Don’t Say Blow Job

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  2. John Casper says:

    Thanks emptywheel. Great title btw. IIRC, a riff off the opening scene of Bette Midler’s THE ROSE.

  3. Neil says:

    EW,

    Don’t say WHAT?!

    Thanks for the post. I didn’t realize Card was so subversive. You really have to watch your wallet, your freedoms and your assumptions about what American values consitute the public trust, and which ones are being flushed down to toilet when you’re not playing attention.

    Guess who getting an honary degree at Commencement,a week before his 25th reunion? link
    He’ll also treat the Amherst community to an hour speech in Johnson Chapel link

    I’ll take notes.

  4. Sailmaker says:

    Maybe the PC police would be happy with ’consider how much time and energy were spent on Clinton’s personal indiscretions (140 hours on Christmas cards alone) against how much time investigating Abu Gharib (12 hours), little investigation into terrorist financing, the unaccountable vaporization of literally tons of U.S. money in Iraq, in all 1056 subpoenas for Democrats, 11 for ’Publicans’.

    If Ken Starr could say and/or leak the word ’blow job’ then the press should be able to write it. Ah. We live in a post 9/11 world. Nevermind.

  5. Anonymous says:

    Neil

    If you really want to capture the whole thing, you’d better tape it. As someone who has tried to capture Fitz speaking, it’s tough, really tough, to do. Even the trained professionals, the court reporters, couldn’t keep up.

    Is it your reunion year this year? mr. emptywheel and I might be driving through toward the tail end of the weekend, probably Monday, not for reunion (I’m safely between 15 and 20), but as a way to show mr emptywheel Amherst without forcing him to go to a reunion (he’s chicken). Not sure of the details yet, though.

  6. freepatriot says:

    yo Neil, good catch

    george is appearing at commencements too

    Whereas President Bush once was regularly invited to deliver graduation speeches at major universities, now he’s reportedly â€left with Florida community colleges or small schools in rural areas that are run by former aides.â€

    finding a whole school full of koolaide drinkers is getting hard to do, it seems

  7. Anonymous says:

    Oh wait. It’d be the end of commencement weekend, not reunion weekend. I guess it’s just been too long since I last went to Amherst.

  8. Anonymous says:

    Thanks a lot for your reflections and testimony, ’Wheel.

    You are right: The instances where I would have liked to post my comments and force journalists to link to them both feature journalists as central players in the story.

    As you know, I think the bloggers vs. journalists dichotomy is mostly false, but I agree there are times when things seem to assume that shape. We have to ask: is that really what’s going on, and what’s a better language for it? A truer picture…

    Where I start from, as a journalism professor, citizen and writer, is… everyone’s a writer. There is a big difference between stand alone writers and people working (writing) for large organizations that have custody of news brands. In between is the group blog: a community of writers building reputation online. We would be much better off with descriptive differences like these than â€bloggers vs journalists,†which morphs into partisans vs. pros.

    I have to share with you (forgive the porting over) an explanation I gave in the comments at PressThink. Why is it so hard for some in the press to recognize what I call press â€rollback†under Bush?

    I’d compare the rollback recognition situation to the FBI’s troubles with a broken, inadequate, outworn and unfixable data management system. It’s not that the field officers and bosses don’t know it’s broken; it’s not that they don’t suffer for it. They know; they suffer.

    But think about the huge up front investment required, the time it would take to figure out a better way, the massive disruption it would cause, the learning costs for transitioning to a new system, all with no guarantee that the next set-up would be better than the prior one… you can see how they’d tell themselves that the old broken network can keep going for another year, and another after that.

    Isn’t it humiliating? Yeah, it’s humiliating– they’re supposed to be the FBI! (This makes them all the crankier.)

    Isn’t it obvious? Yeah, it’s obvious; they have to work with a broken system every day! But their own, very human adjustments make it seem less bad than it really is.

    Don’t they see the failures we see? The 9/11 bombers got through their net, in part because of a non-functioning data system! They do see a lot of what we see, but once they start thinking of those massive disruptions, and the failures that could go on during that…

    How can they ignore the critics who have pointed these very things out? They can’t exactly ignore them, but they know a lot of those critics have resented the FBI for years, and not giving them the satisfaction is probably a factor.

    But the main factor is that the broken system can always run for another day and the day everyone says â€enough, we have to fix this…†always seems impossibly far off.

    It’s a kind of denial, I suppose, but on the other hand they know they have a thoroughly broken system, which is different from someone who is â€in denial†about an alcohol problem or an abusive husband.

    In the specific case of the Times Washington bureau, my hunch is that they took comfort from the purging of Judy Miller (who was not popular there) and began thinking they got their mojo back with this story, which â€restored†an acceptable level of we’re-the-watchdog dignity.

    Thanks again, Ms. ’Wheel.

  9. Anonymous says:

    Jay

    I’d also say there’s a blindness that comes from self-preservation. A good many people within traditional journalist outlets are worried about losing their jobs, understandably so. So rather than asserting enough distance to understand that there is often a direct connection between the economic threats and the dysfunctional FBI communications system, they’re seeing only job insecurity. Along with an unwillingness to rock the boat.

  11. jane_jericho says:

    emptywheel, you noted that Neil Lewis seemed to find Pachacutec much more socially acceptable than the other FDL bloggers.

    I’m curious about the reason, because it seems to me that reporters often have as much trouble dealing cosmetically, as it were, with new messengers, as they do new messages. You’d already completely established your bona fides by the time of the trial, as anyone would know who cared to look. What made Pach so much more credible, in your view?

    (longtime lurker–at Pressthink, too–first-time etc., etc. Thank you so much for the incredible work you do!)

  12. Neil says:

    EW, It’s this year or next. I started with 82 and finished with 83. I’m going to Commencement to see my sister-in-law’s niece graduate, and Fitz receive his honorary degree, and Fitz talk on Saturday. I’m quite certain I’m not a sufficiently speedy note taker. I hope events multimedia records the talk. Maybe I can coax Pat into crashing the President’s Reception with me after his talk.

    You chose a great time of year to be in Amherst. It’s beautiful. I understand Mr. Emptywheel’s trepidation. On the upside its not like he’ll be stuck there for a reunion weekend not knowing whether he’ll have fun or be bored out of his mind. I’ve always found Amherst people engaging if not friendly.

  13. Anonymous says:

    jane

    I think it has more to do with the fact that Pach doesn’t spend quite as much time saying mean things about newspapers. And then there’s a cultural thing. Both Pach and I can play well in â€civilized†society, having hung out in corporate America for a while. But Pach is much better at it than me.

    Neil

    Well, as it turns out, Ann Arbor’s ultimate community seems to get one Amherst person every 5 years, so mr emptywheel knows 3 people on the same reunion cycle as me. Problem is, the spouse of the one he likes best is also reluctant to show up at a reunion. So I need to persuade both of them to go…

    Otherwise, I may take him out there on the way home from CT. That’d work.