Coates Bateman, media agitation - from Barrett Brown

I wanted to get in touch with you in order to gauge your interest in a project that I announced briefly in a recent Vanity Fair piece and which I'll be laying out more comprehensively soon (and about which I'll be meeting with Coates Bateman next week, as T/S is interested in getting involved in some capacity). The medium-term goal of this project is to bring much wider exposure to the failings of such inexplicably respected pundits as Thomas Friedman and to hold publications like The New York Times accountable for employing such people despite the damage done as a consequence. The long-term goal is to increase the influence of the more reasonable sectors of the blogosphere - made up of people like yourself, Glenn Greenwald, Juan Cole, Allison Kilkenny, etc. - relative to traditional outlets, which, as you know, have largely failed in their alleged purpose of keeping the public reasonably well-informed.

You wrote a piece on Thomas Friedman and his general failings a couple years back; that article prompted my publisher to ask me to write a book laying out the case against mainstream pundits in general, focusing on columnists such as Friedman, Krauthammer, and Richard Cohen. I've just finished the book, and in the meantime I've done perhaps a dozen articles for Vanity Fair, True/Slant, HuffPo, and whatnot pointing to the incredible array of failed predictions, factual errors, and contradictory assertions one finds if one goes back through the last decade or so of their columns. Many other writers, particularly bloggers, have done the same. Perhaps all of this has convinced some number of people that the nation is being led astray by such pundits, who retain their positions largely by virtue of sheer notability coupled with the fact that there is no impetus for most publishers and producers to rock the boat, but for the most part we are only reaching people who are already unusually well-informed about the failings of the media. I think it's clear that we can do more than this. The blogosphere is still in its infancy, and just as with any new enterprise, there are vast improvements that can be made to the structure as it exists now; it's simply a matter of identifying some aspect of the potential that's yet to be reached and then establishing a plan by which to reach it.

Think of all of the information that exists to the effect that Thomas Friedman, for instance, is entirely incompetent. You've pointed out, among other things, that his "law" regarding petroleum and liberty is clearly nonsense; I've pointed out, among other things, that his addiction to cute frameworks and failure to do proper research led him to advocate for Vladimir Putin and his policies up through 2004. Altogether, the body of evidence is sufficient to convince any reasonable person that Friedman does not merit his position, and that in fact his output has done some great deal of damage to the public understanding of life-and-death issues, particularly in the realm of foreign policy. But the evidence is not getting to the people who would most benefit from it; by and large, it is only reaching people who are already well-informed. It is not reaching those people who, though reasonable enough to benefit from such output, are nonetheless receiving their information almost exclusively from inferior, more traditional outlets rather than from what we could term the direct online meritocracy - the pundits who have lately risen to their level of influence by virtue of their ability and through the unprecedented means of the internet, rather than by the haphazard manner in which so many of our columnists have gotten their columns and the accountability-free method by which they have retained them despite being terrible at their jobs.

The problem is that any one of us can make any airtight case against such people at any time, even in a more mainstream outlet like Vanity Fair or Rolling Stone, without the national news apparatus as a whole being compelled to address any such case. This is even more true for our counterparts who write only for some obscure blog or some such thing but who are producing work that merits attention. Unless a given issue reaches critical mass, it may be ignored by the media at large. Conversely, if critical mass is reached, some portion of the media at large finds itself compelled to address the issue - partly because other portions of the media may choose to address it at that point, partly because of simple herd mentality. We don't need to dam any rivers here; we simply need to recognize the direction in which the river flows and then build a waterwheel accordingly.

The project I'm proposing involves two aspects. The first is an invitation-based network of commentators, particularly the sort who work in large part in online media, with the purpose of occasionally coordinating in such a way as to force some portion of the traditional media to address some failing. One or two unconnected bloggers can't force the cable networks and national papers to answer for the fact that Charles Krauthammer has been consistently and demonstrably wrong about every major U.S. foreign policy question of the last 12 years, for instance, but several of the more prominent commentators working with dozens of bloggers and thousands of their readers can indeed do so if everyone pushes at once. The second is software that's being developed by an associate of mine with this particular task in mind and which will hopefully facilitate the method by which online commentators of all sorts can obtain, evaluate, and disseminate crucial pieces of information, in contrast to the time-consuming and haphazard manner in which such things are currently done.

I've got a few people on board already; Charles Johnson and Allison Kilkenny are in, Juan Cole is considering getting involved, and about a dozen other bloggers and political activists have agreed to join up as well. I'm going to start recruiting in earnest in a few days after I make a more formal announcement of the project on True/Slant, HuffPo, and Daily Kos. I'm hoping that you might be interested in getting involved as well; I'm thinking of setting up a sort of executive committee to oversee the network until such time as the software is ready, at which point the day-to-day operations will be run as a sort of application-based constitutional democracy, and I would like to have you on that committee if possible.