The Smear Factor

By: Jonathan Martin
July 24, 2008 10:13 AM EST

Republicans have no lack of would-be George F. Wills.

But what they really need are some more Robert D. Novaks.

The distinction between the two prominent conservative journalists isn't always obvious, but it's nevertheless important to understand: One almost exclusively writes opinion pieces, while the other offers reporting with a point of view.

The same might be said of the emerging differences between the conservative presence on the Internet and the liberal one: The right is engaged in the business of opining while the left features sites that offer a more reportorial model.

At first glance, these divergent approaches might not seem consequential. But as the 2008 campaign progresses, it’s becoming increasingly clear that the absence of any websites on the right devoted to reporting — as opposed to just commenting on the news — is proving politically costly to Republicans.

While conservatives are devoting much of their Internet energy to analysis, their counterparts on the left are taking advantage of the rise of new media to create new institutions devoted to unearthing stories, putting new information into circulation and generally crowding the space traditionally taken by traditional media. And it almost always comes at the expense of GOP politicians.

While online Republicans chase the allure of punditry and commentary, Democrats and progressives are pursuing old-fashioned shoe-leather reporting, in a fashion reminiscent of 2004. Back then, the Drudge Report and other lesser-known conservative portals played a key role in defining John Kerry and pushing back against criticism of George W. Bush, such as when conservative bloggers debunked documents purportedly related to the president’s Air National Guard service.
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Just as Drudge and critics of the now-infamous “60 Minutes” report on Bush were able to push stories damaging to Kerry or beneficial to Bush into the mainstream media, liberal online organs are now doing the same, to the detriment of GOP presidential nominee John McCain.

This week, for example, a young liberal writer named Spencer Ackerman heard that McCain committed a gaffe on Iraq in an unaired portion of an interview with CBS anchor Katie Couric. Ackerman, a former reporter for The New Republic and The American Prospect who now blogs at the liberal Firedoglake site, posted the transcript and pointed out the relevant portion just after 5:00 p.m. Tuesday night.

It was picked up by the Huffington Post two hours later, discussed on Keith Olbermann’s MSNBC show, moved onto The Associated Press wire overnight and by Wednesday afternoon McCain was forced to respond.

“We amplify its effect and then stay on it,” explains Arianna Huffington, namesake of the popular liberal news and entertainment hub.

But the left isn’t simply promoting its own version of the news — it’s also breaking it.

Deploying writers with backgrounds grounded in journalism rather than politics, The Huffington Post and Talking Points Memo, in particular, have already become a persistent problem for McCain’s campaign, regularly posting negative opposition research and embarrassing videos in addition to advancing damaging story lines against the GOP nominee.

There is simply no equivalent on the right to these two liberal-leaning websites.

The challenge these sites present have become so apparent that McCain was forced to hire his own in-house blogger to ensure dissemination of a steady stream of anti-Barack Obama material, much of it culled from the campaign’s extensive research file.

Michael Goldfarb, a former reporter at the Weekly Standard, almost exclusively uses his blog on McCain’s website to target the Democratic nominee in the hopes mainstream reporters will link to or pick up the oppo he’s posting.

To be sure, neither of the two liberal-leaning sites — referred to online as TPM and HuffPo — have yet to break the next Watergate story this campaign.

But every day, there comes a steady drip.

It ranges from the amusing (reporting that McCain’s campaign lifted recipes from the Food Network while he’s giving a major economic speech) to the strategic (popping up research on McCain’s opposition to a bill that included wind energy incentives when he’s about to give a speech at a turbine facility) to the eyebrow-raising (disclosing that Mitt Romney said at a private meeting that he would not likely appoint a Muslim Cabinet member).

In some cases, the stories incrementally move the anti-McCain message forward (by flagging an off-message Iraq statement by a McCain surrogate, for example). In others, the reporting scores broadside hits that inflict notable damage (such as posting controversial audio of the Rev. John Hagee that would prompt McCain to finally renounce the pastor).

Add in the increasingly aggressive online efforts of liberal think tanks such as the Center for American Progress, and it leaves the right at a severe disadvantage in the high-stakes business of distributing information about favored candidates and the opposition.

“It’s something we have to get in gear on,” says Patrick Ruffini, the Bush campaign’s webmaster in 2004 and former RNC ecampaign director. “What drives discussion in the blogosphere is original information.”

The lack of any meaningful right-wing entities today is partly because of how left and right media outlets sprung up, he says.

“Liberal media has traditionally been upstream media, generating information and putting it into circulation. Conservative media is downstream; it’s the second bite at the apple.”

For years, says New York Times columnist David Brooks, the model for conservatives who developed a passion for writing (or vice-versa) was not a reporter but a commentator: National Review founder William F. Buckley Jr.

Besides being attracted to his elegant language and compelling arguments, up-and-coming conservatives saw something else in Buckley: job stability.

“In the past 60 years, only one employee of the National Review, Weekly Standard or any conservative magazine has actually been hired as a reporter for a newspaper,” says Brooks, who researched the question a few years ago.

At the same time, scores of young reporters from liberal-leaning journals such as The New Republic or The Washington Monthly have been called up to the journalistic big leagues by general interest newspapers and magazines.

“There is just no career line for a conservative reporter,” observes Brooks.

Further, prominent conservatives such as Rush Limbaugh and Michelle Malkin have prospered by seizing upon the sense of grievance conservatives have felt toward the mainstream media.

Liberals, on the other hand, responded to their own disenchantment with the media and the Bush era by channeling their anger into the creation of parallel reporting outlets geared toward doing what old-line news outlets purportedly weren’t doing.

This development just happened to take place right when the mood matched empowering new technologies, enabling new players who would have found it impossible to break through under the old media model.

“It’s fair to say that the mainstream media…was increasingly either neutral or effectively browbeaten by the right,” says Josh Marshall, the founder and editor of Talking Points Memo.

The powerful presence of Limbaugh on the radio airwaves and the ascendance of Fox News on cable television energized liberals, Marshall says.

“People on the center-left, especially in the lead-up to the Iraq war and after the 2000 recount, realized that there was nothing on that side of equation,” he adds.

The result was the emergence of TPM and HuffPo, along with the opinion- and organizing-centered Daily Kos.

“Republicans haven’t developed a lot of that infrastructure because they haven’t been forced to,” says Michael Turk, a former ecampaign director at the RNC.

But Turk and others say that must change — and the GOP might soon find the impetus.

“If Republicans are out of power, they’ll start to realize this is one of the things we need to do to rebuild,” he says.

A writer for TPM puts it more bluntly.

“If Obama gets in, we'll see a lot of this stuff spring up, probably following the same initial pattern as the lefty Netroots,” predicts Eric Kleefield. “First it's a bunch of nobodies with dingy websites doing the equivalent of writing profanity on bathroom walls. And then it will evolve into some kind of real organization and discourse, and with its own journalism.”

While there is no real national site, Erick Erickson, founder of the popular RedState, points out that there is some reporting taking place on conservative blogs in Minnesota and Colorado.

“The next major wave of conservative funding will be toward journalistic institutions,” he says hopefully.

But for now, Erickson concedes that most potential angel funders are hesitant to bankroll a start-up, still gun-shy after many websites have flopped and skeptical that a right-wing version of HuffPo or TPM would be taken seriously by established media organs.

Conservatives have not been able to obtain the sort of financing that has powered the two sites — for HuffPo, it’s venture capital; for TPM, initially it was reader contributions but is increasingly advertisements.

Amidst the inertia on the right, HuffPo and TPM are not only prospering but growing.

Both major liberal sites have added new elements for this election, and the proprietors for each are already thinking past 2008.

Huffington said in the site's next round of financing, to take place later this year, she’ll hire more reporters.

Each promises that, even if Obama wins in November, they’ll keep up the scrutiny.

“If you want to break stories or report the news, you cannot do it only from your political views,” says Huffington, citing the ironic case of their most significant splash to date: Obama's comments, reported by an Obama donor, concerning the presumptive nominee’s assessment of the psyche of rural America.

“I think if Obama wins, people will see that we’re fundamentally a news organization,” adds Marshall. “We’d cover an Obama administration equally as aggressively. People will believe it when they see it, but that’s what we plan to do.”

Avi Zenilman and Alexander Burns contributed to this report.

Here is a link to my blog called, "The Politico Insider."

http://thepoliticolinsider.blogspot.com/