Some of 'em like more of a challenge.
By Greg Mitchell
Published: July 21, 2008 10:45 PM ET
Coverage of 'Netroots' Confab Draws Protest-- Snarky Article Spiked -- Editor's Note Apologizes
~snip~
When Beach, at the start referred to the crowd as "marauding liberals" I knew it was not to be taken literally. But then we got this:
-- The audience nearly staged a "faint-in" when Gore appeared (note use of '60s term).
-- Pelosi is so far left her title should include "(D-Beijing)." This would come as a surprise to many in the crowd who have criticized her timidity – and posed hostile questions in the Q & A..
-- The liberal blogosphere is "terribly self-confirming" -- not like the mainstream media! In a contradiction, he then noted that at the conference they "critiqued themselves."
-- Paul Krugman, as if to "galvanize stereotypes," wore Birkenstocks -- but Beach throughout the article clearly needed no help in having his own stereotypes galvanized.
-- It's shooting fish in a barrel "to paint liberals as overly intellectual types incapable of having fun unless reading Noam Chomsky counts, and its sure does for them." In fact, the convention was practically "party central," few attendees were "intellectuals," and only a tiny percentage, I would guess, are Chomsky lovers -- again, an outmoded stereotype.
-- Those who protested during the Pelosi/Gore "faint-in" were "shushed" as if they were at a Nanci Griffith concert. I certainly know who she is, but I can imagine most of these particular attendees reading this reference and asking, "Who???"
-- One more reference to Liberals Don't Wanna "have fun." And so on.
Well, I thought I would perform a public service and let some of the convention attendees know about all this -- few are fans of dead-tree media -- so I posted a summary on my diary at DailyKos (the popular blog that founded Netroots). The “Kossacks” as they are known could do what they wanted with it, if anything. Within a few minutes, so many people were reading and recommending my post that it shot to near the top of the DailyKos “diaries” for the day. It also got picked up at some other popular blogs.
Many commenters promised to write letters to the editor. Some of them were Austinites who claimed they knew people at the local paper and might actually work their magic on them.
Theories abounded:
--Longtime editor Rich Oppel had recently retired and who was this new leader named Fred Zipp?
--The paper had been a cheerleader for Bush for many years and only acted liberal, at times, because this, afterall, was Austin.
--Patrick Beach, who has had a long career at the paper (he is a former rock critic), allegedly had rarely written a political piece in his life and probably was assigned to the convention, with no background in this kind of thing, on a lark or in desperation.
Monday: I was back in New York and had turned the page on all this, until I got an email from Michael King, news editor at the Austin Chronicle, the long-running and successful alt-weekly. Coincidentally, the paper’s founding editor (and South-by-Southwest guru) Louis Black had given me a personal tour of the Chronicle’s rambling offices on Saturday night.
Anyway, King informed me that the comments from Beach’s article had been wiped and it was impossible to find the article on the paper’s Web site, though it might still be there somewhere. Perhaps, he mused, "some editor finally looked at the piece and yanked it out of simple embarrassment."
Later Monday, I found the link to the original article on Google – and now the story had been removed from the site completely and was "not available."
yitbos
Didn't he serve with Ted Striker during the war ?
>>— Pelosi is so far left her title should include “(D-Beijing).” <<
Thanks for adding that tidbit. The liberals here are PO’ed bigtime about that.
>>—The paper had been a cheerleader for Bush for many years and only acted liberal, at times, because this, afterall, was Austin.<<
My BS meter just pegged and broke the needle totally off the shaft.
Some of 'em like more of a challenge.