this same speech, Sotomayor spends some time at the beginning talking about her childhood, her favorite foods, the music and games she grew up with, the way the family and neighborhood interacted. She has taken some mild ridicule from talking heads of both parties for admitting she liked patitas de cerdo con garbonzo—pig tripe. Basically, Republicans like Senators Sessions and Graham seem prepared to beat up on her because sees her background, not as an obstacle to be overcome, but the source of her strength.
They seem to feel that anyone who didn’t grow up to be what they are—male, white, and for the most part, graying—should apologize for it.
The vocal Republican minority is not making itself look responsible and thoughtful here. The face they are showing to the public is one some of us are old enough to remember, and the rest of us have seen plenty of times in movies and on TV; the plump, privileged white guy who doesn’t want the country-club integrated; who thinks decisions that support him and his cronies are somehow “unbiased” and those that look baldly and honestly at the law and both sides of the question are “partial.” They look like guys who are used to getting their own way and don’t want to face the risk that they might not get their way all the time. And why is it that the people who always get their way are the first to kick their feet and wail “It’s not fair!” when the decision goes the other way once in a while?
So, Sotomayor does indeed have “a prejudice issue.” The Republicans are prejudiced against anything that upsets their recollection of the status quo—that being around 1952. They look like bigots, but more importantly, they look like big scaredy-cats.
A wise Latina! Supreme Court Justice! Eeek! OMG!!
Cowboy up, guys. C’mon, she’s got her leg in a cast! I bet, if worse came to worst, at least some of you could ourun her.
“So far the recently verbose Mr. Cheney isn’t talking.”
–Rachel Maddow, commenting on the program that the CIA hid from Congress.
The Rachel Maddow Show
The other day I was someplace I had to wait for awhile, and I didn’t have a car book, so I bought a book at a drug store. (Note to self: Never let this happen again!) It was a terrible book—at least as far as I read—and I’m not going to talk about it here except to say that it got me thinking about point of view.
Point of view (POV) is the way the writer chooses to tell the story. It isn’t the narrative voice, although the two are closely linked. POV is analogous to the use of the cameras in a movie.
Two most common types of POV are first person and third person.
First person is “I.” Third person is “she,” “he” or “they”. Second person is “you” and is used occasionally, mostly as stunt-writing or some stylistic trick. Once in awhile you will see it—oh! Like right there—with a folksy first-person narrative voice. “I pulled my hair up in a scrunchie. You know how some days you just can’t be bothered? This was one of those days.”
Many nineteenth century novels are first person novels. This, I think, is because early novels in English were written in the form of letters (epistolary novels). Since letters, written from one friend to another, are first-person documents, novels followed suit. New writers and literary writers still often prefer first person narratives. I don’t know why. First-person makes it very difficult to impart information to the reader, and, for me, creates distance. The “I” in my head is certainly not me, it’s the person telling me the story. Many modern writers who use first person narratives end up alternating chapters with 3rd person POV to make their stories work, as in The Book of Air and Shadows by Michael Gruber. One thing you can get with a first-person story, though, is a great narrative voice. Think about Huck Finn.
Once a writer chooses 3rd person POV, there are still choices to be made. Basically, there are three types of 3rd person POV: 3rd person omniscient, 3rd person objective and 3rd person close.
In 3rd person omniscient, the reader sees all and knows all. The writer can give any information he/she wants, sharing character’s thoughts, feelings and history and even including information the characters don’t know yet.
“As Doug reached across the campfire, the flame flared, singeing his wrist. He jerked back his arm, as pain filled him. Doug had a low tolerance for pain, inherited from his father, whose threshold was so low that he could be incapacitated for hours by a paper-cut. From his father, however, Doug had also learned chivalry, so he struggled to appear calm for Maisie. Maisie, who had always relied on men to take care of her, stared at him wide-eyed across the fire, hoping Doug would not disappoint her.”
3rd person objective is where the writer tells us nothing of the character’s interiority, recording only speech, actions, physical attributes and behavior. One term for it is, “I Am a Camera.” A great example of 3rd person objective is Dashiell Hammet’s The Maltese Falcon. We never know what any of the characters are thinking or really feeling. This creates suspense. If you haven’t read it, go find an excerpt somewhere online and take a minute. Find a section with dialogue. Oh, wait, that’s just silly. It’s practically all dialogue, which is also the reason the book made such an easy and excellent transition to the silver screen.
Here is an example without dialogue:
“As Doug reached across the campfire, the flame flared, singeing his wrist. He hissed, jerking back his hand and cradling it against his chest. For a moment he swayed on his feet, his eyelids fluttering. Maisie gasped, her eyes wide.”
3rd person objective puts a lot of weight on the dialogue and actions of your characters. 3rd person objective challenges you, as a writer, to pay strict attention to actions, tics and nonverbal clues, and use them precisely and wisely. I don’t write in 3rd person objective much.
In 3rd person close, the writer can park the reader right in the character’s head. We experience what they’ve thinking and feeling.
“As Doug reached across the campfire, the flame flared, licking at his wrist. A searing wave of pain rolled up his arm. He hissed and yanked back his hand. The pain continued to pulse, and black spots winked at the corner of his vision. He thought he was going to pass out, the way his dad always had when something hurt him. He sucked in a deep breath. He couldn’t black out. Maisie needed him to be strong.”
The beauty of these 3rd person choices is that a writer can shift among them in the same story. For example, you can use close 3rd person POV for one character and always have another in 3rd person objective. This creates mystery and even, perhaps, a sense of danger.
“Maisie opened her eyes, awakened by the strange persistent sound, a soft scraping. Heart thumping, she sat up, clutching the airline blanket to her chest. Doug sat across the dying fire, head bent, his hands moving in a methodical, rhythmic manner. The glowing coals highlighted the shape of his mouth and the strands of brown hair, but hid his eyes from her. As the reddish light danced off the thing he held, she suddenly understood what the sound was. He was stroking the blade of his pocketknife on a stone. ‘Doug? What are you doing?’
He stroked the blade along the surface of the rock twice more. “Go back to sleep, Maisie,” he said, still not looking up. “I’ll take care of everything.”
As a writer, you’re most likely to get into trouble when you lose track of POV. Generally speaking, even if you move into and out of the heads of your characters, you should stay in the same POV through an entire paragraph.
Very close 3rd person POV, when the foundations haven’t been laid, can confuse the reader:
“Doug carried his tray over to the table where Maisie sat playing with her i-phone. She ignored him when he sat down next to her. She thought he was lower than dirt.”
Huh? Unless Doug’s inferiority complex has been alluded to previously, this is awkward.
Shifting from close to omniscient is something you see occasionally, usually with newer writers. It almost never works.
“The fire flared, burning Doug’s wrist and he hissed with pain. His father had a low threshold for pain also. What would Maisie think? Maisie, whose mother had run a Fortune 500 company in the 1980′s was wondering how she had ended up on this plane. Unbeknownst to either of them, in Guatemala, a hyacinth macaw launched itself from a treetop and flapped across the azure sky.”
If this is your paragraph, you’d better be writing a book about chaos theory.
This kind of thing really happens more when someone wants to do close 3rd person but also wants to foreshadow something. Then you get paragraphs like this:
“Hung-over, Doug staggered toward the refrigerator. His head was pounding and he hoped he wouldn’t throw up. As he reached for a beer he heard the mail slither through the mail slot. He trudged in and picked it up. Bills, bill, more bills, and a letter on blinding white bond, from the Law Offices of Baggem, Taggem and Scute. He threw the mail on the table. He could never have known how that one envelope would change his life.”
That’s right, he couldn’t, and neither can we. We are in Doug’s aching head right up until the moment we know something he doesn’t. Is there another way to make that envelope stick in the reader’s mind?
“Head pounding, Doug leaned over to scoop up the mail. One envelope slipped from his fingers and dropped onto the floor. Sighing, he bent down slowly and picked it up, squinting against the glare off its blinding white surface. From the Law Offices of . . . He rubbed his head, staring at the letter. Must be a collection agency. He threw the envelope on the table, where it came to rest on a stack of unpaid bills.”
You could also convincingly do a rather straightforward foreshadowing thing, if you started in 3rd person omniscient. This creates a rather distanced tone. Not saying it’s bad, I’m just saying.
“The day Doug got the letter that changed his life, he was trying to survive the second-worst hangover he had ever had.”
*
I personally don’t write fiction in first person. It’s also not my favorite POV to read in modern works, mainly because it usually seems mannered and distant in the hands of modern writers. There are some surprising exceptions. Robert B. Parker writes the Spenser novels mostly in first person. Decades ago, Parker perfected the tough-yet-tender private eye voice, and Spenser works best in first person. Even the action has a clipped, matter-of-fact feel to it. Now, Parker is the king of dialogue, and his books are mostly dialogue, which may be why the first person thing works. His Jesse Stone series is written in third person. Jesse Stone is a lot like Spenser. Clipped, machine-gun dialogue and blasé yet accurate action sequences abound, and for me they read flat. Stone would be more engaging in first person.
The first Lee Childs novel I read had the captivating title of Bad Luck and Trouble. It is late in the Jack Reacher series, but unlike some of the earlier Reacher novels, it gives us a little back-story about Reacher and his old team, who reunite to figure out who is killing them off. It was interesting, and the last forty five pages were totally compelling, but I almost didn’t get there because the third person point of view created a character in Reacher that I didn’t care for (or about). Flat, inconsistent, alternately badass and implausibly naive. Because I thought Childs had something going on, though, I picked up an earlier book, Persuader, later. Persuader is written in first person POV. The plot is absolutely, from the first few pages, unbelievable, and I didn’t care. I was riveted, totally sucked in by this character’s voice. In first person, Reacher’s moments of naiveté function more like poignancy—”wouldn’t it be nice if the world could be this way, instead of the way it is?” The fight scenes and the action scenes carry the authority that we see in Spenser; the terse account of a fighting man who has killed before, who doesn’t enjoy it, but is willing to do it again if he has to.
For me, the question that has to be answered about first-person is, “Why?” Is there a compelling reason to use it? In the hands of a gifted writer, just creating a wonderful voice is reason enough. You need to use first person to create an unreliable narrator, as Edgar Allen Poe did so well and Tara French attempts in In the Woods.
Eighteenth and nineteenth century readers got their information and entertainment mostly from letters, and novels evolved from that. Twenty-first century readers get much of our information and entertainment from television; multiple points of view, rapid transitions,overlapping rapid-fire dialogue, time shifts with no warning, flashing forward and backward. Prose is evolving, drifting (or racing) in that direction. Hmm, maybe in five years novels will be just bullet-point lists with hyperlinks. What POV do we have then? Third person-hyperlink?
In other news, Paul Krugman’s Conscience of a Liberal is now my car book.
Bloggers on the Bus
Eric Boehlert
Free Press
Simon and Schuster, 2009
“In many ways Clinton was the AOL to Obama’s Google during the campaign season. Online, she represented the more lumbering, established giant, and he was the nimble newcomer. Poor John McCain. He was the CompuServ of 2008 (p. 258).”
Mainstream media tend to speak of the individuals who write weblogs—bloggers—as a homogenous mass; “bloggers” this or “the blogosphere” that. Maybe they make a distinction between the political poles and cite the “liberal bloggers,” but even within that subdivision, there’s a sense that bloggers are a uniform, cloned mass.
Eric Boehlert, who wrote for The Rolling Stone and Salon, challenges that assumption, using the 2008 presidential campaign as his argument. He focuses on liberal or progressive bloggers. The book explores the diverse personalities that comprise what some call “the netroots.”
Boehlert is interested in those personalities, and the impact of these quirky individuals, combined with the technologies that allowed sites like YouTube to grow up alongside them.
Each chapter in Bloggers is discrete, allowing the reader to browse. Of course I flipped right to “Sarahdise Lost,” because here was a chapter about bloggers AK Muckraker and Shannyn Moore, whose blogs I actually read. Once I’d scratched that itch, I went to the beginning, following the story of a groundswell of bloggers who stopped Nevada Democrats from teaming up with Fox News (that’s right, Fox News) to cosponsor a Democratic primary debate.
The demographics of the bloggers profiled in the book captured my attention. One sixty-something homemaker broke two high-profile stories on Huffington Post. Long-lost sixties liberals and twenty-something libertarian-progressives find their voices through blogging. Women are well-represented, many in the thirty-five-to-fifty age range, and young males are solidly in evidence too. Several of the bloggers Boehlert interviewed have faced serious and even life-threatening illnesses. Perhaps surviving lends a sense of urgency, a desire to do something meaningful before it’s too late, or just a recognition that time can be precious.
The chapter that gave me a true “Aha” moment was Chapter Three, “Whose Space?” Boehlert compassionately and fairly explores the story of Joe Anthony, a twenty-eight-year old who, on his own initiative, created a Barack Obama My Space fan page. The page was so successful that it directed tens of thousands of people into the Obama campaign, and also sucked up every second of Anthony’s free time. The site came to attention of the Obama campaign, and the subsequent events give real insight into what happens when a shy, tech-savvy “supervolunteer” interacts with a polished, highly-functioning political team that wants control. Obama’s campaign does not look good here, but the reader can see how Anthony’s own personal conflicts, and some of his actions, helped create problems. The campaign tried to work with Anthony, Anthony tried to work with the campaign, and ultimately both parties failed. There is an object lesson here for anyone who thinks they are going to “harness the blogosphere” for any purpose other than its own.
Beohlert doesn’t shy away from the shadowy side of blogging. In two chapters he recounts the examples of misogyny Clinton supporters encountered in the blogosphere. Chapter Nine discusses this in detail. Susie Madrak, a blue-collar blogger who doesn’t like bullies, characterized the vitriol spewed toward Clinton and her supporters this way; “She thought the venom suggested that more than a few of the netroots members had mother issues, that they looked at Clinton, saw somebody their mothers’ age, and got very angry at the idea of her running for president. Clinton seemed to tap into something, something that Madrak thought said more about the bloggers than it did about the candidate (p 148).”
Part of the reason blog commentors or bloggers themselves feel they can be so vicious might be the relative anonymity of the medium. Here’s a paragraph about Duncan Black who blogs as Atrios on Eschaton:
“The snark and sarcasm at Eschaton came in thick doses. The funny part was that the smart-aleck, ballbusting persona of Atrios online was nothing like Black offline, who in person is exceedingly shy and unassuming, with a perpetually sleepy look on his face. He’s the guy at the cocktail party who hovers on the outer circles of the room, speaking quietly. . . and who enjoys discussing mass transit (p.50). ”
Later in the same paragraph Boehlert says that people who meet Black are expecting Atrios, and that Black “. . . isn’t that person in person (p 50).”
Like Black, another well-respected blogger hides behind a single name; Digby. Many people, she says, assume that Digby is male, and they relate to her differently once they find out she is middle-aged and a woman.
Boehlert makes the reader realize how important YouTube was to the growing blog community. It’s not just hamsters on a piano. The netroots, through tools like Google and YouTube, MySpace and Facebook, have the ability to hold politicians of any party immediately responsible for what they say. They can fact-check and communicate the correct information within a few hours. They can pass along rumors and misinformation just as quickly. They can literally change the course of events.
This leads inevitably to a discussion of Barack Obama. Boehlert’s conclusion; Obama did not utilize the blogoshere as much as he could have, preferring to use social networking sites as his main internet tool. Boehlert describes Obama as keeping his distance from the blogger community. Obama ran a grassroots campaign, not an online campaign, and he saw the netroots as part of that, but only a part.
If anything was missing from this educational and entertaining book, it was a deeper discussion of the ethics of blogging and the idea of “citizen journalists.” Boehlert touches on this in Chapter Ten, “The Most Unlikely Instrument for Change.” Mayhill Fowler brought the Huffington Post the now infamous Obama comment about bitter people in small towns clinging to “guns and religion.” She was attending an event for campaign contributors that was off-limits to the press. Fowler had contributed to the Obama campaign, in fact had maxed out her contribution, but she was working as a “citizen journalist” for HuffPo’s Off the Bus Initiative. Fowler herself recounts that her reluctance to give the quote to her editor came from her sympathy for the candidate, not an ethical conflict. Similarly, Fowler did not identify herself as a “citizen journalist” when she asked Bill Clinton, at the rope line of a meet-and-greet event, what he thought of the recent Vanity Fair hit piece about him. Fowler was not just an eager member of the public who had great tape on both famous men; she was working as a quasi-journalist, at least, for HuffPo. Shouldn’t she have identified herself as one?
The reverse of this situation is problematic also. Bloggers aren’t journalists. They aren’t required to confirm a fact from a second independent source. They aren’t even required to state something is an opinion because we all assume it’s an opinion; yet the phrase “citizen journalist” seems to imply a right to access that, back in the old days—like, 2007– only journalists had. And what happens when blogging bleeds through into the mainstream media, in places like MSNBC, who apparently feel perfectly comfortable releasing an “unconfirmed report” (for example,) that police found a potent pre-operative anesthetic in Michael Jackson’s house? Does MSNBC, a subsidiary of NBC, think it’s a televised blog? Bloggers and pundits are quick to give out the “buyer beware” spiel, that it is the reader’s/viewer’s job to check their facts and know their data, but how exactly is one to do that when there are no standards, when anyone can call themselves a journalist?
Boehlert lets his narrative raise these questions, but seems reluctant to express his own opinions on the matter.
Perhaps this is a topic for another book. Something tells me that Boehlert may have enough material for a second. If you’re a commentary junkie or a political science major, then get this book. You’ll learn a lot and it will be fun.