So the Liberal Media Doesn't Work

By Keith R. Schmitz

Yesterday I alluded that somehow people are going to have to figure out how to make on-line media for news pay off (though Jay did take us all out to dinner one night on this site's revenues).

Looks like someone has according to The Nieman Journalism Lab:

When people talk about aggregator models for news, they always bring up Drudge, Huffington Post, and The Daily Beast. But I wonder why more attention doesn’t get paid to Daily Kos, which adds a strong editorial voice, an affection for activism, and a huge and involved community to the typical aggregation model. And Daily Kos seems to have more of a news-y feel than it used to — something I suspect will continue past Jan. 20. Their newish Congress Matters site is stuffed full of news. Founder Markos Moulitsas Zúniga just announced 2008 revenues “easily broke $1 million” and allowed the site to have a paid staff of eight.

More hate from those hate-filled DailyKos haters (Wisconsin edition)

by folkbum

Just in case Bill O'Reilly hasn't yet convinced you that the Daily Kos is bevy of foul, putrid, Bush-hating filth, the New York Times brings you the story of one prominent hatemonger in Campbellsport, Wisconsin:

The brick church, more than a century old, stands at the junction of two county roads tracing the glacial hills of southeastern Wisconsin. In the field across the way, the summer corn stretches eight feet from root to tassel. This being a Sunday morning, the Rev. Daniel Schultz greets the faithful on the front steps as they arrive for 9 a.m. worship at the Salem United Church of Christ. Pastor Dan, as he prefers to be known, is the only man in the congregation wearing a coat and tie.

Over the next hour, he leads the 70 worshipers in a round of "Happy Birthday" for Jim Maul, a longtime member. He invites a half-dozen children to the pulpit, where he crouches among them to teach them to recite "The Lord's Prayer." In the part of the service designated for "sharing joys and concerns," he listens as people rise in the pews to tell of a relative's surgery, a brother's recovery from a liver transplant.

Here is ministry at its most venerable, ministry at its most tender and intimate and finely grained. And it comes from a minister with a strikingly unlikely double-life, one part as the small-town preacher in a socially conservative spot of the Midwest, the other as an abrasive and confrontational voice of the religious left in the blogosphere.

Exactly one week after Mr. Schultz presided over Sunday worship at his home church here, he gave a sermon in the vast arena of the McCormick Convention Center in Chicago. Instead of the farmers, factory workers and tradesmen who typify his regular congregation, the audience for his denunciation of the Iraq war consisted of the self-proclaimed "netroots" attending Yearly Kos, the annual political and media convention organized by the Daily Kos Web site. [. . .]

"Over all, we're a fairly conservative congregation, but everybody loves him," said Denise Goetsch, a member of the church's governing board. "Whatever people's personal politics are, they're here because they believe in God. And Dan's been good at making friends with pretty much anybody."

Mr. Schultz's sermon here the week before Yearly Kos offered a prime example of how. Drawing on a passage from I Corinthians, Mr. Schultz preached for social justice while speaking directly to his humble church and its obscure home.

It's so horrible, isn't it? When will someone finally shut that site down?

Charlie Sykes Supports Gay Porn

by bert

Sorry about that headline, but Sykes started it.

He started it on his radio show this morning because he supposedly established that all the folks involved with the DailyKos website/movement hate the troops and are extreme left-wing radicals.

Now pay attention to the supposed logic here. Sykes confirmed this premise by featuring one diarist for Daily Kos, A. Whitney Brown, who is a former Saturday Night Live cast member. Here is one of Brown’s sentences that are now pinging around among right-wing bloggers:

“Do I still support the individual men and women who have given so much to serve their country? No. I think they’re a bunch of idiots. I also think they’re morally retarded.”

(I'll leave aside the point that Folkbum already made in a comment to the preceding DailyKos post: That this Brown fellow is a professional comedian with his tongue in his cheek. I'll also decline to mention that the DailyKos founder, Markos Moulitsas Zúniga, is a U.S. Army veteran.)

What I want to focus on is the fact that A. Whitney Brown is just one diarist among a multitude for the DailyKos site, and is not even among the 15 contributing writers. Others such as Keith Schmitz no doubt know the DailyKos site better than me, but Brown's peripheral role seems to resemble the status of folks who leave comments on Folkbum. Brown is one of many and there is very little control exerted on what he says.

Nevertheless, Sykes is hoping his listeners are stupid enough to hear some sentences from one dude’s DailyKos writings and think that everyone connected to DailyKos embraces those ideas.

But, if he wants to take that approach, let's look at Charlie Sykes’s own operation on the internet for a sec. Now, unlike the more open format of DailyKos that fosters a widely shared conversation, the website of Sykes restricts input a lot – no guest bloggers, no comments allowed, a small blogroll. But Charlie Sykes does allow website visitors to access some select few right-wing sites. Those sites that Sykes blesses with access include The Weekly Standard.

You might be liberal and not know much about that publication, so I'll tell you everything you need to know about it.

The Weekly Standard’s Michael Goldfarb – who as online editor is more responsible for the site than a diarist is for DailyKos -- has been attacking a U.S. soldier in Iraq, Scott Thomas Beauchamp. Beauchamp became Goldfarb’s target when he described for The New Republic reprehensible conduct of fellow soldiers. The Weekly Standard attempted to discredit the story by attacking sources such as Beauchamp. But The Weekly Standard’s own sources for the counterattack, as Max Blumenthal shows here, are revealing:

Among all the active duty soldiers used by Goldfarb to undermine Beauchamp, only one is cited by name: Matt Sanchez, a corporal in the Marine reserves. "Frankly, I don't believe ANY of this story," Sanchez proclaimed in the Standard about Beauchamp's diary. Who is Sanchez? According to Goldfarb, he is simply a soldier "who stands behind his work."

But Sanchez is more than a mere man in uniform. As I reported for Media Matters today, Sanchez is also a conservative pro-war activist whose bio includes a stint as he gay porn actor Rod Majors, (star of such filmic classics as "Beat Off Frenzy") and an illustrious part-time job as a male prostitute -- facts he has acknowledged "leaving ... off my curriculum vitae."

There you have it. A homosexual male, who is a porn movie actor and prostitute to boot, is connected to Charlie Sykes’s website. According to Charlie's logic, that should tell us all we need to know about Sykes himself.

Those Hatemongers of the DailyKos

by folkbum

Given that one of our number here at folkbum's House of a Billion Bloggers is actually down in Chicago for the hate-and-bile-fest that Bill O'Reilly thinks the YearlyKos convention must be, I thought I'd point you to a description of the fetid orgy of hippie flag-burning that is surely happening as we speak:

I admit that I was expecting this crowd to look weirder. Not hippie weirder, though I did expect a bit of that, but nerdy weirder. So I was surprised at how extraordinarily normal everyone looked. The left, if I may use that radioactive word, sure has changed since “my day,” i.e., the nineteen-sixties and early seventies. The equivalent of the liberal blogosphere back then was the “underground press,” the anarchic collection of weekly and irregularly published quasi-newspapers and para-magazines that served as bulletin boards and primal-scream outlets for the counterculture and the various antiwar and “liberation” movements. YearlyKos’s closest equivalent back then would be the ramshackle underground-press convocations that took place from time to time. I attended several of these. What a contrast! The stereotypical look then was rock roadie or medieval wizard for men, groupie or earth mother for women. Those of us who were on the more moderate, “reasonable” side of the left were at pains to point out that even then, most of us, say sixty per cent, were actually fairly normal. This was true, but the eyes of America and America’s cameras were understandably drawn to the forty per cent who were, shall we say, comparatively colorful. On my bathroom wall I have a photograph taken at one of these underground-press convocations. It shows a crowd of a hundred or so undergrounders in a discussion circle. I’m in the middle, in shaggy haircut, Lennonish eyeglasses, and turtleneck, earnestly making some point (probably about the need to avoid alienating the great mass of Americans). And, sure enough, if you make allowances for a certain number of extravagant mustaches and batik prints, the crowd does look kind of normal, most of it. Except that three of the young women listening (somewhat skeptically, I have to admit) are stark naked.

No one naked around here. No chaos at YearlyKos. No “sweet smell of marijuana,” as the straight papers used to refer to it. No demands for revolution. No denunciations of bourgeois democracy. The Democratic National Committee Chairman is listened to respectfully and cheered enthusiastically.

Please, please, please, Bill O'Reilly! Save us from this horrible convocation of decency!

Live Blogging from YearlyKos

By Keith Schmitz

I always scoffed at the pretension of this, but I am right now at Bill O'Really's worst nightmare -- the YearlyKos Conference in Chicago. Here in the Grand Ballroom at McCormick place where I last heard Colin Powell at the NRA Conference (sorry righties, National Restaurant Association) I am sitting in a crowd of thousands, armed with laptops in the hundreds. It's kind of what I would imagine to be among an army of court reporters.

I could well imagine at a conservative counterpart event there would be Evangelists thundering hellfire, radcons working the fear levers and guys like Steven Moore hanging out with Rosie Scenario.

At this even we get to hear...comedians. Then again, rightwingers have...comedians. Signing off.