One doesn’t need to click through to know the title of that post is not “Facebook Reddit Digg Print this article.”

P.S. Yeah, this is kinda ripped off Mickey Kaus’ “Nate Silver Infallibility Watch.” What of it?

A Special Note Re: Third Way

This is Jennifer Palmieri, acting CEO of the Center for American Progress Action Fund.

Most readers know that the views expressed on Matt’s blog are his own and don’t always reflect the views of the Center for American Progress Action Fund. Such is the case with regard to Matt’s comments about Third Way. Our institution has partnered with Third Way on a number of important projects – including a homeland security transition project – and have a great deal of respect for their critical thinking and excellent work product. They are key leaders in the progressive movement and we look forward to working with them in the future.

What had Yglesias written to deserve this treatment? Two days prior, this:

Third Way is a neat organization — I used to work across the hall from them. And they do a lot of clever messaging stuff that a lot of candidates find very useful. But their domestic policy agenda is hyper-timid incrementalist bullshit.

It shouldn’t take long to figure out what the reaction would be. And it took only three minutes for the first comment, by “The CAP Cleaning Staff”, to appear:

Maybe it’s just me, but this post is kind of creepy.

Around the blogosphere, reactions have been much the same. Lefty bloggers from the netroots and academia, such as Matt Stoller and Brad DeLong, rallied to his side. Markos Moulitsas, who has a few more institutional relationships than most, was somewhat muted in his response, the first line simply being:

The Center for American Progress should not make a habit of doing this.

And I concur. The post was, as Yglesias friend Julian Sanchez put it, profoundly tone deaf. It makes CAP look less like a think tank and more like a message machine (something that is true of most DC research institutions, but few let their guard slip so badly) and it will bring yet more scrutiny to Third Way [Update: About which, great comparison here].

Yet this is also exactly the way of things, as James Joyner matter-of-factly explans:

CAP employs Matt to write a blog for them and, contrary to the views of some commenters, it’s absurd to expect that they should simply let him post whatever he feels like posting. Institutions start blogs with the purpose of advancing their institutional agenda. Writing for CAP is different from writing for a general interest magazine or on one’s own space, both of which Matt did previously.

What’s more, left-leaning but independent-minded Brendan Nyhan had already imagined just this scenario, and does not believe this will be an isolated incident:

There’s no way that this sort of reaction won’t create a chilling effect on Yglesias. How could he not think twice about criticizing Third Way or other CAP partners in the future? It’s the reason we need smart bloggers like him at independent outlets like The Atlantic that won’t enforce a party line.

It’s already having an effect on his comment section. To be sure, Yglesias’ commenters have been irritatingly wry and weirdly intelligent for years, but in response to this throwaway joke post this morning…

Deep Thought

The fact that the weather has swung rapidly from unseasonably warm to incredibly cold conclusively debunks concerns about man-made climate change.

…this was the first comment:

Now we know Jennifer Palmieri’s views on the weather. Also Third Way’s official opinions.

Just remember, Matt Yglesias is no longer writing on this blog. It’s been hijacked by Palmieri, CEO of Center for American Progress. Sad, that.

This is really sad.

I don’t think I’d go that far. But it is a reminder that the blogosphere is still subject to constraints from the outside world.

Why wasn’t Michael Isikoff’s investigative piece outlining the lobbying connections of Barack Obama’s lead strategist, David Axelrod, promoted in Newsweek’s Sunday e-mail to subscribers?

Below right, I’ve cropped the article descriptions from this list for purposes of formatting this post, but I have not removed any of the articles. Although Isikoff’s report appears in the same June 2 issue of Newsweek as the stories, it is nowhere to be found here. And it should be, especially considering that the first four articles listed are all generally pro-Obama in their tilt and three are explicitly framed as advice for candidate Obama. The other four articles cover minor issues such as Hillary Clinton, Ted Kennedy and John McCain.

What happened? One slim possibility is that the article is online-only and thus not eligible for inclusion in a round-up of magazine stories. But this seems not to be the case, as the screen capture indicates, both types of stories are included.

Another may be that Isikoff’s story was put to bed late, and not yet finalized when the feature-heavy e-mail was compiled. Possible, but if so not an adequate defense. Like last November, when WashingtonPost.com erroneously reported positive developments in the condition of Redskins safety Sean Taylor after he was already deceased, there is no excuse for not making e-mail alerts as timely as possible.

One more reason could be that Isikoff’s article is short, perhaps taken from the front of book section that is also home to Perspectives and the up-down-sideways Periscope arrows (if you can’t guess, this week Obama is up, Hillary is down and McCain is sideways). But that doesn’t make any sense, either. As the e-mail alert says,

Dear NEWSWEEK Subscriber,

Welcome to another edition of Political Perspectives, the subscriber-only e-mail newsletter previewing and highlighting NEWSWEEK’s coverage of the political world, in print and online. This week, Evan Thomas writes what an Obama adviser might say to the candidate about how to address the issue of race on the campaign trail. Elsewhere, Holly Bailey pores through John McCain’s just-released health records and Jonathan Alter looks at the lessons we can learn from Hamilton Jordan and Ted Kennedy.

It goes on like that, but there’s no mention of Isikoff or Axelrod. As the e-mail announces, it is not merely a list of their top features but the magazine’s “coverage of the political world, in print and online.” How does Isikoff’s reporting not fall into that category?

Surely there’s an explanation I haven’t ridiculed, and surely that will be their justification. I’m not the first to suggest that Newsweek specifically is in the tank for Obama, but I think I am the first to suggest that Newsweek is burying scoops that are problematic for him.

No matter, the Isikoff story still made it into the blogosphere. But as far as I can tell, only conservative blogs mentioned it. Even TalkLeft, which remains Clinton supporter central, hasn’t picked it up. One wonders how much further it might have traveled if the magazine had deployed its considerable PR assets on the story’s behalf.

Lieberman has already endorsed McCain, and in fact did so long before it was apparent that McCain would land the GOP nomination. In the Wall Street Journal article featured, Lieberman continues to make the case for his longtime colleague. Hagel has not yet endorsed Barack Obama, but it seems increasingly likely, as the Huffington Post article by Sam Stein just below suggests.

One more thing: Out of the blogs listed as following the two stories, a non-trivial majority are liberal or non-partisan reporter blogs. And there’s another imbalance: I see conservative bloggers supporting the Lieberman op-ed, and liberal bloggers criticizing it. Meanwhile, there are plenty of liberal bloggers supporting the article about Hagel, but no right-leaning bloggers weighing in on the same. I’ll grant that this is a very small sample, but I mention it because it’s a pattern I recognize: the leftosphere is more active than the rightosphere in contesting the opposing side’s storylines.

Then again, the left has had no small amount of practice going after Lieberman, while the right has ignored Hagel for awhile. Which may itself be part of the problem, and something to correct sooner rather than later.

So what did that initial explosion look like, online? All it takes is a little bit of trial-and-error on Memeorandum, the live-updated aggregation of the political blogosphere, find out where the Spitzer scandal first popped into online consciousness. Specifically, it appeared about midway down the page of the 2:20 p.m. update like so:

Just kinda sandwiched in there between a couple other articles getting some contemporaneous linkage from around the ’sphere. Hats off to Jammie Wearing Fool and New York Magazine — one pure blogger, one blogging MSM outlet — for getting there first, even if some luck played a part in their picking up the Times report ahead of the pack. And it didn’t take an hour for the rest of the pack to join in. The article reached its highest point of linkage at 5:15 in the evening, just shy of three hours after it was first posted:

The rest is recent history: the offline mediasphere swooped in after, Gov. Spitzer threw in the towel after 48 hours’ thought, and his consort, Ashley Alexandra Dupre/DiPietro/Youmans joined Radiohead and Nine Inch Nails among the few musical artists to earn millions releasing music online. Aside from a “60 Minutes” interview a few years down the road (his) or a reality show on E! (hers) this story is about done. Coincidentally, just in time for the McGreevey sex scandal to make headlines and bloglines once again.

Bonus pre-scandal tidbit: Lest we fgorget, here’s Hotline’s Quote of the Day from Feb. 27:

“I’ll be there maybe later in the week or next week, if this continues.”
NY Gov. Eliot Spitzer, explaining why he won’t be campaigning for HRC in OH 2/27

In retrospect, I’m sure he would have rather spent that week campaigning for Sen. Clinton.

But as of late Friday/early Saturday, this is the top story:

Actual header on the HuffPo report:

Bill Kristol To Become New York Times Columnist In 2008

Atrios is listed first among “Sites Linking to This Page…” so that probably has something to do with the mishap, though it doesn’t actually explain it. As for “Jesus H. Christ,” your guess is as good as mine. Same for the “(2)” bit, whatever that refers to.

Here’s the Atrios post linking, for what it’s worth:

Your Liberal Media

Publishing lying conservative psychopaths since I can remember.

No Jesus there, nor at HuffPo.

I’m sure whatever this is will be fixed before long, but it suggests a problem for Gabe Rivera’s meme-tracker (and its sister sites) in the near future: as blogs continue to be added to the Memeorandum list, and those sites change trade in their simple CMSs for more elaborate ones, Memeorandum could get noisier.

For awhile now I’ve noticed an existing issue where authors of posts are sometimes misidentified — especially blogs at National Review Online, where even posts on Jim Geraghty’s Campaign Spot are often listed simply as “NationalReview.com” and attributed to Katherine Jean Lopez. I searched the December Memeorandum archives for an example, but came up empty, so you’ll have to take my word for the moment. My impression is that posts on The Corner are properly attributed, but the other NRO blogs are not.

Don’t get me wrong, Memeorandum is still the best gauge of what’s happening in the political blogosphere right now, but it isn’t 100%. It is still something like 99%, and I hope it stays at least that good.

Update: Gabe responds in the comments:

Thanks William. Made a manual fix after your post tripped one of my alerts. Not sure what the underlying problem was…I’m not able to reproduce it. Hope it doesn’t happen again. I guess this shows days go by when I don’t even look at memeorandum. That is definitely the case.

As for the bigger picture, notwithstanding this, I think my system is always improving at extracting headlines, bodies etc. There has always been an error rate, and it’s being gradually reduced, but will always be non-negligible.

One blog covering the controversy but not yet featured in the roundup — it takes some time and linkage to make the cut — but sure to be a staple of Memeorandum round-ups in the near future is CQ’s latest blog, opening for business today: Ground Game. It’s written by my old college buddy and current flatmate, Eric Pfeiffer (the journalist, not the furniture designer).

In addition to covering the issue of improperly-screened questioners, he discusses how much these things matter:

The real question facing Republicans today is not whether they should make use of emerging technology, but how the medium can be used to improve their communication skills.There’s a tendency in the media to overemphasize the real-world impact of online activism, but the danger to those who ignore the grassroots power of the internet is very real. … “It’s pretty remarkable that just a year after ‘Macaca’ the candidates are standing on a stage in St. Petersburg,” Grove acknowledged.

Make sure you follow those embedded links.

Meanwhile, many of the bloggers linked in the roundup pictured above are now questioning the usefulness of these YouTube debates as organized by cable news networks, or at least by the Cable News Network. But as Pfeiffer points out, that’s not the only way CNN’s YouTube partnership is outdated:

You Tube debates have already expanded to include a Mayor debate in Salt Lake City, several student council elections and campaign forums hosted by TV stations in Greece and Poland.

I probably should have known that, but it’s news to me. That’s good enough reason to bookmark and blogroll it. After you do, check this video out even though — and I really hate to do this to you — it’s all Greek to me:

Update: In an e-mail released this afternoon, RedState is calling on CNN to fire their political director. Considering the egregious and recurrent nature of this problem, I can’t say that sounds unreasonable:

Dear RedState Reader:

RedState is calling for CNN to fire Sam Feist, their political director; and David Bohrman, Senior Vice President and Executive Producer of the debate.

During last night’s debate, which CNN billed as “a Republican debate, and the goal was to let Republican voters see their candidates,” CNN either knowingly or incompetently allowed hardcore left wing activists to plant questions and Anderson Cooper willingly gave one of those activists a soapbox so he could harass the Republican candidates about military policy.

Simple googling would have revealed these left wing activists.

Had CNN done its homework, this would not have happened. They either willfully let it happen, or incompetently bungled it. Either way, heads should roll.

The RedState editors have a related post up on the site as well.

P.S. Can you just wait for the newly-announced ABC News-Facebook presidential fiasco debate?

It made sense, though. The bloggers who show up on Techmeme are much more likely to track themselves on that site than are the bloggers who populate Memeorandum likely to watch themselves. Of couse, all tech bloggers are geeks in good standing, while only some of us political types are. So they get the goodies first.

But as expected, Rivera rolled out his Memeorandum Leaderboard, and he did so this week. As he explained, the Leaderboard

identifies 100 of [the most influential political blogs], ranking sources simply by how much they’ve appeared on memeorandum in the past month. It updates every 20 minutes and offers archives of past days. … The memeorandum Leaderboard doesn’t tell the whole story of course. For instance, influential curators of opinion like Instapundit.com don’t figure highly given memeorandum’s preference for longer articles. Yet it remains a handy portal to many of the sources with the greatest role in framing and shaping the national debate.

It’s handy, all right, and it fills a need. Five years ago, in a very different political blogosphere, The Truth Laid Bear Ecosystem was the definitive guide to the top political blogs. But with Rob Neppell (née N.Z. Bear) now focused on other projects, it’s fallen into obsolescence. The Technorati Top 100 was a welcome addition, but its inbound link counts were sometimes unreliable, it never focused on politics per se, and as I pointed out last year, the political blogs have to share the top 100 with many other genres. Since then, Technorati has lost its direction in other ways, and it’s too soon to tell whether founding CEO Dave Sifry’s departure will change things. I’m not counting on it.

So while Rivera’s list is worth analyzing, it should come as no surprise that the analysis so far has come from more tech-centric bloggers. For example, here’s TechCrunch’s Duncan Riley marveling at how important the legacy media remains, especially compared to the ’sphere in which he moves:

According to the list, based on story headlines on Memeorandum the New York Times, Washington Post and AP control over 22.4% of political headlines. The Atlantic Online, The National Review and CNN (twice) also make the top ten, leaving slim pickings for political blogs. … The (perhaps sad) state of the political blogosphere stands in contrast to the tech blogosphere, which dominates the equivalent Techmeme Leaderboard list, holding approx 64% of all spots.

The observation is fair, but I object to the judgment call. For one thing, defining the subject matter of Memeorandum as “politics” is far too narrow. Foreign affairs, U.S. diplomacy, domestic policy, electoral politics and sundry current events make up the subject matter at Memeorandum — a much broader spectrum of news and analysis than what TechMeme covers. Moreover, these subjects often require reporting from around the country and around the world that even in the digital age aged institutions with more resources than resolve continue to dominate. Most of the stories on TechMeme emanate from the Silicon Valley; Memeorandum spans the world at large.

GOP Internet consultant Patrick Ruffini has already taken a crack at evaluating what it says about the Right’s online fortunes. What it says is that Republicans and conservatives need to reinvent their online channels of communication:

Lots of bloggers have been over to Iraq, a commitment which makes the professional activists in the leftosphere look like dilettantes. Guys like Jeff [Emanuel], Bill Roggio, and Michael Yon have been the advance guard for this stuff. But nothing little has been done to institutionalize their work, to create counter-memes by controlling the upstream information flow through a system for nurturing these upstart war reporters. The failure to develop an effective counter-narrative out of Iraq is reflective of the “conservative message machine” and its reluctance to think outside the box.

Myself, I’m still thinking it over. To get started on the process, I separated all the websites on this afternoon’s Leaderboard into a few arbitrary categories and added up the percentages accorded to each. I then created a simple chart with Zoho Sheet (beating out Google Docs by a slim margin and NeoOffice by a much wider one) to visualize the statistical spread. Others will have different ways of breaking this out — and I may have different ways at a later date — but here’s what I came up with:

I should note the numbers taken off the leaderboard do not actually add up to 100%. That’s something I intend to ask Rivera about, and because the Zoho chart rounds them up to reach a sensible 100%, here are the actual numbers as I compiled them:

This dilutes MSM-owned websites only just a bit; as you can see, print and wire-based news stories commanded much, much more attention than websites based on television news, so you can squint and add that back in if you’d like. Add in MSM-created content specifically for the web, and it’s up over 60%. That is also a more arbitrary but, I would argue, more necessary category — “MSM Online” is where I placed any ostensibly non-partisan blog and any non-blog content by more partisan sources. These days established media organizations are creating more and more content for the web, and much of it differs in character from what they publish on dead trees. Liberal and Conservative blogs are more self-explanatory; the hard-to-categorize sites included Drudge Report and The Moderate Voice. The Primary Sources were Gallup, Rasmussen and whitehouse.gov. If anybody cares, I can forward the list as I compiled it. It could probably use some revision, and I certainly reserve the right to have made a clerical error here or there.

I’ll leave you that to chew over for now. I’ll be back with answers when I have them, and with any luck, I will be back inside of a month with a few more thoughts about what all is going on here.