By Steve Twomey
Now here’s a headline: The Daily Howler believes the media did better in 2004?
Bob Somerby, idling at a restaurant in Baltimore, not only says campaign coverage ticked upward last fall but suggests he might scale back the Howler, the Web site where he eviscerates what he unlovingly calls “your press corps.”
Should we conclude the media have reformed? His work here is done?
We should not.
Bob Somerby needs no introduction, of course, unless your days are spent solely in the brick-and-mortar world, in which case he is, well, Who is he again? “I’ve never followed this blog,” says David M. Halbfinger, a political reporter for The New York Times whom the Howler has mocked but who didn’t know it, “and am pretty sure I don’t know anyone who does.”
In the parallel dimension of cyberspace, however, Somerby is a birth father of digital media-watching, the sarcastic iconoclast whose ravings about how reporters treated Al Gore four years ago will wind up in books, or at least his book about the 2000 contest, which is nearly done. There aren’t armies of Somerby readers — the Howler hasn’t the reach of a Daily Kos or an Instapundit — but his readers have the zeal of the converted, laughing along with him at the idea that your press corps is as tough as it thinks it is, or as liberal as charged.
“Among people who are aware of how badly our media are broken; how shallow and lazy their reporting is, and how completely awash in conservative misinformation it is, I think Somerby is well known and widely read,” says David Brock, the right-wing-turned-left author who founded the Web site Media Matters for America.
When he began, back in the Clinton era, Somerby was pretty much alone in hunting journalistic malfeasance with a blog and a liberal take. Now everybody’s a critic, and although no one resembles the Howler, he doesn’t care to be a redundant voice. He frets about his tone, too, and about income. He doesn’t make any, not from the Howler. Most likely, he says, he’ll be writing shorter columns about the media. But not because there’s less to write. Your press corps wasn’t as bad last fall, ’tis true. But in Somerby’s view, it remained hapless, and worse. “I find their conduct repulsive,” he says.
Somerby, fifty-seven, is the kind of media writer made possible only by the Internet. His major at Harvard, where he had a roommate from Tennessee named Gore, was the always useful subject of philosophy. He became a public school teacher, then a comedian, but never a reporter or editor. Although the Howler often mentions its “entire staff” at “world headquarters,” it’s all just Somerby, who lives alone in a row house in the Bolton Hill neighborhood of Baltimore. Cringing at the marketing necessary to make the Howler a going concern, as some blogs are, Somerby doesn’t have ads, grants, or contributions. He survives on stand-up comedy gigs for corporations and professional organizations.
The site (dailyhowler.com) mucks in one place only: political coverage, and it’s a raging stew of incredulity and bile, exclamation points and italics, and copious quantities of transcripts and extended quotations, the product of deep dives into Lexis-Nexis and of Somerby’s mania for taping TV chat shows. It oozes contempt for the affluent echelons of journalism whose members are, at least at Howler headquarters, too eager to adopt “scripts” about candidates (Bush is dumb! Kerry’s French!), too eager to short-shrift complexity, too cowed to point out politicians’ lies and too clubby to publicize each other’s mistakes. They are not the courageous, serious guardians that democracy demands.
“He just gets so angry at them, being so irresponsible,” says a close friend, Tim Howe, a longtime Democratic campaigner and now a producer of comedy shows. Somerby, who Howe says is the smartest and most honest person he knows, feels someone must spotlight the failures. “Bob is a good citizen,” Howe says. “Isn’t that the responsibility of a good citizen?”
In the flesh and in e-mail exchanges, Somerby comes across as not angry at all, actually. Sitting at a Mexican place, he is exceedingly low-voltage, a man of ruddy face, gray beard, and less hair than his Web site photo. Mostly, he says, he is amused. A great human conceit is that “we are so smart,” he says, yet reporters seem incapable of treating problems and politics in intelligent ways. “It’s not about newspapers,” he says of The Daily Howler. “It’s about whether humans can do democracy. I find it very funny.”
Funny to him, maybe.
The Howler can be nitpicky, obsessive, naive, and so brutal that Somerby risks relegation to the ranks of cranks. Some regular targets (there are oh, so many) strongly resent being accused of conscious efforts to advance agendas or take down candidates, rather than of simple mistakes or bad judgment. Ceci Connolly, a Washington Post reporter whom Somerby saw as a leader of a cabal determined to undermine Gore’s candidacy, says she is sure he “had legitimate points and observations” about stories, but the Howler was “personal, it was nasty, it leaped to conclusions about me and my colleagues and our motivations.”
Somerby’s indictments of journalism are overly broad, too. After all, many fine reporters in Washington do revelatory, probing work. Even in the blogosphere, he is sometimes regarded as a bit much.
“I appreciate what he does,” wrote “Jim” during a discussion of blogging on The Washington Monthly’s Web site in September, “but seriously, if I read him for more than a few days in a row, I want to scream, ‘We. got. it. the first 8,000 times you wrote it, our press is deeply dysfunctional. Move on. PLEASE.’”
But Dan Kennedy, the media critic of The Boston Phoenix, says Somerby is “the best close reader in the media today,” the most adept at parsing a story for faulty logic, sloppy research, omissions, writing tricks, and the degree to which its author swallowed somebody’s spin. Kennedy, a late-comer to the Howler, says that when he finally read it regularly, “the scales were lifted from my eyes: ‘Good Lord, this guy is amazing.’”
A sample?
In what seemed a fine “gotcha” piece on February 26, 2004, The Washington Post reported that Kerry “accepted money and fundraising assistance from top executives” of companies that had shifted operations overseas, even though the candidate had been decrying such “Benedict Arnold” behavior. But in the third paragraph came amplifications that irritated the Howler. The contributions were not only from top executives, but from “employees.” And not only from people at companies that had relocated but from people at firms that “helped” companies relocate but had not done so themselves. And the total contribution from all these sources was about $140,000.
It was “plainly absurd,” Somerby wrote, to chastise Kerry for accepting contributions from employees — as opposed to top executives — because they “have nothing to do with decisions made by the firms for which they work.” He said $140,000 is “a stunningly trivial amount,” given that Kerry raised $30 million. And including people from firms that had “helped” companies move offshore but had not themselves was a “sleight of hand.”
On August 13, The New York Times reported that Vice President Dick Cheney had belittled Kerry for promising a “more sensitive” war on terrorism. The enemy had to be killed, Cheney had said, not “treated more sensitively.” The Times article, written by Jodi Wilgoren, said the Kerry camp, in reply, had accused Cheney of taking a comment out of context. The Howler howled:
Sensible readers settled back, expecting to learn what that meant. But Wilgoren never explained what the Kerry camp meant — and she never quoted what Kerry originally said! What exactly did Kerry say about the need for a ‘sensitive war’? Today, The New York Times omits his disputed comment — the troubling comment that produced this big flap.
But then, The Washington Post omits Kerry’s comment as well. Indeed, it’s almost impossible, in today’s papers, to learn what Kerry actually said. What remark was Cheney savaging? What had Kerry actually said? Slumbering, bumbling, burbling and snoring, your national ‘press corps’ forgot to tell you. They repeated all of Cheney’s attacks. But attacks against what? They don’t tell!
So Somerby told. He quoted at length from the Kerry remarks that Cheney had zinged. And the context was unmistakable: In calling for a more “sensitive war on terror,” Kerry meant only that the United States had to be more attuned to the desires of its allies, not that it had to baby terrorists.
Wilgoren’s take? Should she have included Kerry’s actual words?
“I thought that was a decent point,” she says.
Somerby often has one. It’s why he has value. But Howler shots can be cheap, too.
An example: During the campaign, the columnist Maureen Dowd of The New York Times ridiculed Kerry for allegedly telling a Wisconsin crowd, “Who among us doesn’t like NASCAR?” a phrasing that smacked of out-of-touchness. What Kerry had actually said, though, was “there isn’t one of us here who doesn’t like NASCAR,” a more everyday way to say it. The discrepancy led Somerby to write that Dowd had “invented” a “fake NASCAR quote.”
But farther into Somerby’s piece, readers learned that an investigation by the Web site Slate found Dowd hadn’t invented a thing. She had gotten the bad quote from a Times reporter who had been at the rally but incorrectly remembered what Kerry had said.
Another: In April, Wilgoren wrote about a Kerry appearance on Meet The Press in which the candidate answered three questions with “it depends.” The remarks would “provide new fodder for Republican attacks on Mr. Kerry for avoiding direct questions,” Wilgoren wrote.
Somerby blistered her for parroting Republican spin. But her story never said Kerry had dodged questions, only that the Bush campaign would say he had.
Of late, his own blitzkrieg approach sometimes troubles the author. In the beginning, he was more polite, Somerby explains, but that went nowhere with your press corps. “And increasingly, I think they just have to be yelled at,” Somerby says. But when told reporters are upset when he pins motives on their articles, Somerby replies via e-mail, “You’re raising a good point.” He shouldn’t do that, he says; he can’t read minds. “I’m tired of my all-seeing pose.”
Beyond that, Somerby seems to be running low on passion. He cared deeply about press coverage of the 2000 election because he thought it was obvious that the media applied a tougher standard to Gore than to Bush, in complete contravention of the allegation that reporters slant left.
Kerry, however, was not Gored. The media were “not making things up this time.” And at the eleventh hour last fall, Somerby wrote with astonishment that the media seemed to be chewing a substantive issue, namely, what had happened to tons of Iraqi explosives. Four years earlier, the last-minute topic was an inane one about an ancient George W. Bush arrest for DUI. Why the improvement over 2000?
“Who knows?” Somerby says. “Maybe the thought that Web cats were going to yell at them very loud helped keep it under control this time.”
Or maybe not.
Somerby cannot seem to decide whether he matters. In the blogosphere, he probably does. In October, the Howler was ranked 115 out of 15,788 Weblogs being tracked by The Truth Laid Bear, a Web site that gauges a blog’s stature by how often other sites provide links to it.
But does Somerby — or any blogger — influence newsrooms?
Scott Kraft, national editor of the Los Angeles Times, doesn’t read the Howler. “You know,” Kraft says, “there is so much noise on the Internet that I just don’t have the time to tune into everything.” He is hardly the only prominent member of the profession to confess that the Howler is not on the radar. Wilgoren says her editors at The New York Times have never mentioned Somerby or anything he wrote about her coverage.
“I don’t think he’s having a tremendous impact,” says a Somerby friend, Gene Lyons, the Arkansas political columnist, co-author of The Hunting of the President and author of Fools for Scandal. “For one thing, he never runs out of targets.”
With the start of the new year, Somerby, who says he needs to earn money, will join the lecture circuit, talking about how “liberal bias ain’t what it used to be.” He won’t kill the Howler, he says, but he will probably write shorter pieces, and he might change the tone.
Or he might change topics altogether. The sins of the media are well noted now. He has something else in mind: “No one ever discusses the public, except to say how brilliant, wise, and far-seeing they are,” Somerby says. “The press is getting beat on pretty good right now. The public still tends to get a polite pass.”
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