Category Archives: Special Relationships

Bloggers and Fleet Street

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Juan Cole — who is, we learned this week, the favourite blogger of both Seymour Hersh and John Simpson — looks at the role of American bloggers in ensuring that the U.S. media picked upthe Sunday Times’ reporting on the so-called Downing Street Memo:

If this story had broken in the 1970s, it probably would just have been buried by the mainstream US press and remained an oddity of UK’s Fleet Street. But here you have the Times of London actually acknowledging the wind under its sails from the blogging world!

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[Times reporter Michael] Smith not only acknowledges the pressure put on the US corporate media by the bloggers, but he also points to a virtual social movement around the DSM, with emails and petitions circulating in the hundreds of thousands and giving the Democrats in Congress their first high-profile investigatory opportunity of the Bush presidency.

The seeping of blogistan into the pages of the Times of London with regard to its own scoops seems to me a bellwether of the kinds of changes that are being produced in our information environment by the blogging phenomenon. The gatekeepers at the New York Times and the Washington Post can no longer decide whether a leak is a story or a non-story. The public decides what a story is.

Cole’s analysis is also fair to American journalists, noting that they had to be careful about running a story where they could not get hold of a copy of the original document that was the key to a politically-sensitive story leaked in the midst of an election — remember where that got Dan Rather?

Downing Street memo story gathering pace in US

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For weeks now, liberal American media activists, bloggers (and some journalists) have been perplexed about why the 2 May Sunday Times story about the 2002 Downing Street memo has not been picked up more widely by American newspapers.

But the campaign to publicise the story finally seems to be having some success. With Tony Blair in Washington, CNN, the New York Times and Houston Chronicle all ran stories about the memo on Wednesday.

CJR Daily has a good story of the story — as does Eric Boehlert at Salon.com. Think Progress effectively explains the significance of the memo in American politics.

(Via The Periscope and MoJo Blog)

Galloway provides culture shock

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The most interesting thing about George Galloway’s performance in the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations yesterday was the way it highlighted the major differences in style between Westminster and Washington.

The Guardian’s Oliver Burkeman put it like this:

The culture clash between Mr Galloway’s bruising style and the soporific gentility of senate proceedings could hardly have been more pronounced, and drew audible gasps and laughs of disbelief from the audience.

Alex Massie also noticed in a sketch for The Scotsman:

The Senate has a reputation, many would say well earned, for ponderous and windy rhetoric. Snobbery is its lifeblood; stately sobriety its state of mind. Mr Galloway’s particular type of flamboyance would be considered the worst form of vulgar showboating in the Senate. Its members are not used to being accused of committing “schoolboy howlers” or to being lectured by witnesses and condemned for running a kangaroo court.

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When it was his turn to speak, Mr Galloway drew frequent gasps of amazement from watching journalists and other interested parties, astonished at the chutzpah he was displaying. For the Americans in the audience, this was a new experience; for the Britons, it was all too familiar. Only the setting, the Dirksen Senate Office Building, was different.

Massie toned the piece down a bit for the American conservative magazine, the National Review.

But the clash of cultures has been a common theme in the American media commentary today.

Judith Miller, of all people, wrote the New York Times report on the hearing:

Galloway, accustomed to the rancorous debates of the British House of Commons, more than held his own before the committee. A flamboyant orator and a skilled debater, he attacked UN sanctions against Iraq, the program, and, above all, the American-led war to topple Saddam. The administration, he said, had based its invasion of Iraq on a “pack of lies” and was now trying to justify its actions with charges regarding the oil-for-food program and other allegations, which he called “the mother of all smoke screens.”

His aggressive posture and tone seemed to flummox Norm Coleman, of Minnesota, the first-term senator who heads the Senate panel. But after the hearing, Senator Carl Levin, of Michigan, the ranking Democrat on the Senate subcommittee, joined his Republican counterpart in describing Galloway’s dramatic testimony as good political theater, but “not credible.”

The Los Angeles Times noted that he “testified under oath and without immunity but used harsh language that shook up the typically staid hearing room”. The Washington Post was abit more understated, calling him a “formidable debater”.

The best headline award, however, goes to Gotham’s Murdoch tabloid, the New York Post, which screamed, “BRIT FRIES SENATORS IN OIL”

Update: Massie article links were added after the initial post.

Gorgeous roundup of US blogs

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Here’s a roundup of how some American blogs saw the testimony by Respect MP “Gorgeous” George Galloway before a Senate subcommittee today.

Conservative blog Little Green Footballs certainly isn’t a fan, but thinks the Progressives have a New Hero.

One certainly hopes American left has enough sense to look into Galloway’s background before embracing him uncritically. For now, they seem to be suspending judgement somewhat and enjoying the Parliamentary theatrics of an eloquent guy laying into Republicans in a way their own Democrats can’t or won’t. Thomas McKelvey Cleaver, for example, certainly enjoyed the show:

Watching “Senator” Norm Coleman, the Minnesota Moron who could only win election by the fact that Paul Wellstone was killed in an airplane crash in the middle of the campaign get ripped apart by George Galloway has to qualify as one of the nicest things to happen in Washington recently.

Sisu, liveblogging in front of Fox News’ fair and balanced coverage, found Galloway “unspeakably rude and puerile and pompous”:

His rabidly anti-Bush soundbites will be manna for the gaping media maw in the coming news cycles. Presumably that’s Galloway’s strategy, but we have a gut feeling the truth will out. We won the Revolutionary War fergossake. This shouldn’t be so hard. Coleman gives the impression of a skilled fisherman letting a barracuda on the line wear itself out thrashing before the fisherman effortlessly reels him in. Galloway will make a lovely trophy on the wall behind Norm Coleman’s desk.

James Wolcott has a somewhat different interpretation:

… Norm Coleman and the Senate committee picked on the wrong guy when they picked on George Galloway (scroll down for “This Old Brit’s”‘s take). His rebuttal so exfoliated Coleman’s short hairs that Fox News had to step in afterwards and downplay Galloway’s rousing anti-Iraq war broadside as a rhetorical gambit.

God, does Galloway make our own representatives look mushmouthed and gutless.

Whizbang’s Kevin Aylward suspects the Senators were laying some sort of perjury trap for Galloway. (Indeed, Harry’s Place already has a nomination for a lie under oath.)

And (via Glenn Reynolds), Tim Russo is unimpressed by the American media’s coverage of the testimony:

Who needs real news when you’ve got Wolf Blitzer telling you about it? Attempting to watch the oil-for-food hearing today featuring George Galloway via CNN, Fox News, and MSNBC was like watching a baseball game with the camera focused on the broadcast booth rather than the ball diamond. Every time it got good, especially during the questioning, which provided the real fireworks, they cut to some ‘commentator’ telling us how ‘firey’, ‘scathing’, etc Galloway was (especially Fox), while Galloway and Senators Coleman and Levin were actually being firey and scathing behind them. What a disgrace.

C-SPAN, apparently, was the way to go.

UK war memo finally news in US

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The minutes of a Downing Street meeting before the Iraq war published by the Sunday Times two weeks ago are finally becoming news in the United States.

Democratic congressmen lead by Rep. John Conyers, the ranking member of the House Judiciary Committee, have sent a letter to President George W. Bush asking for an explaination for the memo’s suggestion that the Iraq war had been decided before the justifications for it had been established.

The liberal media watchdog Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting had this week charged the American media with downplaying the story.

In further developments in the “special relationship” over Iraq, anti-war MP George Galloway will testify before Congress next week to clear his name of allegations that he benefited from the oil-for-food programme in exchange for his support for the former regime in Iraq.

That should be fun to watch. I’m not a fan of Galloway, but he is quite an orator, and the Congressmen will have their work cut out for them.

UK election explained for Americans

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MyDD has been one of the best American blogs in terms of its coverage of the UK election. Today they have an essential post for any American readers wishing to understand the current UL election:

One of the things I have noticed in discussing British politics in these parts is the trouble people have understading the ideological configuration of the three major parties. Suffice it to say, do not try to jam Labour, the Liberal Democrats, and the Conservatives into an American political model. Labour is not like the DLC, a kind of centrist party in between the Conservatives on the right and the Lib Dems on the left.

To understand the difference, you have to recognize that British politics (and indeed, the politics of many other “developed” nations) evolved along class lines in a way American politics never has. Broadly speaking, every major political party in American history has been, in terms of post French/industrial revolution European politics, a liberal party. In essence, both the Democrats and Republicans find their ideological centers in differing segments of the middle class (something that is especially true today, but I would argue has been generally true throughout all of American history). In Britain, by contrast, while the Liberal Democrats, and before them, the Liberals, (always) and the Conservatives since the beginning of the 20th century have both been institutionally and ideologically centered in the middle class, the Labour Party has not. It is, and in many ways still is, a party that governs for the benefit of the working class and the poor. It is concerned with improving the lot of the lives of these groups primarily, and only secondarily with the kind of post-1960s civil liberties/lifestyle/quality of life questions that have defined and still define American politics.

It’s interesting that some Americans seem to percieve of Labour, rather then the Lib Dems, as the natural centrist party. That’s quite a shift from the traditional description of British party structure.

I’m also not so sure about New Labour governing for the benefit of the working class, but the comparison to the Hartzian understanding of American parties as two factions of the 18th century liberal tradition is an important point to make.

Another historical point that might be added is that the current configuration of both left-leaning parties in Britain derives from two separate projects to shift the Labour Party to the centre — the 1980s SDP breakaway from Labour that lead to the merger with the old Liberals to form the Lib Dems and then the New Labour project of the late 1990s.

While Labour probably looks most familiar to American Democrats in terms of policy priorities, the tension between social democratic and civil libertarian ideologies that dominates the left in America is probably best seen in the Liberal Democrats — precisely because of that party’s history as a fusion of liberals and the right-wing faction of a (then) socialist party.

Also on MyDD, Jerome Armstrong notes Charles Kennedy’s “baby bounce” in the polls and Chris Bowers apologises to UK readers for saying that the Vatican conclave is “biggest election of the year”.

Update: Thanks to Nosemonkey for alerting me to my HTML screwup this morning.