This is the continuation of my long multi-part post on the “Open Source/PJ” media launch at Solomonia last November. I have divided them up differently this time and made slight changes.

Keynote: Preaching to the Great Unwashed

But the best was for after lunch. Glenn Reynolds (a.k.a InstaPundit) introduced keynote Judith Miller. Why Judith Miller? Why not Glenn Reynolds (whose book “An Army of Davids : How Markets and Technology Empower Ordinary People to Beat Big Media, Big Government, and Other Goliaths” with a scheduled date release of March 2006 is already a best-seller at Amazon)? Like Elizabeth Hayt in the first panel, she admits she doesn’t blog, she only really found out about them when she was in prison and didn’t have internet access, and actually, she admitted later in the discussion as she entertained the suggestion that she really should blog, she finds the prospect quite “terrifying.”

Why is she here? Because she’s the Martha Stewart of journalism? The current MSM celebrity? Because various key legislation swirls around her case? Okay. Whatever. I guess I just happen to have other concerns. But wait, what’s that she’s saying?

“Let me tell you the five commandments of journalism.”

Huh?!? What does she think she’s doing?

Apparently she views herself as the representative of serious mainstream journalism who has come to give some elementary ethics and advice to these junior journalist bloggers so that they too could aspire to the heights of mainstream excellence.

Is this dramatic misreading of the audience due to “lack of curiosity” as Austin would put it dryly, or the result of such intense cocooning that she doesn’t know to whom she speaks? (Are these two sides of the same coin?) Is this a whiff of that characteristic arrogance that has given us so much MSM misbehavior, including the Olympian disdain that prompted Dan Rather to talk about those “those guys sitting around at 2:00 AM in their pajamas”? Oh wait, she’s also NYT, or was.

It could only get surreal from this point on. Her first three commandments were elementary, known to anyone in the room, perhaps useful to recall, but hardly keynote timber. But then the whopper: “Fourth commandment: If you are wrong, acknowledge it prominently, and follow up with further stories.”

Silence. My jaw dropped. Even she squirmed, distancing herself sotto voce from the NYT editorial policy on this. This woman wrote for a paper with a scandalous record of “correcting itself,” with some of the worst misreporting on its record, including the Holocaust on the back pages just to name one of the more staggering… Nor does it have any institutional memory of such catastrophic failures, as it careens into a similar lack of understanding and a systematic downplaying of another round of genocidal ferocity aimed at Jews.

One of the main causes of the blogosphere’s success comes precisely from the brick wall that descends from the MSM any time serious corrections are in order. The case we work on at Second Draft, that of the “martyr” Muhammed al Durah is one that had spectacularly destructive initial impact and never got “followed up” on even as plentiful evidence emerged that the media had gotten it wrong emerged… with few exceptions that really went nowhere, for five years now. Embarrassingly wrong. Anyone who has read Renata Adler on the combination of superciliousness and arrogance that characterizes the NYT attitude towards self correction had to laugh at this lesson in MSM ethics. Or cry.

After all, what characterizes the blogosphere — and may explain Miller’s terrified attitude towards it — is that if you have a thin skin, you’re doomed (well, not so Juan Cole — added). Don’t expect polite coddling, don’t expect to escape correction — immediate correction — if you mess up. Bloggers are accustomed to a level of give-and-take which the MSM has systematically insulated themselves from — with tragic consequences. (Could we say that blogging is on one level the record of letters to the editor that the MSM refused to publish?)

Next, Part IV: Who’s in What Century/Millennium?

[This is the first of a series of 6 segments on the OSM Launch in New York last November.]

Fashion advice for the ugly: I’d rather be in my pajamas.

Ask not on whom the Joke is; the Joke is on Us

Everyone writes with an audience in mind. To some extent, what we write says something about what we think of that audience: Are we condescending? Demagogic? Demanding? Generous? Some of the above?

Bloggers, especially the political bloggers who form the core of the new Pajamas Open Source Media, got their start by writing to an imagined audience that wanted to hear what they had to say even if, initially, they had no idea how large an audience that might be (and any expert in the MSM would have told them to forget about it). Above all they broke the matrix of MSM mimetic desire, the now suffocating arrogance of the gatekeepers of public discourse, those who get repeat parts in the public discussion, those who adhere to the powerful, if invisible, consensus as to what the “public” wants (entertainment, lifestyle issues, national news, all packaged professionally) and what they need (images that encourage respect for other cultures, that do not give fodder for right-wing warmongering).

I once read about a fish that is programmed to follow the fish in front of it, so that they all follow each other and the whole school moves in a kind of Brownian motion. But when experimenters took one fish and pithed the part of the brain that made it follow other fish, it swam off in any direction and drew in its wake the rest of the school. Although far from pithed, or random motion, the bloggers who form the core of PJMediaís initial launch group, and those who read them, are not random swimmers followed by mimetic idiot(arians). They are mavericks followed by independent thinkers, and they do break out of the Brownian motion of the MSM. No phenomenon illustrates better the workings of the invisible hand in the market place of ideas, than the sudden, stunning, and salutary rise to the top of the blogosphere of such independent minds as Richard Fernandez, Glenn Reynolds, Charles Johnson, Roger Simon, Michelle Malkin, Pamela … the list goes on and on.

So going to the launch of PJMedia promised to be a delightful experience. It was like going to a convention of people, all of whom, were they at the procession where the emperor paraded naked, would have said — indeed they have said — “Daddy, why is the emperor naked?”

But every time a grass-roots movement institutionalizes, or as Max Weber says, goes from charisma to rationalization, certain dangers emerge. This week we’re studying heresies in my medieval French history course. Repeatedly movements that started out charismatic, independent, passionate, gained immense popularity thereby, and got drawn in the direction of institutionalization that all too often distorted the very source of their initial strength. Francis of Assissi, pressured to form an order by the Pope Innocent III in the early 13th century, ended up distancing himself from his own order, so unhappy was he with the results; and before the century was out, institutional Franciscans were executing spiritual Franciscans for heresy. Now modern grass-roots movements like the blogosphere need not be as extreme in their demands, nor as violent in their transformation, but… you get the idea. And since Pajamas Media was such a nice term — like the Lollards or the Quakers, a name given to the group by disdainful outsiders and accepted by the group as a way of turning the insult around — the idea that it would be discarded in favor of something more neutral made me uneasy.

Would the process of institutionalizing contribute to shifting from a primarily free-wheeling discourse that rewards plain talk and common sense to one that worries about who speaks rather than what they say. As OSM becomes a portal to the blogosphere, it runs the risk of shifting attention in this direction, and ending up more as a gatekeeper than a portal. How much effort will now go into catching the eyes of the institutionally powerful decision makers, rather than into addressing the very audience of plain-thinkers who raised them to prominence? This can be the beginning of the slippery slope of mimetic desire that leads to a group of people who, taking their cues from above, end up praising “the emperor’s new clothes.”

Pushing that thought to the back of my mind, with the prospect of hanging with all the lively independent minds, I made my way over to the W hotel on Wednesday night with Pedro Zuquete (my partner in crime), just glad to be there.

Getting Warmed Up: The Root Causes of Terrorism

The first evening, after spending a delightful time with, among others, Sol (Solomonia), Pieter Dorsman (Peak Talk) and Stephen Green (Vodka Pundit) on the lobby of the W, Pedro pointed out David Corn of The Nation to me.

“We used one of his writings to illustrate the PCP (Politically Correct Paradigm) slogan, poverty breeds terrorism.”

“Really, so what’s he doing here?” I asked, thinking that that was a pretty idiotarian position to hold.

“He’s the token leftist on the steering committee.” (On the panel the next day, Corn referred to himself at the “token liberal”).

“Great, let’s ask him if he really thinks that.”

We finally reached him by “joining” a conversation between him and Pamela, of (don’t mess with) Atlas Shrugs.

“Is it true” I said, with the kind of incredulous tone that tends to make people defensive, “that you think poverty breeds terrorism?”

“I didn’t say that,” Corn responded quickly, “I said that addressing poverty is a way among others to reduce terrorism. I didn’t say that poverty breeds terrorism [ah, cyberspace is so merciless]. I’m just arguing that if you have programs and help the economic situation, then you’re going to reduce terrorism and… the influence of jihadis,” he said, gesturing to us as if to say, ‘you know, the people you’re so worried about’).

“That’s not helping, that’s extortion money,” Pamela shot back without missing a beat. Pure PCP vs JP. This was going to be a lot of fun.