at least I assume MWO was a woman.

MWO was retired at least 2 years ago, IIRC. The first and - now that there’s no interest in a media critique on the left (Tim Russert is our friend? Really?!) - the best.

is still up and running and Eric Boehlert has done a damn good job.

I loved MWO. Wondered why they or she shut down.

It is stunning how Hillary, against all odds-media, right and now left, has prevailed.

But MWO was old school blogging…

[x] Any (D) in the general. [ ] ?????. [ ] Any mullah-sucking billionaire-teabagging torture-loving pus-encrusted spawn of Cthulhu, bless his (R) heart.

for MWO here.

As DCB recalls, the founder was a woman, known as Jennifer Kelly or JennyQ, but she was never publicly identified.

Dave Niewert at Orcinus had a long-running correspondence with the person/s behind MWO and he said this when MWO went out to pasture:

The answer, to put it most simply, is that real life outside the Web intruded on MWO’s online career, as it does for most of us.

Without revealing too much of what was explained to me in confidence, I think it’s safe to say that MWO’s editor became unable to post as often one might have liked to be effective. There is also a bandwidth issue, but putting out a tin cup is not on the agenda.

It’s been 4 years since MWO went dark. I agree that Media Matters has been terrific but I miss the unbridled snark of MWO. It was one of the first blogs I began reading regularly, along with GOS and MyDD.

Why The Horse? TV transcripts erroneously called the site “Media Horse Online.”

Howler.

I guess I’m returning to Shystee’s point. Back in the day to participate in the media critique was to participate in a network: A-C… n listers. Now, not so.

[x] Any (D) in the general. [ ] ?????. [ ] Any mullah-sucking billionaire-teabagging torture-loving pus-encrusted spawn of Cthulhu, bless his (R) heart.

He had it nailed for years, but, perhaps due to his writing style, many of the newer bloggers tended to not link to him.

Always annoyed me that he was given so little credit where credit was so massively due.

Note: My reading was not as wide-spread as possible, so maybe I missed some bloggers who did link. But not many did.

BTW, while we’re mourning the loss of great blogs, I so terribly miss Billmon, still, mon. Now, there was a writer! With mad crazy research skills. Those brilliant justapositions! Oh, I do so miss Billmon….

(And I do so love EDIT!)

we have edited a comment? I edited the above to correct two typos and to add my adoration of EDIT.

How long after posting may one edit? Will this disrupt the flow of the Internet Force?

Unlike great orange satan, you can edit here whenever. The big problem is that is screws up the order of the comments. Previously when they were flat it was confusing. I’m not sure what happens with reply threads turned on, it might not let you edit anymore after someone replies.. Or does it more the whole thread to newer time stamp?

how one would communicate with the erstwhile horse and beg her to leave whatever sunny, grass plush pastures she had found and return to the cultural discussion. How funny to see I was not the only one who had this on my mind.

Somerby liked “The Passion of Christ” and dissented on Joe Wilson, and consequently got less popular. Also he has no comments. Still he remains one of my favorites. You should see his comedy routine if you ever get a chance. He is COMPLETELY different on stage from The Howler. Most of his comedy has to do with a send up of marketing.

I was reading Somerby when Plamegate happened, and he was very vocal about the travesty it was. Or is it something else to do with Wilson?

Bill Clinton for First Dude!!!

OK to edit, but don’t edit the content such that the flow of discussion in the thread breaks, unless you call it out with an UPDATE, since people who have responded to your previous version could look foolish. (And I have to confess I’ve done this at least once by rewriting for style in place, with umpty million windows open and doing 8 things at once). So, be careful.

Yes, on reflection, the operating ethical principal is don’t screw up the thread. The repositioning in the thread through a time change I can do nothing about; but somebody might experiment to see if threading is maintained across time changes. I’m guessing yes.

[x] Any (D) in the general. [ ] ?????. [ ] Any mullah-sucking billionaire-teabagging torture-loving pus-encrusted spawn of Cthulhu, bless his (R) heart.

This is, again, a networking issue.

I think that Somerby was neglected for two reasons:

1. No comments, no community, no network

2. The repetitious nature of his content. The problem is, the same thing is happening over and over again, and so his content has to be repetitious, if he is to cover the story. His archives truly are incomparable. To the Duck Pits, all of them.

[x] Any (D) in the general. [ ] ?????. [ ] Any mullah-sucking billionaire-teabagging torture-loving pus-encrusted spawn of Cthulhu, bless his (R) heart.

Somerby did beat up Joe Wilson, using the running appellation “The Honest Ambassador,” and that grew out of his sense that the coverage of the “sought uranium from Africa” story had given Wilson credit for refuting the claim when — as Somerby saw it — he hadn’t. Wilson said that Iraq couldn’t have successfully acquired uranium from Niger, which, Somerby insisted, is not the same as saying that Iraq never _sought_ uranium from _someplace in Africa_. It was part of his media critique: he smacked around the media for falling for Wilson.

I like reading Daily Howler, but there are times when a little goes a long way, because he never lets go of the idea that because the media coverage — mainstream and liberal, not just conservative — determined the outcome of the 2000 election, that’s the topic that all of us should be writing about, like, always. Not to write about it isn’t just to neglect it passively, it’s to suppress it actively. That’s his shtick. It can get tedious. But when he’s on, he is amazingly on, like no one else.

With heart pounding and trembling fingers poised over my keyboard, I excitedly posted my first comment there. I kept returning to check it was still there, that it hadn’t been deleted.

It was thrilling to drop into the stream of consciousness and hear that small splash. Occasionally, some soul in the gene pool would splash back.

To me it was an evolution of the hide-bound, ruling class agora.

I wonder what’s next — magic carpets at the speed of free-broadband-for-all light?

Thanks, MWO — I still have your bookmark, as a memento of that first time.

Okay, enough reminiscing. Back to the salt mines.

But the Obama campaign has officially told donors who support Obama to not donate to independent Democratic groups during the election.

Yahoo via politico

And his campaign has largely ignored the existing network of liberal bloggers, and actively opposes their embrace of fierce partisanship.

“Obama has created a number of significant infrastructure pieces through his campaign, displacing traditional groups the way he promised he would by signaling the end of the old politics of division and partisanship,” the blogger Matt Stoller wrote recently of Obama’s “consolidation of the party,” which he called “stunning.”

LOL

**Awaits MoveOn repudiation NOT**

Remember, when MWO was active, it stood almost alone. Somerby was active, and during the 2000 election he was also posting at another online magazine thingee, name escapes me, as well as his own Howler site.

We were all disappointed when MWO ended, but the critique had propagated to other sites. Remember also, that MWO was a very sophisticated site, with more than one poster, many different features, and comment threads in which individual commentators became well known, so that it felt like a group blog.In fact, I first met that turtlenecked bloke known as Atrios at MWO, and like me, many of MWO’s readers followed him to Eschaton. In some ways, I remember those days as golden ones, even though the sterling media critique being developed was minuscule compared to the output of the SCLM, and even the output of rightwing blogs.

Those Eschaton comment threads in the early years were extraordinary. Not long by the blog’s present standards, fifty comments was not uncommon, sometimes more, but every comment was superb. It took me months to get up the courage to make a comment, I felt so intimidated by the general quality. As the readership for his blog grew, his comment threads changed, became something different - a kind of forum. On the other hand, Atrios’s own influence grew, and I have no regrets about that. He is still a hero to me, which, no doubt would embarrass him, and which embarrasses me, since I’m old enough to be his mother, (assuming I’d been a child bride, of course). But that was then, this is now.

Look, there is more media critiquing today than ever. Granted, it has endured some distressing wounds during this particular primary season, and some of the stalwarts of the media critique movement appear to have forgotten what that movement was and continues to be all about.

Even so, not only is there Media Matters, and please let’s not forget Jamison Foser who is doing yeoman work there along with David Brock, hiimself, who used to be on the other side, and Eric B; there’s also Fox Hounds, Think Progress, which just got the union-affliated Sidney Hillman Award, for best blog, in fact all the work being done at The Center for American Progress is part of the on-going media critique, and all of you should sign up for delivery to your email inbox of their daily Progress Report, which is an invaluable source for issue analysis.

The wonderful “Caro,” Carolyn Kay, of “Make Them Accountable” is still out there - and mainstream journalists have begun to pick up the critique and run with it - see many of Bill Moyers’ Now shows and his more recent “Reports” series.

The “media critique” is stronger and more resilient than ever.

Let me posit that one of the reasons that Hillary’s campaign, apart from its own incompetence, of which there have been significant examples, has had such a hard time in terms of press coverage vis a vis Obama, is that she is being haunted by tropes were fashioned in the nineties, when there was almost no press critique from the left, and liberals and Democrats were left scrambling cluelessly around the increasingly rightward tilt of the SCLM. Obama has benefited from the left press critique, in part, just by not being a Clinton.

It’s one thing to point out the emerging cracks in the blogisphere’s media critique, it’s quite another to wallow in a despair that simply doesn’t line up with what’s out there. And believe me, were MWO to come back online, it’s media criticism would be in a different mode from the old MWO. We are at a different place historically, right now.

We need to worry about sustaining and further developing that media critique, but I’m always suspicious of analysis that starts to harden into ritualized complaint. It is too easy to begin to need, for our own emotional and intellectual ecology, to believe the worst.

Not me.

UPDATE But right now I’m tracking the Hillary stuff, and it’s incredible. They really are trying to pick our President for us. And I don’t see any callouts on this in the upper reaches of the blogosphere, or am I missing something? As I keep saying, what I miss is the network, not this or that site. Then again, maybe I’m not hooked up to the right network any more.

UPDATE One person’s ritualized complaint is another’s “repeat, repeat, repeat.” Well, we know what works…

[x] Any (D) in the general. [ ] ?????. [ ] Any mullah-sucking billionaire-teabagging torture-loving pus-encrusted spawn of Cthulhu, bless his (R) heart.

The “media critique” is stronger and more resilient than ever.

Say whut now?

if you don’t understand the business side of the media, you don’t understand the media. One of the defects of Media Matters and others is that they do not consider the business side of the media, other then talk about the problem of media concentration, but not other than that. They do not examine the business model, so do not understand its weaknesses. They can envisage no remedy save legislation, means we play on the media’s ground according to their rules. Were we to examine the business model, it would be a very different story.

Make Them Accountable has looked into the Washington Post’s ownership of Kaplan and its support of NCLB, but assumes this is a profitable relationship. A close reading of WP SEC filings reveals otherwise.

So this is why I blog about the NDS Echostar case, because it really does have to potential to bring down News Corp the same way the stockholders lawsuit brought down Conrad Black.

But really, it was not so long ago that we were just a bunch of pseudononymous citizens banging on our keyboards in obscurity. There was a time when 1,000 hits was sky high. It really is better now.

And long live Atrios, still setting an example for blogosphere.

even just as likely to be found in the MSM itself, which is meaningless—we see media critique everywhere—from Digby to Greenwald to Kos to everyblog, and also in Politico and even Time and WaPo and NYT themselves—But does any of it make any difference at all? Going by this campaign cycle, it’s making even less difference.

i miss MWO, and Media Matters and Howler and others that are exclusively media-focused really don’t have impact, i don’t think.

… I would say that Media Critique 1.0, if I may so call it, focused on the reporters and the pundit heads. Perhaps MC 2.0 needs to focus more on managers (editors) and owners. Not sure how to go about that…

[x] Any (D) in the general. [ ] ?????. [ ] Any mullah-sucking billionaire-teabagging torture-loving pus-encrusted spawn of Cthulhu, bless his (R) heart.

all very much covered, i think—also with no effect i can see.

And the FCC has been neutered entirely, and not just by the GOP.

Yes, his style can be annoying, and he is repetitious, but reading the Howler will help you learn to spot media bullshit even when you don’t yet have facts to dispute it with. There is a tremendous amout of bullshit getting fed to us everyday, and sometimes we only realize it when it conflicts with information we already possess.

As for comments at the Howler, I’m sure Lambert knows how much time that can eat up for a site monitor/administrator. And if they are unmoderated, the trolls breed like bacteria. Look at the struggles Digby has had with comment threads.

————————————————————————————
“We must separate loyal party members from counter-revolutionaries. The first shall inherit our glorious future. The second must be purged from us and history” -Mao Zedong

the blogs that could do this are Calculated Risk, etc, but they are busy with the credit crash. really WKJMM needs to hire a business reporter, or maybe Media Matters needs to hire a busienss reporter, or just make an agreement with the Australian Financial Review to syndicate Neil Chenoweth’s material.

he wrote about his exhaustion, that keeping the comment threads up to par was part of what took up so much time. I was amazed, that on top of the time he put into research and writing, he also did that to keep up his site!

Wow.

I had not realized how much work was entailed in running a blog, keeping it readable and, how to sya this, inhabitable. Some really ugly comments get put out on those intertubes.

This is by way of a t/u to all who manage the Might Corrente Building. I remember when there use to be a lights out time!

“The “media critique” is stronger and more resilient than ever.

Let me posit that one of the reasons that Hillary’s campaign, apart from its own incompetence, of which there have been significant examples, has had such a hard time in terms of press coverage vis a vis Obama, is that she is being haunted by tropes were fashioned in the nineties, when there was almost no press critique from the left, and liberals and Democrats were left scrambling cluelessly around the increasingly rightward tilt of the SCLM. Obama has benefited from the left press critique, in part, just by not being a Clinton.”

It’s one thing for the media critique to struggle uphill in fighting SCLM’s tested anti-Clinton smears; it’s another thing for those sources of critique to ignore those smears altogether, or find fun in repeating those smears as if they were proven true.

Shakesville wouldn’t need a list of the misogynist slurs against Clinton that have been published by the MSM as well as the left blogosphere; Clinton supporters wouldn’t be attacked wholesale as racists for voting for her. Black people such as Tavis Smiley would not be let go from their jobs due to continued harassment by listeners because he dared criticize Obama for not attending an AA summit, and Tom Joyner wouldn’t face the same criticism for daring to ask his audience whether an Obama/Clinton ticket was a bad idea. (Joyner had to denounce his own column. No, I am not kidding.)

If this were 2002, and the MSM didn’t have a clue of what political blogs could do to shape the media critique, then I could believe as you do that not much has been tampered with. But now, with the leaders of the left blogosphere not only endorsing a candidate but also blunting their criticism of him months before the national convention, without getting a damn campaign promise out of anyone, and aiding in the development of a parallel communications and funding system that will make any netroots system we’d consider our own to be superfluous, I’d say our power to set any record straight about present or future administrations’ crimes to be blunted, yes.

And they’ll say we’re wrong, because we were too partisan, uncontrolled, and unpredictable. In short, we’ll be back at the beginning, but with a lot of time, money and friendships wasted.

is basically me, jawbone. But running a “hate-fest” gives me the energy to get up and do what needs to be done…..

[x] Any (D) in the general. [ ] ?????. [ ] Any mullah-sucking billionaire-teabagging torture-loving pus-encrusted spawn of Cthulhu, bless his (R) heart.

As I suspected with threads turned on, you lose the ability to edit comments AFTER someone replies. This would break the thread with the way it updates the Submitted date upon edit.

I believe you will have much more admin work now when someone forgets to close a tag (Or people have to reply to thread with broken tag and put extra </I>