you dudes gotta keep up. Walt has already been on BhTV, with Anne-Marie Slaughter no less:
http://bloggingheads.tv/diavlogs/15813

errrr: matt, and you are? http://bloggingheads.tv/diavlogs/170...0:23&out=10:32

Wow: twelve minutes in and Matt has suggested that journalists and the "old media" writ large are, to quote Frank Zappa, "only in it for the money." Um: seriously? Does Matt honestly think that his former employer, the Atlantic, to take an example, (once a truly superb mag) is solely in the journalism business because of a profit motive? If that were the case, the Atlantic would look nothing like it does: it would morph into People! The motive of some of the best journalists and journalistic enterprises has always been, and still is, providing interesting and useful information and analysis. Matt is so devoted to his "blue team vs. the red team" worldview, however, that the idea of disinterestedness if foreign to him. To suggest that the Atlantic is produced solely to make money is about as absurd as suggesting that Bob created bloggingheads.tv to enrich himself.

Talking about Americans treating Israel as any other country strikes me as similar to talking about them treating the military as any other governmental institution, or treating Christianity as any other religion. It would look more fair to a disinterested observer, but it's just not how Americans seem to see the world. Even if the whole concept of anti-semitism were removed from the debate you'd still be pissing off everyone outside a small segment of the population and you'd still get called names. They'd just have to be more creative in choosing invectives.

Matt claims that general-interest newspapers "strive to be dull." Obviously he's being flippant, but I don't think that's even an accurate distillation of a newspaper's goal. Here's my alternative suggestion: general-interest newspapers strive to be useful. For low-interest, low-information general audiences, who lack the time to parse a news outlet's agendas, information that strives to be balanced is more useful than information that does not. I suspect that people in Matt's position fail to appreciate this because they're accustomed to a different set of readers. Matt's median reader is better-informed, more media-savvy and (here's the rub) more able to devote time to newsgathering than the median reader of the Dallas Morning News. This has been the case since Matt's Harvard Independent days, when his audience was presumably smaller and nerdier than his classmates who wrote general-interest stuff at the Crimson. Which is great! Let a thousand audiences bloom! Being useful to a broad audience isn't Matt's top priority; that's fine. But he should remember to consider his assumptions about other people's audiences.

Matt's bashing of old-school journalism is distasteful and overplayed. (Jeff Jarvis, anyone?) It's like he's "striving to be dull" or something.

Nikkibong, I don't think Matt suggested that the profit motive is the only goal, just a primary goal. I agree with that. For-profit means for-profit. Anyway, it's not true that the surest road to profit is becoming similar to People magazine. There's already a People magazine! The surest road to profit is finding a niche and getting really good at it. It's a question of comparative advantage. Arguing that "social responsibility is the only thing stopping the Atlantic from becoming People" is like arguing that "social responsibility is the only thing stopping Panama from eliminating coffee plantations so it can do more software programming."

The front end of this discussion is a fascinating exercise. Matt disses mainstream – i.e., fact-checked, both-sides-quoted, not explicitly opinionated – journalism as “dull,” in contrast to the “interesting” (but not “smart-ass”) issue advocacy of the progressive blogosphere. Ross explains that the conservative blogosphere came into being to counter established journalism, perhaps a stealth acknowledgment that balance, not “liberal bias,” was the rightists’ real beef with the MSM. It’s pretty clear that neither of these guys has ever done straight journalism, as in covering a fire, a city council meeting or the day-to-day of an election campaign. Those of us who have can’t help but roll our eyes as such pundits comment on (not to say celebrate) the decline of the old journalism and the rise of the new. Opinion writing is more “interesting” from the writer’s perspective, and certainly requires less work, than trying to present a balanced account after sifting facts out of available hard data and the comments of opposing interests bent on slanting information. Mainstream journalism was born when people recognized that disseminating news was a different discipline than disseminating opinion – a difference not recognized in American journalism until the

Quoting allbetsareoff: The front end of this discussion is a fascinating exercise. Matt disses mainstream – i.e., fact-checked, both-sides-quoted, not explicitly opinionated – journalism as “dull,” in contrast to the “interesting” (but not “smart-ass”) issue advocacy of the progressive blogosphere. Ross explains that the conservative blogosphere came into being to counter established journalism, perhaps a stealth acknowledgment that balance, not “liberal bias,” was the rightists’ real beef with the MSM.

It’s pretty clear that neither of these guys has ever done straight journalism, as in covering a fire, a city council meeting or the day-to-day of an election campaign. Those of us who have can’t help but roll our eyes as such pundits comment on (not to say celebrate) the decline of the old journalism and the rise of the new.

Opinion writing is more “interesting” from the writer’s perspective, and certainly requires less work, than trying to present a balanced account after sifting facts out of available hard data and the comments of opposing interests bent on slanting information.

Mainstream journalism was born when people recognized that disseminating news was a different discipline than disseminating opinion – a difference not recognized in American journalism until the

Mainstream journalism was born when people recognized that disseminating news was a different discipline than disseminating opinion – a difference not recognized in American journalism until the early 20th century.

I don't know about that, Allbetsareoff -- I tend to think that the shift toward "objective" news wasn't a cultural shift but an economic one -- in the early 20th century, news became more (a) popular, thanks to rising literacy and falling distribution costs and (b) profitable, thanks to its rising popularity. Mass audiences are low-attention audiences, and (as I argued a couple posts up) news that strives to be balanced is easier to use than news that doesn't. Therefore popularity bred objectivity. Profitability gave capitalists (as opposed to pure partisans) a reason to own newspapers. Many of those capitalists were also partisans, but when push came to shove, they opted for profit before politics. And because politically slanted information is less useful to a general audience, maximizing profit meant maximizing objectivity. The current shift, accompanied by another big drop in distribution costs (aka THE INTERNET), is toward small, highly motivated audiences. These days, mass audiences don't pay; so the financial incentive for objectivity is falling.

I find it hard to call what both Douthat and Yglesias, as well as Huffington, Goldfarb, or InstaPundit all do as "blogging" when all of these writers work in differing types of businesses and organization, e.g. nonprofit, subscription, donation, and whatever hybrids there are. And, too, bloggers aren't supposed to be employees, or even contract employees.

(Is Matt swinging some cast metal balls to relieve stress?) Could Douthat be any wimpier on this topic? Walt and Mearsheimer didn't scream "Fire!" in a crowded room. And then, arguing that the two authors did a disservice to future attempts to criticize Israeli policy begs the question just what would a good argument be? Is Douthat arguing that editors should wait for the perfect argument before they publish another book? What is this, waiting for the Jackie Robinson of Israel books? Douthat just cannot summon the requisite semen level to criticize the book, or his bosses for its role in the fracas. He lacks the nerve to be what any YouTube'r or real blogger can do -both start a flame war and contribute to the public bank of opinion. And, when did it become impermissible - as if I care about permission? - for laypeople to say anything about religion? I'm looking forward to a Walt/Goldberg diavlog, blood, guts, semen, and all!

People resort to name-calling when they have no other arguments left. The term "anti-semitism" is used so often nowadays, that it's not even taken seriously by anyone I know. When the Serbs were forced to deal with its Muslim population in a civilized manner by the NATO alliance, it was also called a Nazi plot against the "eternal victims". I was laughing then as I am laughing now. Maybe that's because I'm "objectively anti-semitic".

Let's check in with Daniel Levy:

US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was left shame-faced after President George W. Bush ordered her to abstain in a key UN vote on the Gaza war, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said on Monday.

"She was left shamed. A resolution that she prepared and arranged, and in the end she did not vote in favour," Olmert said in a speech in the southern town of Ashkelon.

The UN Security Council passed a resolution last Thursday calling for an immediate ceasefire in the three-week-old conflict in the Gaza Strip and an Israeli withdrawal from Gaza where hundreds have been killed.

Fourteen of the council's 15 members voted in favour of the resolution, which was later rejected by both Israel and Hamas.

The United States, Israel's main ally, had initially been expected to voted in line with the other 14 but Rice later became the sole abstention.

"In the night between Thursday and Friday, when the secretary of state wanted to lead the vote on a ceasefire at the Security Council, we did not want her to vote in favour," Olmert said.

"I said 'get me President Bush on the

Palestinian death toll: 903

More than 45 percent women and children.

3,700 wounded.

13 Israelis, including 10 soldiers, have died in the operation in Gaza and from rocket strikes on southern Israel.

Source: CNN

I know how you feel! So does Cenk! How Much Power Does Israel Have Over the US?

Ross Douthat states that The Israel Lobby is about "the fraught subject of Jews in politics," thereby demonstrating his own "seriousness." The book is about those who seek to influence U.S. policy toward Israel, ie efforts to lobby in that area. Definitions don't come much more uncomplicated than that. He ought to leave off embarrassing himself.

Ross sounds completely naive in this diavlog. At one stage he says, the American establishment has decided to strongly support Israel, as if the policy-views of the "American establishment" just appear from thin air, rather than being the result - as in other issue-areas - of massive pressures and incentives, including the retaliation etc of donors and funders that Matt has the honesty to mention, and which Ross does not deny. Also, Ross seems to think that a better book by W&M would have focussed on AIPAC alone, but it's bizarre to think that jewish pressures on US policy towards Israel are derived from AIPAC alone. It's zionist activism and zionist mentalities, in and out of AIPAC, that drives US policy towards Israel and yes to large degree that impacts US policy toward the Middle East as a whole.

This was truly a meta debate, perhaps even a meta-meta debate, since at times the interlocutors seemed to be commenting on the commenting on the commenting of others... It would have been nice to hear a less involuted debate about the Walt-Mearsheimer thesis, which, after all, is clarity itself. Clarity is always suspect in the halls of power, but surely journalists can do a little better. As far as I can tell, the thesis of Walt-Mearsheimer, and its possible practical applications, has had no more influence on what passes for intelligent debate within the stagnant fishbowl of the American "foreign policy community" than the ideas of Chomsky. Which is really too bad!

Quoting Francoamerican: the Walt-Mearsheimer thesis...is clarity itself.

I can't decide what to say about that.

Quoting allbetsareoff: The front end of this discussion is a fascinating exercise. Matt disses mainstream – i.e., fact-checked, both-sides-quoted, not explicitly opinionated – journalism as “dull,” in contrast to the “interesting” (but not “smart-ass”) issue advocacy of the progressive blogosphere. Ross explains that the conservative blogosphere came into being to counter established journalism, perhaps a stealth acknowledgment that balance, not “liberal bias,” was the rightists’ real beef with the MSM.

It’s pretty clear that neither of these guys has ever done straight journalism...............”

Well said, especially telling was Matt's use of the word 'dull' for something most thinking persons would call 'vital'. IMO the more smart-a** and vitriolic the blogger, the less respect he/she has for their audience, whether it's Andrew Sullivan, Robert Farley or Ann Coulter. The problem is (speaking as someone who never reported for anything above a college newspaper but who has read multiple newspapers daily since an early age) that the reporting now (especially on political and policy issues) is much more often cleary slanted to cast one side of the issue in a good light and vice-versa. Less and less often now can you read a political/policy story in a popular daily and not come

Matt talks about prosecuting President Bush for war crimes. It's not going to happen. Sure, the soon to be President Obama has shifted his focus from the Iraq war to the disintergrating economy. Actually, he did that after winning the primary. In his debates with McCain he didn't talk much about his opposition to the war as he previously had done when running against his fellow Democrats. To top it off he retained W.'s DOD top guy, Robert Gates, a head scratcher if there ever was one considering he (Obama) was so much against the Iraq war in '07 and in early '08. John

The controversy surrounding the discussion of whether Bush will be prosecuted often seems focused on the retributive part of the equation. That is, whether Bush ought to be prosecuted, based on somebody's gut feeling over whether or not he's guilty of breaking the law. The much more important issue, I believe, is that when the Executive behaves in a way that raises the question as often and as clearly as this administration has, then the question of whether they've skirted the line ought to be formally tested. Not only to establish where the lines should be drawn, but also to make sure there's some sort of active feedback mechanism in place to provide for sanctions when the lines are crossed. Despite the smokescreen that is inevitably raised by allies of an administration about the "criminalization" of politics.

Quoting MikeDrew: The book is about those who seek to influence U.S. policy toward Israel, ie efforts to lobby in that area. Definitions don't come much more uncomplicated than that.

The book needs a lot more defenders on this point. (The term Israel Lobby is really almost self-defining.) To the point of controversy, the lobby is defined by its words and ideas, not by who's in and who's out. The authors are fairly clear about this. It's not about particular people or institutions; it's about what's said.

Quoting mvantony: I can't decide what to say about that.

But I'm sure you will....eventually. The thesis is pretty simple (I am relying on memory and I confess I just skimmed the book): 1. The American foreign policy establishment is beholden to conservative or neo-conservative Jewish organisations that do not represent the opinion of the majority of American Jews. 2. These organisations lean towards the extreme right, or hawkish, end of the Israeli political spectrum. 3. As a result, American foreign policy favors the most uncompromising policy towards the Palestinians, and contributes little to the solution (assuming there is one). 4. This is bad for the United States because the national interest of a superpower like the US cannot be identical with the national interest of Israel. 5. It is also bad for Israel because the national interest of Israel is endangered by the intransigeance of its hawks. That is all I remember. Perhaps you can fill in the details. Une clarté aveuglante, as we say in French.

"Objective," or at least nonpartisan, journalism was considered a better business model by early 20th-century newspaper owners. If you were after mass circulation, linking to a political party was a handicap, especially in urban areas, many of whose populations c. 1900-10 were still closely divided in partisan affiliation.

If you want to be taken seriously as a reasonable defender of Palestine it's probably a tactical mistake to identify yourself with Chomsky, a man who embodies what Palestinian supporters are caricatured as. I don't think defending Palestinian sovereignty is the same as defending the Khymer Rouge regime against Western 'propaganda' but if you go out of the way to blur the line you're not going to get a lot of sympathy from me.

Quoting Magic Flea: The authors are fairly clear about this. It's not about particular people or institutions; it's about what's said.

Yikes. You managed to make this book seem utterly irrelevant, then.

Quoting pampl: If you want to be taken seriously as a reasonable defender of Palestine it's probably a tactical mistake to identify yourself with Chomsky, a man who embodies what Palestinian supporters are caricatured as. I don't think defending Palestinian sovereignty is the same as defending the Khymer Rouge regime against Western 'propaganda' but if you go out of the way to blur the line you're not going to get a lot of sympathy from me.

I assume this is addressed to me. I neither identify myself with Chomsky nor accept all his views (besides, I could never match his breadth of knowledge). I merely said that his ideas have had no more influence on the stale debates within the American foreign policy community than those of Walt and Mearsheimer. PS. Anyone with an ounce of courage who comments on current events will make mistakes at times. Chomsky has certainly made one or two big mistakes, but even his mistakes have been caricatured by his opponents---in order to discredit everything he says. I think Chomsky's views on Israel and the Palestinians are worth listening to; I also think he is justified in

Quoting Francoamerican: PS. Anyone with an ounce of courage who comments on current events will make mistakes at times. Chomsky has certainly made one or two big mistakes, but even his mistakes have been caricatured by his opponents---in order to discredit everything he says. I think Chomsky's views on Israel and the Palestinians are worth listening to; I also think he is justified in saying that certain views cannot even be aired in the US media because Americans do not want to hear them, or are too ill-informed and ill-served by the media to understand them.

Well put. I agree completely.

Pretty unsatisfying discussion of Walt-Mearsheimer. I read the original article, not the book about the Israel lobby. Could a political scientist have been much more specific about the composition and workings of the alleged Israel lobby in the US than were Walt-Mearsheimer? Here is the problem. If US policy towards Israel has not been in the US interest because of its slant in favor of Israel, one has to ask why that would be the case. The Israel lobby hypothesis is the answer to that question. I’ve heard Mearsheimer say that he believes that the lobby works primarily through the domestic campaign finance system, i.e. through the large network of wealthy Jewish donors. The hypothesis is basically correct in my opinion. Whether it would be possible to provide a detailed description of how the lobby has actually worked, I don’t know. I’m sure that much or most of the pressure and lobbying is tacit. I’ve no doubt that someone could have made a more detailed and persuasive historical case than did Wald-Mearsheimer, but had someone done this I doubt that it would have made any difference to the politics of the matter, as

P.S. One has to ask oneself what US policy towards Israel would be like in the absence of monied and organized domestic US Jewish interests. Of course, one cannot know the answer to this question. Nevertheless, a refusal to attempt to perform this experiment is tantamount to a refusal to engage the question raised by Walt-Mearsheimer seriously.

Quoting ledocs: P.S. One has to ask oneself what US policy towards Israel would be like in the absence of monied and organized domestic US Jewish interests. Of course, one cannot know the answer to this question. Nevertheless, a refusal to attempt to perform this experiment is tantamount to a refusal to engage the question raised by Walt-Mearsheimer seriously.

I don't think it's all that difficult to know the answer to that question, actually. In the first place because there is no "monied" US Jewish interest. AIPAC has less than 10% of the budget the NRA has or around 1-2% of AARP's budget. Second, AIPAC wasn't influential until the 70s, when US policy radically shifted into something indistinguishable from what it was before AIPAC. Third, you can look to US history before the existence of the state of Israel itself and see how incredibly popular the idea of a Jewish state was. It was a big deal in the Great Revival, Washington and Jefferson wrote in favor of it, etc. There's a clear historical record that makes doing thought experiments pointless.

Quoting ledocs: Here is the problem. If US policy towards Israel has not been in the US interest because of its slant in favor of Israel, one has to ask why that would be the case. The Israel lobby hypothesis is the answer to that question.

I think this undersells the real pressure that American voters (as opposed to lobbyists) put on their legislators and oversells the effects of concerted lobbying. Especially in an ongoing conflict like this, where voters' attitudes may have hardened years ago. We are very obviously not always doing what's in America's best interest on many fronts. But putting our actions at the feet of a few lobbyists just seems way too reductive. Lobbyists can move legislatures, but only among the range of solutions that the public readily accepts.

Quoting ledocs: Here is the problem. If US policy towards Israel has not been in the US interest because of its slant in favor of Israel, one has to ask why that would be the case.

"National interest" is a mutable thing. During the Cold War the national interest of the US and Israel did in fact coincide: Israel was seen as an ally of the United States because it was a counterweight to the influence of the Soviet Union in the region, and also, let us not forget, because it was a voracious consumer of American weaponry (and still is). The widespread support that Israel enjoyed after the 1967 war had as much to do with the dynamics of the Cold War as with American and European admiration for the plucky little David standing up to the Arab Goliath. Of course, there was also the ever-present guilt hanging over Europeans and Americans in the wake of the Holocaust. That was then. But what is the US national interest now? Walt-Mearsheimer seem to be arguing that this once useful and profitable alliance has turned into a burden. Israel no longer represents a strategic

Why even associate AIPAC with "monied interests"? Money is the price of playing in the interest-group configuration in the US. Fixating on the "Jewish" nature of the interest group is a convenient way to ignore reforming the entire way money works in the system. There are alternative interest-group systems, where AIPAC would just be an unnamed group, not the Jewish lobby.

Congratulations on the NY Times editorial position.

An interesting take on Douthat's earlier career by Greg Atwan, Author of "Privilege" and "The Facebook Book: http://bigthink.com/blog_entries/498-A-Portrait-of-Ross-Douthat-as-a-Young-Republican

EXCERPT:
"Douthat's earlier writings for The Harvard Crimson and Salient paint him as someone whose "writer"s zeal as a culture warrior, as well as his often bizarre moral logic, should be disconcerting to readers of the Times who share a few fundamental premises more cosmopolitan than this."

Quoting StevenDuque: An interesting take on Douthat's earlier career by Greg Atwan, Author of "Privilege" and "The Facebook Book:

http://bigthink.com/blog_entries/498-A-Portrait-of-Ross-Douthat-as-a-Young-Republican

EXCERPT:
"Douthat's earlier writings for The Harvard Crimson and Salient paint him as someone whose "writer"s zeal as a culture warrior, as well as his often bizarre moral logic, should be disconcerting to readers of the Times who share a few fundamental premises more cosmopolitan than this."

I'd say two things to this. First, the idea that someone's college writings should be weighted that much when evaluating someone who has been out of college, and writing full-time, for nearly a decade, seems a bit of a stretch. I certainly do not hold every opinion I held at age 21, and I also have a considerably less black and white view of the world than I did back then. I suspect I'm more the norm than the exception in this regard. Second, even if it turns out that Douthat is a stealth culture warrior, there is still a benefit to him having that slot at the NYT: it lets the left and moderates see what that sort of thinking is all about. It is my feeling that Bill Kristol's