The liberal tilt of mainstream newspapers and magazines certainly has something to do with the professional networks within which editors find writers for their stories. But it also has something to do with conservative journalists rarely operating outside their zone of comfort. And especially in magazine articles, they tend to add commentary to existing stories rather than going out and finding new ones.

This is how it works: Liberals get reporting jobs. Conservatives get opinion columns.

Obviously, I’d like to see that change. Just as obvious is that this is a long-term project, and though other factors are involved, substantial and sustained investment is a must. So let me point out one place where this is happening: The Phillips Foundation is one such organization, and just this week they put out a call for applications to its 2009 Journalism Fellowship Program. From the release:

Print and online journalists with less than 10 years of professional experience are eligible. The Foundation created this program to provide fellowships for projects by journalists who share the Foundation’s mission to advance constitutional principles, a democratic society and a vibrant free enterprise system.

The Phillips Foundation awards $75,000 and $50,000 full-time fellowships and $25,000 part-time fellowships to undertake and complete a one-year project of the applicant’s choosing focusing on journalism supportive of American culture and a free society. In addition, there are separate fellowships on the environment, on the benefits of free-market competition, and on law enforcement.

I think anyone would call that substantial, and considering that the program is going into its 15th year, sustained it is, too. Applications are due by March 2, so if this is your kind of thing, you better get cracking.

The image above was taken about five minutes before descending into cellular service to find five copies of the same press release in my inbox saying that (most) convention activities have been suspended (at least tomorrow) in anticipation of Hurricane Gustav.

And to think, I could have accepted an offer to be bumped to a Monday flight, which would have gained me three round-trip tickets (on AirTran, but still).

Whatever happens, I’m still on the clock for NMS and C-SPAN, so I don’t expect this will quite turn into a paid vacation. But I don’t know quite what to expect. Depending on how serious the damage from Gustav proves to be, it could be quite a morbid one.

N.B. I first tried posting a version of this from my iPhone from the airport, but something went awry. If I can’t get this fixed, this will put a serious damper on my plans to “mo-blog” or “iPhlog” the convention. Assuming, of course, that there is a convention. Meantime, you can always follow me on Twitter for the latest.

For 168+ hours now I’ve been working literally around the clock — to be more accurate, one revolution of the hour hand each solar day — finding and spotlighting blog posts from national and state-level media and political blogs, and running a Blogads campaign involving changes to the artwork and copy reflecting each evening’s developments (I like how it’s rendered on BuzzMachine best). I’ve also done C-SPAN TV twice, sitting on the back of my sport coat, focusing just beyond the camera lens, depending on the bug in my ear for cues, reporting on the latest buzz from the left- and rightosphere from the offices of New Media Strategies.

This week my role shifts, and in a dwindling few hours I’ll be flying to St. Paul, Minnesota for the Republican National Convention. As the NMS Blue Team returns from Denver, the Red Team will be shipping out to the metropolitan area where the Coens’ Fargo mostly took place. I travel both in my capacity as a representative of C-SPAN at the convention as well as an official, RNC-credentialed blogger, so I will do my best to share the experience with you.

This will be a new thing for Blog P.I., but a second time for me as a blogger at a GOP convo; in 2004 I was part of Hotline’s convention team in New York City, and I blogged the convention in my off-hours. Then, I took some pictures with my crummy first-ever Sprint camera phone, most of which were uploaded to a server I long since forgot to pay for. This time I’ll be blogging it here in this space, using my iPhone camera and WordPress app, available free of charge from iTunes (which by the way now is really crying out for rebranding).

For the next five days or so, I expect to be taking photos and posting them with minimal presentation, reserving most of my reporting and commentary for a widget from my Twitter account, which will appear here shortly. This is basically the opposite of what Blog P.I. has been in its two years-plus existence: whereas my blogging has primarily comprised several times-weekly essay posts (such as this one) I will instead switch to frequent, quick-hit posts that will take you inside the moment (I’m pretty sure I can do this).

If you’re going to be in the Twin Cities this week, gimme a shout (see the contact page). If you know me from e-mail or the Blogometer or Blog P.I. and want to say hello, drop me a line. If you know of a party, breakfast or similar event that’s either open-invitation or you can extend one, consider me interested. Need a mug, thumb drive or baseball cap emblazoned with the C-SPAN logo? We can probably work something out.

And but so, I’ll get back to packing a week’s worth of my least-unprofessional attire and making sure I don’t leave anything behind, with the DVR playing the Oregon Ducks’ 44-10 victory over the (Huck the) Fuskies as I close up shop here and make my way to the Lesser White North.

More coming soon.

Last week I traded a series of Twitter “@ messages” with Jay Rosen, the NYU journalism professor, blogger and media critic. The first one asked:

Maybe you know. Q: why doesn’t Politico have a Ben Smith for the White House? Bets on whether they’ll get one if Obama wins?

He’s got a point. The Politico lists the organization’s designated blogs on its front-page in this order:

Ben Smith on Dems, Jonathan Martin on GOP, Shenanigans on Gossip, The Scorecard on Campaigns, The Crypt on Congress, Michael Calderone on Media, James Kotecki on whatever.

The Politico is literally blogging about “whatever” but not about “the White House.” So I guessed, in fewer than 140 characters:

Smith-Martin are a package deal, covering both primaries. Politico: more campaign, less governing? But that’s a great idea.

Prof. Rosen suggested in turn:

How about a PI post? Politico columnists for the Dems, Reps, Congress, Media, Gossip, Campaign trail, but no White House?

To which I replied:

Mike Allen certainly covers the WH. But not in blog form, true. Have friends down there, so I can ask. Possible PI post indeed.

And so I did, getting in touch with a half-dozen or so current and former Politico writers, asking for their thoughts on background. I also made an effort to get VandeHarris on the record, but they did not return e-mails by my less-than-rigorously self-enforced deadline.

So here’s what I could piece together:

• When the Politico launched a little under two years ago, the presidential campaign offered the biggest opportunity first. Politico was first conceived as a newspaper to be called Capitol Leader — “Yet Another Newspaper Aimed at Capitol Hill” as the Washington Post had it. The Executive branch wasn’t even in the picture until John Harris and Jim VandeHei were.
• As noted above, the newspaper that did emerge hired the much-acclaimed, much-accosted former White House reporter for Time and WaPo, Mike Allen. He writes big stories, is in good with Drudge, and produces content on a daily basis like everyone else. The format of his output is a secondary matter.
• Most everyone I talked to seemed to assume that no matter who won the presidential election, Politico would increase their White House coverage after the election. After all, it’s the logical continuation of the campaign stories they are covering now. Some said they thought a blog would be involved, and no one volunteered the opposite.

One thing that occurs to me is that other major newspapers have blogs covering the White House as a beat, as do regional newspapers with Washington correspondents, but none of them command major audiences (even when they resort to Olympics T&A).

People care about the big stories that emanate from the White House, and they’ll get that from every newspaper and every political blog inside the Beltway, but few are looking for the day-to-day minutiae. Bush is a lame duck, interest has waned even in some of the bigger stories, and other national newspapers have moved their White House correspondents to the campaign trail.

The answer given reminds me a bit of the response I got in the summer of 2006 when I first wrote about the opening for a “Republican ActBlue”, viz., just wait. It may be worth noting, the person who did finally create one was not yet working on it at that time.

So, yes, the Politico will probably have a White House blog next year. Whether Politico writes the one that Jay Rosen is hoping for remains to be seen.

Photograph by David Boyle in DC via Flickr.

It’s certainly a legitimate article, if not exactly a groundbreaking one, and I have no particular complaints about it. But I did find myself wondering: Couldn’t they have found a reporter from a conservative background to write this story?

In his day job, Wallace-Wells writes for Rolling Stone (as Ben, actually) where the tone of coverage is anything but sympathetic to Republicans. Before that he wrote for the left-leaning Washington Monthly.

So, to answer the question above: Yes, they probably could have. Not that anyone would expect it. Nor does the Times Magazine have a graduate of National Review writing about the Democrats. That’s Matt Bai, and his previous job was — perhaps coincidentally, perhaps not so much — Rolling Stone.

And it’s not just the Times Magazine; there is in fact a dearth of experienced, right-leaning feature reporters who write for mainstream magazines and newspapers. The mastheads of Time and Newsweek are filled with reporters who graduated from left-aligned publications. The New Republic is another example, but the Washington Monthly may have no rival as a journalist factory. Among the many former staffers who populate the list of Contributing Editors, here are just the ones I know currently write for major newspapers or magazines:

Jonathan Alter, Katherine Boo, Matthew Cooper, Michelle Cottle, James Fallows, Joshua Green, Michael Kinsley, Nicholas Lemann, Jon Meacham, Timothy Noah, Joseph Nocera, David Segal, Walter Shapiro, Amy Sullivan, Nicholas Thompson, Steven Waldman, Wallace-Wells, Robert Worth

That doesn’t even include Joshua Micah Marshall, who has set up a viable and valuable media company of his own. (Full disclosure: I once wrote an article for the Monthly; Sullivan was my editor and made it a much better piece.)

Conservatives grouse that the writers and editors at the national magazines lean left, and there is definitely some truth to that. Not to a man and woman, and this does not mean their reporting follows the Democratic Party line, but it does have consequences on which stories are covered and how they are covered. But I think the lessons learned are wrong, or at best incomplete.

The reaction is usually to set up an alternative forum which is defined as being explicitly conservative. The problem is that these alternative organizations often operate inside a bubble which their “liberal” counterparts do not. This can be the case beyond journalism as well. On the web we can see this very clearly: The non-partisan but in some ways “liberal” Wikipedia has been answered by the conservative-minded, low-quality Conservapedia.

You could see this in journalism when, last month, new Washington Times editor John Solomon brought the newspaper’s style book closer in line with the standards at every other daily broadsheet in America. Some on the right yelped that this was giving in to the “reigning liberal sensibilities.” But this gets it exactly backwards: instead of “liberal” coming to mean “neutral,” these conservatives are letting “neutral” come to mean “liberal.”

For the record, among the “liberal” sensibilities to which Solomon’s paper succumbed: calling Hillary Clinton “Clinton” rather than the more personal “Hillary” and referring to “illegal immigrants” instead of the antagonistic “illegal aliens.”

The liberal tilt of mainstream newspapers and magazines certainly has something to do with the professional networks within which editors find writers for their stories. But it also has something to do with conservative journalists rarely operating outside their zone of comfort. And especially in magazine articles, they tend to add commentary to existing stories rather than going out and finding new ones.

This is how it works: Liberals get reporting jobs. Conservatives get opinion columns. Look at the Newsweek masthead, liberal Jonathan Alter does indeed have an opinion column, but his full title is Senior Editor and Columnist. George Will is just Columnist. The columnist can make overt arguments the way a reporter cannot, but the columnist’s words are also unmistakably opinions. But decisions that go into how a story is reported are the product of a reporters’ opinions, too. These biases are not always obvious. (And it’s worth noting, there are many other biases besides political outlook in play.)

Conservatives’ railing against the New York Times for being liberal has some salutary effects, and certainly creates some new jobs. A few years ago, Bill Kristol admitted this was “working the refs” (not his phrase). And look: today Kristol himself is a New York Times columnist.

Up to a point, there is a structural bias to the newspaper industry. This can be summed up in three words: “Woodward and Bernstein.” Oftentimes journalists look for something that needs to be fixed by the government. Right-minded individuals, to use an intentionally tendentious phrasing, do not clamor to fix every last societal ill. But then, why doesn’t the right of center dominate investigations into the abuse of government powers? Surely this has a lot to do with Republicans holding a lot of government power for a long time. But then Reason magazine, which is certainly right of center on economic issues, is mostly a lifestyle magazine. It’s Slate for libertarians, with a print edition.

One exception that comes to mind is Byron York. He is not the only reporter at National Review, but he is the only one whose articles include a dateline. His 2005 book “The Vast Left Wing Conspiracy” was a detailed look at how the left has set up its own alternative apparatii in response to conservative ones. Nothing against Wallace-Wells, but York too would have been an excellent choice to write a story about the NRCC’s misfortunes.

Which raises a question conservatives should be asking themselves: If the left builds itself a successful activist structure mirroring that of the right (and to a large extent, they already have) while maintaining a soft grip on ostensibly non-aligned political media institutions, what kind of position will the conservative movement be in then?

When one says “conservative journalist,” too often this means “columnist,” not “reporter.” If the right can fix this, they’ve got a chance.

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.

• Hotline On Call
• The Corner
• Memeorandum
• Ground Game
• BlogNetNews/Iowa
• Google Maps
• William Beutler on Twitter
• IowaCaucus on Twitter
• Drudge Siren alerts, via Gmail
• Several Gchat windows, also via Gmail

Feel free to recommend something in the comments; I’ll add anything that I end up following.

For the record, I’m hoping for a strong third-place finish for Fred Thompson, and a Huckabee win to keep Romney from getting one. For the Democrats, I’m hoping for a persuasive Obama (not Edwards) victory to keep things interesting. One thing I am definitely rooting against: respectable wins by Romney and Hillary; that is to say, I’m rooting against Iowa.

8:58 update: It’s not even 9:00 Eastern and Fox News is calling it for Huckabee, with Thompson third: 36-23-14. Haha, only if she’s 5'3".

9:28 update: Half an hour later, MSNBC calls Iowa for Obama first, Fox follows close behind. Things will get more interesting.

9:32 update: The Google Maps Iowa caucus page still says:

Come back tonight for live results!

9:45 update: You know, the Dem results came back a lot faster than expected. So much for Edwards’ momentum, though it seems to be playing as a Hillary loss. Meanwhile, Jim Geraghty guessed correctly this morning in a piece that should get a second look.

10:28 update: Back and forth between the non-concession speeches [updated: and in 2OT, victory speeches] on CNN and the down-to-the-wire Blazer game on TNT. For once I need picture-in-picture. [Final update: "115-109, THE HOTTEST TEAM IN THE NBA GOES TO 20 AND 13!"]

11:58 update: Looks like Chris Dodd already had his throwing-in-the-towel banner ready to go:

Whereas it appears that Joe Biden did not:

No great surprise, Mike Gravel’s website hasn’t been throwing rocks into the lake since December 31. [Update: Gravel is still in the race, eh? That'll teach me to believe what Keith Olbermann says.]

12:37 update: Not to pile on Dodd, who wasn’t the only sub-1% Democrat tonight, but the best headline of the night belongs to Eric Pfeiffer:

Chris Dodd .08!

12:52 update: While the most unlikely reportage is Isaac Chotiner’s:

TNR friend Charles Barkley writes to say that Obama winning Iowa is a “great start” and he hopes it leads to Obama “winning it all.” And who wants to argue with Sir Charles?

1:01 update: Calling it a night.

No, wait. One last update: If you’ll allow me to indulge, via Twitter:

On Thursday I gave a somewhat-impulsive thumbs-up to RedState’s call for CNN to sack their political director. National Review’s indispensible Jim Geraghty has outlined eight editorial oversights (four quite serious, four merely problematic) in CNN’s vetting of the televised questioners. One or two would be enough to generate a blogswarm, but eight looks like malicious negligence, and it subseqently became a full-fledged blogstorm. Worse, CNN’s statement didn’t even attempt to be a “non-apology apology” — they’re digging in their heels and claiming:

The issues raised during last night’s debate were legitimate and relevant no matter who was asking the questions. The vested interests who are challenging the credibility of the questioners are trying to distract voters from the substantive issues they care most about.

Did somebody say “fake but accurate”? As QandO’s McQ notes, the hubris implicit in that statement is galling:

Says who? Says CNN, that’s who. It is the network that chose the questions that would be aired. Consequently what aired had nothing to do with what voters found to be the substantive issues of the day, but instead had everything to do with — say it with me — what CNN decided were the substantive issues of the day.

I stand by my initial judgement — in fact, I am all the more sure of it — but I realize it isn’t going to happen. (FWIW, CNN’s political director is Sam Feist; one wonders if indie rock/iPod Nano darling Feist could do any worse). And the truth is it wouldn’t make up for the debacle, so I concede that a change is not imperative. What would be better is a pro-active solution — that is, another debate. And so I am very intrigued by a new proposal, this time issued jointly by RedState and Human Events (both subsidiaries of Eagle Pubishing), for a “do-over debate”:

We have a base of readers who represent the Republican wing of the Republican Party. You — and the Republican Party — deserve to face the questions posed by undecided Republicans, not Democratic activists. We will solicit and obtain YouTube videos from those people and vet each questioner to establish that they are — really — undecided Republicans. We hope to include soldiers in the field in Iraq, Young Republicans, and others who still have not decided among you.

Today, allow us to make you this offer: We will organize a debate at a time and date amenable to you all. We will work with a national broadcaster to broadcast the debate as well as offer it online. We, not the liberal drive by media, will ensure the questioners are who they say they are. And we will choose them based on criteria that will be fully disclosed to you all which ensure the questioners aren’t activists for any Democratic candidate.

I think this is a terrific idea. The MSM no longer has a monopoly on campaign coverage, so why should they have a monopoly over organizing candidate debates? The only good answer is because they control the airwaves. Could Fox News be persuaded to air it? Possibly. C-SPAN would certainly set up a camera, it could be simulcast on the web, and it would obviously be made available on YouTube. Heck, put it on the History Channel. I bet more people would watch it.

And if so desired, Google/YouTube (GooTube, if you will) need not formally be involved. Eagle’s online outlets could independently create a YouTube account, put RedState’s Erick Erickson and Human Events’ Jed Babbin in a short video soliciting questions, and anyone could post their videos as responses. Eagle could narrow them down, submit them to a hand-picked group of conservative bloggers to identify the best, and blog readers would be invited to vet the questions themselves. The ultimate decisions should still be made by the organizing consortium, but the crowdsourcing would be a substantial (if not bulletproof) way to head off complaints from conservatives. Necessarily, this would aso give the campaigns time to study the questions and prepare well-thought out answers — this too would be different from the “gotcha” element that annoyed so many in the CNN/YouTube debate.

Of course, the last point hints at the major reason why it wouldn’t happen. Here I’ll note: I cannot formally join the call for such a debate; as I point out whenever relevant, New Media Strategies consults for the Fred Thompson campaign, and I won’t put the campaign or my employer on the spot. Same goes for the other campaigns, though — the Iowa caucuses are now a month away and no campaign should be pressured to join a debate in a time frame this limited. The CNN/YouTube debate required months, not to mention a “Save the Debate” movement by Republican bloggers, to happen at all. So don’t hold your breath, and save your Facebook campaigns. But it’s a terrific idea.

To address another issue: A few commenters on the above-mentioned post here, including some friends of Blog P.I., apparently read my criticism of the debate as a complaint about tough questions. If I understand them correctly, they feared a not-yet-proposed alternative would result in “softball” questions. I replied that they were mistaken, and pointed to a prediction by Patterico following the Democratic CNN/YouTube debate in July:

The Democrat debate was dominated by questioners asking: “Why can’t you be more leftist?” And the Republican debate will be dominated by questioners asking: “Why can’t you be more leftist?”

That pretty much nailed it. The problem is not that the issues CNN is so pleased with itself for raising were illegitimate or unfair. They were not. It’s that those Dem-leaning questions asked by Dem-leaning YouTubers were general election questions, and the general election audience generally (as it were) was not watching. Certainly Republicans should keep an eye toward next November, but a debate for a Republican primary should focus on issues that matter to Republicans. Say what you will, but “don’t ask, don’t tell” just isn’t one of them, and it doesn’t help Republican voters make up their minds. It does no good when Google flies a publicly-identifiable Hillary Clinton supporter in to berate the candidates about their position on the issue. (One which, I would like to point out, is unlikely to be a major factor in the general, either.) In fact, it rises to the level of farce when Anderson Cooper asks said Hillary supporter to rule on whether or not the candidates answered his question and the guy says “no,” yet anyone who was paying attention knows they did answer his question honestly, but he just didn’t like their answers.

True, CNN did air questions about illegal immigration, gun rights and religion. But RedState/Human Events would query those subjects, too. They might even include a question about the Bible that doesn’t conform to slack-jawed yokel stereotypes (sorry, Joseph Dearing, whomever you are, but when you assert that your question tells us “everything we need to know” about the GOP hopefuls, that’s how you come across). Although various writers at RedState and Human Events have evinced support for various candidates (Erickson most notably in favor of Fred Thompson, I can’t help but note), I would argue they have a greater interest than CNN in a strong, fair debate that includes difficult questions for all the candidates, because (as Erickson and Babbin point out) it’s their audience who will be deciding which Republican goes on to the general election.

In short, RedState and Human Events would be better curators of a Republican debate than CNN.

Because I am confident that this do-over debate will not come to pass, I encourage both to organize similar debates for Senate and House candidates, whose primaries mostly will not be decided until further into next year. This would give them time to work out the kinks, gain experience appealing to local television channels for airtime, and give them credibility in proposing such a debate in 2012 (er, 2011, but you know what I mean). I call on Pajamas Media, NRO, Heritage or any other independent, webbish, GOP-leaning organization to do the same. Now that I think about it, I call on Josh Marshall’s TPM empire to do the same for Democrats.

You know what would be awesome next fall, sometime after the conventions and before the general election, Commission on Presidential Debates-permitting? A RedState/Daily Kos YouTube debate.

Ahead of me already?

For most of the 20th century, the color red was associated with Communism, and for reasons that scarcely need explaining, it carried a decidedly negative association in the West: Better dead than red, after all. The American left certainly had its share of Stalinists, and anti-Communists on the right didn’t hesitate in extending the term. When I lived in Eugene, Oregon, the town daily Register-Guard was sometimes referred to as the Red Guard.

Likewise, the color blue is sometimes associated with nobility in Europe and the upper class in America, particularly in the Northeast — I refer to the term blue blood. The stereotype of rich, right-wing industrialists who cannot identify with regular Americans has probably been used against every Republican candidate since Lincoln. The recognition that this can be a political liability is what led Mike Huckabee to recently descrbe himself as “a blue-collar Republican, not a blueblood Republican.”

Meanwhile, witness the rapid adoption of the terminology. One of the rightosphere’s best-known websites is RedState; an online political firm founded by former Howard Dean staffers is called Blue State Digital.

It’s worth remembering that in elections prior to 2000, the colors were not standardized across the television networks, and they also switched colors between the parties. In 2000, chance might have had red assigned to Democrats and blue to Republicans. The prolonged attention to the electoral map might have given rise to opposite definitions for the terms, but would they have stuck?

I don’t think so. The vice versa could never have become political shorthand in this country because neither side would allow it. Reversed, the colors would draw attention to negative aspects of each party’s intellectual and sociological histories.

Therefore, the switch is serendipitous — by adopting the other side’s derogatory colors, each cancels out the other, and in the 21st century can accrue all-new (and perhaps more positive) political connotations.