I think he might be wrong in his characterization of TAPPED, but at his own blog he's included a description of Matt Welch's treatment by TAP, and I'm less sure than I was.
I'm not trying to defend TAP. In this case, Nyhan used his position at a liberal magazine to write idiotic slams on liberals, and is acting like being asked to stop means the death of intelligent debate. Wanker!
Um, yes. TAP has a fer-chrissake editorial position. It's an opinion magazine. A minor facet of that editorial position is that Sean Penn quoting Huey Long on how fascism might come to America is not particularly deplorable.
If Nyhan wants to deplore it, he can go buy his own electrons.
I dunno. The Welch story sounds a bit fishier to me, but Nyhan's suggestion that he had only made "a minor factual error" in his initial post is self serving bullshit of the stinkiest kind. It was a pretty dumb attack in the first place - but usually when you attack person x for saying y it's considered sound journalistic practice to make sure that x said y in the first place. By, say, reading the name tag attached to the fucking post.
I dunno. I think TAP comes off worse than he does. He's persnickety, and believes in formal analysis that ends up obscuring a lot of what's going on. But TAP handled it badly. Frankly, TAP should have just let him continue; I think it was a short term deal, in any case.
I have seldom seen liberals criticizing conservatives for small misstatements. The main criticisms seem to be for things like starting a war based on lies, committing crimes against humanity, being thoroughly corrupt, and increasing the national debt exponentially.
Wait, to be fair -- the increase in the national debt probably wasn't literally exponential. So I mean, I have faults, too, and we should talk about them.
From Nyhan's lede: Not that long ago, many people thought the Internet would break down partisan boundaries and improve the quality of political debate in this country
Leaving aside your other usual reading comprehension issues, I didn't write the post.
God you're an idiot Brendan.
Ironically, in a comment attacking my "reading comprehension issues," Atrios falsely suggests that I said he wrote the post, when I actually wrote that he "quotes approvingly" from it (which he did).
Nyhan didn't see his "minor factual error" of misattributing the post even after it was pointed out to him. More to the point, and ignoring Nyhan's apparent pathological desire to point out false equivalencies and his awful posts over at Sargent's usually excellent blog, I call bullshit on his claim that Atrios et al are even responsible for the downturn in TNR's subscriptions; Marty Peretz's editorial stance of relentless dove-bashing and support for a disastrous war did that without anyone else's help.
Of course TAP has an editorial position, but he wasn't wildly off the reservation, he wasn't any different than he has always been, and he was (I think) a short term hire. In that case, the wiser course would have been to mention their concerns to him and let it go at that. You have to give your writers some leeway in their opinions, if only to keep a magazine interesting. I might feel differently if he were a long-term hire, but I think he was just filling in for Greg Sargent.
If TNR's subscriber base were to shrink as a result of these attacks, the viability of the magazine could be threatened.
Cry me a river. If TNR's viability is threatened, it won't be because of partisan blogs. It will be because the magazine dove headfirst into the river Suck. The only person who would be disserved by Peretz's idiotic warmongering losing its outlet is Marty Peretz.
Surprise! I have a history with Wanker Nyhan, and not in a good way. I posted this at Time, but Nyhan has to approve it:
"The Prospect has always opposed a 'pox on both houses' posture, and that's what we came to believe you were doing."
That's the only thing that Nyhan has ever done, and the Prospect was a fool to hire him (as he admits).
Nyhan's real problem was that readers hated him. He's been flogging his "too-much-partisanship" snake oil for years now, and a lot of people aren't buying it. In the age of Bush, DeLay and Rove, it just sound childish and clueless to say that Democrats are too partisan.
"[The magazines]have no incentive to incur the wrath of the liberal heavyweights whom they depend on for traffic."
Nyhan has no incentive to keep working for a low-paying rag like TAP when he can do a Wonkette and suck himself up into the big Time.
12: A post consisting of 'Oh, look at mean old Sean Penn mentioning fascism as if it might have some connection to current politics. Bad, naughty liberals, be kinder'? Look, it's not the biggest deal in the world, but it's not in keeping with TAP's positions. And the Atrios thing was just sloppy as hell.
14: Ding! This is a problem with Nyhan dating back to his Spinsanity days, and it's hardly surprising that he seems to have a soft spot for TNR. Maybe he can get a job at Slate, where the editorial stance is "no contrarianism is stupid contrarianism".
For such an anti-spin warrior, he sure does go out of his way to obscure the nature of his mistakes and twist the motives of his opponents. For that I dub him wanker.
I am thoroughly confused. What's the story here? He wrote an article his editors didn't like and they told him they didn't like it and now he's whimpering that they didn't like it and that it's the downfall of the country because....... well, it doesn't look like he was fired. I
I'm sorry. Who the hell is this guy, and should I care?
You know what I think would be funny? A comedy skit about some Nigerian who gets suckered into running a franchised Nigerian spam scam, and wastes a lot of his money and time trying to make it work, but no one ever bites, so he goes bankrupt.
But just to make you happy, in the end he'll win the lottery with his last dollar and take his daughter (the one with leukemia) to Disneyland, and she'll go into remission.
I heard that the people making money on Nigerian scams are the ones who sell the e-mail lists to the people trying to pull the scams off. The scammers are mostly getting burnt.
Though I could have sworn there was an article a while back about someone who did that and wound up involved with some pretty dodgy real-life Nigerians.
28: I read something about that a while ago; I think the writer actually got the scammer to send him money, in order to set up the account for the transfer or something.
I wonder whether Nyhan set the Prospect up with a cagy interview. His first two articles were really crap, and he's quite capable of doing good stuff. Maybe he was hoping to raise his profile and then cash in on the counter-intuitive-liberal / bipartisan / non-partisan scam.
for me the killer was the last line about liberal bloggers who always rail at capitalism.
The best indication that someone is fundamentally an old-fashioned right-winger is their persistent illusion that they are still battling old-fashioned left-wingers.
I mean--Josh Marshall? Black? Yglesias? Hilzoy? Katherine? These people rail against capitalism?
He might as well have claimed that liberal bloggers are all SDS members.
I posted the bit below to the Time Blog, but like K Emerson I don't expect to see it any time soon...
In spite of a link from Unfogged, no comments have yet appeared here. Perhaps because they "will not appear on this weblog until the author has approved them", and everyone thinks you're a wanker.
My considered opinion of Nyhan has been posted at my site. It's always a good idea to wait 24 hours before expressing yourself on something controversial, because that way you don't say anything that you'll regret.
That dig about 'capitalism' at the end is especially bizarre. After he gets done whining that he was asked by a commercial publication to write things that the subscribers enjoy instead of things they hate, he ends with a dig at liberals for not understanding market forces? Really?
Also, he bitches about Atrios commenters as if they were the only ones who were complaining about his crappy work. You can compare the timestamps on Atrios links to the timestamps on the comments to see that his links increased the frequency but certainly didn't introduce the theme of Nyhan being a wanker.
ObPrediction: we'll see him working for McCain within a year.
After he gets done whining that he was asked by a commercial publication to write things that the subscribers enjoy instead of things they hate, he ends with a dig at liberals for not understanding market forces?
This is why I was totally bewildered. Even if Nyhan were totally correct and providing careful analysis ('but Ann Coulter is very intelligent!'), unless something very weird is going on at TAP, it's not unheard of for an editor to offer criticism and direction. In fact, it might even be the job of an editor! It seems they offered the criticism privately, and he had to mount the barricade, wave his little flag, and expire.
So he didn't even get fired. I just know this is the sort of guy who pickets freshman dorms for grad student rights with his gourmet coffee in hand, priding himself on his proletarian cred, yo.
I'm not sure I'd ever read the guy before he started posting at TAP. Then I saw the one where he complained about comparisons between current events/politicians and Nazism/Hitler, providing "balance" by matching examples from leading administration figure and various flaks with . . . Sean Penn! The latter speaking for all liberals, of course. "Wanker" was pretty much the thought that crossed my mind at the time.
The defense that TAP should have known what they were getting has an unfortunate grain of truth--one wishes they had thought about it more before hiring such a wanker--but ultimately doesn't hold up. They presumably liked some of the stuff he had done and figured that he'd be willing to work with them--that the crappy "pox on both houses" stuff he may have done in the past was not all he could do.
47: More and more I think that Nyhan set up TAP in order to get visibility. He hopped right to Time (courtesy Wonkette) with his whine.
To the traditional "big media liberal" (Alan Colmes, Richard Cohen) is being added the "big media blogger". When Time decided they needed a representative of the blog demographic, they unerringly chose Cox. Why? Because I think that could tell that she would be willing to play. Nyhan's working that angle: he'll play with Time, but not with TAP, and I could see that coming a year or two ago (just as I could with Cox).
Going a little further: by now, in any social group of young liberals or young Democrats of the journalistic type there will be a few who figure out that 1.) being too liberal or too Democratic is a serious career disability and 2.) there's a niche for someone who's willing to play ball with the media while purporting to represent liberals and Democrats. "Being willing to play ball" = "being a team player" = "Mafia loyalty" = "knowing who to blow" = "getting real" = "getting with the program" = "knowing what you can say".
I've watched two whole generations play this game by now, going on three.
JL, check out the spinsanity archives. It's all he can do [claim retracted below]. I'm going to randomly check out a week from the first year of the archives...
Oh foo. Two posts from Nyhan that week, and neither go after liberals. OTOH, the other posts do, including an amazingly wankerrific one from Bryan Keefer complaining about how Daschle used rhetoric to address Bush's fiscal irresponsibility, boo hoo wah.
OK, looking at the next couple of weeks, I wronged Nyhan. Apparently he was once capable of going three weeks without a silly attack on liberals. Maybe when he severed the association with Keefer he felt it necessary to incorporate his wankery.
49: I was so disappointed in Spinsanity. It seemed like such a good idea when I heard about it, and all it was was one false equivalence after another.
I remember Nyhan on Spinsanity playing the equivalence game and making rather silly accusations against Democrats and liberals. It was especially stupid because he was doing this at a time when the Democrats were cowed and incredibly timid, and the Republicans were vicious and running completely wild. The Republicans haven't gotten any better, but the Democrats have slightly improved.
One thing he did (and still does) was balance major Republicans with minor liberals. A little anthology of Tom Delay's worst statements (or Limbaugh's, or Pat Robertson's, or Dobson's, or Gingrich's, or Norquist's) would be almost as bad as an Ann Coulter anthology, and there's no one important on the Democratic side who's equally bad. (The example given is always Sharpton, who doesn't hold any office and is just a middle-level power broker -- not Speaker of the House or Majority Leader).
I remember being outraged with Spinsanity's distortions during my phase when I was a dedicated Naderite who believed there wasn't a dime's worth of difference between the parties. So I don't think it's just my latent partisan demagoguery that makes Nyhan look like a wanker to me.
Nice try Emerson, but even your tendentious misreading of my comment cannot possibly support the interpretation that I have only two friends! It could be which one of a thousand! That said, I have only two friends.
I was imagining some softer, more muscular, gripping devices. I can think of a couple. But it would require some coordination on the part of the catcher.
(JFTR -- all claims for anything to be "the greatest thing evar" or similar superlative praises are a priori false; "Bulbous Bouffant" holds that distinction in perpetuity.)
What a joke. Nyhan believes that in his article he was "as clear as [he] could possibly be" that he was fired. And he extensively quotes Andrew Sullivan who clearly is under the impression that Nyhan was fired.
I'm beginning to think Nyhan is fully aware that he's distorting and obfuscating the facts just as much as any politician or actor. He just doesn't care.
I think he might be wrong in his characterization of TAPPED, but at his own blog he's included a description of Matt Welch's treatment by TAP, and I'm less sure than I was.
Posted by SomeCallMeTim | Link to this comment | 09-20-06 8:27 PM
He certainly thinks rather highly of himself. Deigning to mingle with the partisan masses, and so on.
Posted by Matt F | Link to this comment | 09-20-06 8:42 PM
I'm not trying to defend TAP. In this case, Nyhan used his position at a liberal magazine to write idiotic slams on liberals, and is acting like being asked to stop means the death of intelligent debate. Wanker!
Posted by ogged | Link to this comment | 09-20-06 8:43 PM
Um, yes. TAP has a fer-chrissake editorial position. It's an opinion magazine. A minor facet of that editorial position is that Sean Penn quoting Huey Long on how fascism might come to America is not particularly deplorable.
If Nyhan wants to deplore it, he can go buy his own electrons.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 09-20-06 8:46 PM
I dunno. The Welch story sounds a bit fishier to me, but Nyhan's suggestion that he had only made "a minor factual error" in his initial post is self serving bullshit of the stinkiest kind. It was a pretty dumb attack in the first place - but usually when you attack person x for saying y it's considered sound journalistic practice to make sure that x said y in the first place. By, say, reading the name tag attached to the fucking post.
Posted by Henry | Link to this comment | 09-20-06 8:47 PM
(should have made clear that I'm responding to 1.
Posted by Henry | Link to this comment | 09-20-06 8:48 PM
I dunno. I think TAP comes off worse than he does. He's persnickety, and believes in formal analysis that ends up obscuring a lot of what's going on. But TAP handled it badly. Frankly, TAP should have just let him continue; I think it was a short term deal, in any case.
Posted by SomeCallMeTim | Link to this comment | 09-20-06 8:48 PM
I have seldom seen liberals criticizing conservatives for small misstatements. The main criticisms seem to be for things like starting a war based on lies, committing crimes against humanity, being thoroughly corrupt, and increasing the national debt exponentially.
Wait, to be fair -- the increase in the national debt probably wasn't literally exponential. So I mean, I have faults, too, and we should talk about them.
Posted by Adam Kotsko | Link to this comment | 09-20-06 8:51 PM
From Nyhan's lede: Not that long ago, many people thought the Internet would break down partisan boundaries and improve the quality of political debate in this country
Did they really? News to me.
Posted by Jesus McQueen | Link to this comment | 09-20-06 8:52 PM
Update: In a comment on this post, Atrios writes:
Leaving aside your other usual reading comprehension issues, I didn't write the post.
God you're an idiot Brendan.
Ironically, in a comment attacking my "reading comprehension issues," Atrios falsely suggests that I said he wrote the post, when I actually wrote that he "quotes approvingly" from it (which he did).
Nyhan didn't see his "minor factual error" of misattributing the post even after it was pointed out to him. More to the point, and ignoring Nyhan's apparent pathological desire to point out false equivalencies and his awful posts over at Sargent's usually excellent blog, I call bullshit on his claim that Atrios et al are even responsible for the downturn in TNR's subscriptions; Marty Peretz's editorial stance of relentless dove-bashing and support for a disastrous war did that without anyone else's help.
Posted by Steve | Link to this comment | 09-20-06 8:58 PM
Fargle. Up through "Nyhan" should be italicized.
Posted by Steve | Link to this comment | 09-20-06 8:59 PM
Of course TAP has an editorial position, but he wasn't wildly off the reservation, he wasn't any different than he has always been, and he was (I think) a short term hire. In that case, the wiser course would have been to mention their concerns to him and let it go at that. You have to give your writers some leeway in their opinions, if only to keep a magazine interesting. I might feel differently if he were a long-term hire, but I think he was just filling in for Greg Sargent.
It just strikes me that they handled it badly.
Posted by SomeCallMeTim | Link to this comment | 09-20-06 8:59 PM
If TNR's subscriber base were to shrink as a result of these attacks, the viability of the magazine could be threatened.
Cry me a river. If TNR's viability is threatened, it won't be because of partisan blogs. It will be because the magazine dove headfirst into the river Suck. The only person who would be disserved by Peretz's idiotic warmongering losing its outlet is Marty Peretz.
Posted by apostropher | Link to this comment | 09-20-06 9:00 PM
Surprise! I have a history with Wanker Nyhan, and not in a good way. I posted this at Time, but Nyhan has to approve it:
"The Prospect has always opposed a 'pox on both houses' posture, and that's what we came to believe you were doing."
That's the only thing that Nyhan has ever done, and the Prospect was a fool to hire him (as he admits).
Nyhan's real problem was that readers hated him. He's been flogging his "too-much-partisanship" snake oil for years now, and a lot of people aren't buying it. In the age of Bush, DeLay and Rove, it just sound childish and clueless to say that Democrats are too partisan.
"[The magazines]have no incentive to incur the wrath of the liberal heavyweights whom they depend on for traffic."
Nyhan has no incentive to keep working for a low-paying rag like TAP when he can do a Wonkette and suck himself up into the big Time.
Posted by John Emerson | Link to this comment | 09-20-06 9:01 PM
Pwned by Steve.
Posted by apostropher | Link to this comment | 09-20-06 9:01 PM
12: A post consisting of 'Oh, look at mean old Sean Penn mentioning fascism as if it might have some connection to current politics. Bad, naughty liberals, be kinder'? Look, it's not the biggest deal in the world, but it's not in keeping with TAP's positions. And the Atrios thing was just sloppy as hell.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 09-20-06 9:03 PM
My first Unfogged pwnage! Today I am truly a man.
14: Ding! This is a problem with Nyhan dating back to his Spinsanity days, and it's hardly surprising that he seems to have a soft spot for TNR. Maybe he can get a job at Slate, where the editorial stance is "no contrarianism is stupid contrarianism".
Posted by Steve | Link to this comment | 09-20-06 9:04 PM
To reiterate, hiring Nyhan was the mistake. He's been playing that game forever.
His photo is creepy too. Reminds me of Gannon Guckert's, except cropped.
Posted by John Emerson | Link to this comment | 09-20-06 9:06 PM
You are all communists who hate America. Except for Apostropher. And ogged, who is a heathen.
Posted by SomeCallMeTim | Link to this comment | 09-20-06 9:08 PM
Newsflash: if you read to the bottom, Nyhan is a Wonkette protege.
When I mentioned Wonkette in my post I had no idea that there was any actual relationship.
Posted by John Emerson | Link to this comment | 09-20-06 9:15 PM
For such an anti-spin warrior, he sure does go out of his way to obscure the nature of his mistakes and twist the motives of his opponents. For that I dub him wanker.
Posted by neil | Link to this comment | 09-20-06 9:17 PM
I am thoroughly confused. What's the story here? He wrote an article his editors didn't like and they told him they didn't like it and now he's whimpering that they didn't like it and that it's the downfall of the country because....... well, it doesn't look like he was fired. I
I'm sorry. Who the hell is this guy, and should I care?
Posted by Cala | Link to this comment | 09-20-06 9:33 PM
You know what I think would be funny? A comedy skit about some Nigerian who gets suckered into running a franchised Nigerian spam scam, and wastes a lot of his money and time trying to make it work, but no one ever bites, so he goes bankrupt.
I suppose it's already been done.
Posted by John Emerson | Link to this comment | 09-20-06 10:01 PM
How is it funny to see someone trying to make a go of it and failing? I bet it warms your heart to see "Going Out of Business" signs.
Posted by ben wolfson | Link to this comment | 09-20-06 10:07 PM
I'm a Communist and I hate entrepreneurs.
But just to make you happy, in the end he'll win the lottery with his last dollar and take his daughter (the one with leukemia) to Disneyland, and she'll go into remission.
We oughta write more scripts together.
Posted by John Emerson | Link to this comment | 09-20-06 10:11 PM
I heard that the people making money on Nigerian scams are the ones who sell the e-mail lists to the people trying to pull the scams off. The scammers are mostly getting burnt.
Posted by Matt Weiner | Link to this comment | 09-20-06 10:14 PM
I once wrote back to a scammer, offering my services, but never heard back.
Posted by ogged | Link to this comment | 09-20-06 10:17 PM
Though I could have sworn there was an article a while back about someone who did that and wound up involved with some pretty dodgy real-life Nigerians.
Posted by ogged | Link to this comment | 09-20-06 10:19 PM
So I just went to brendan-nyhan.com and it was a bunch of ads for Ann Coulter thingies, and an Al Franken ringtone. I guess the www matters?
Posted by Matt Weiner | Link to this comment | 09-20-06 10:23 PM
I sort of suspected it was a franchise.
Posted by John Emerson | Link to this comment | 09-20-06 10:26 PM
I guess the www matters?
Matters? It's changed history.
Posted by standpipe b | Link to this comment | 09-20-06 10:27 PM
28: I read something about that a while ago; I think the writer actually got the scammer to send him money, in order to set up the account for the transfer or something.
Posted by Matt F | Link to this comment | 09-20-06 10:28 PM
Fuck. Schmitt just weighed in on ogged's side. I'm changing my vote. Ogged is beloved of God.
Posted by SomeCallMeTim | Link to this comment | 09-20-06 10:34 PM
I wonder whether Nyhan set the Prospect up with a cagy interview. His first two articles were really crap, and he's quite capable of doing good stuff. Maybe he was hoping to raise his profile and then cash in on the counter-intuitive-liberal / bipartisan / non-partisan scam.
Posted by John Emerson | Link to this comment | 09-20-06 10:37 PM
Schmitt just weighed in
Link?
Posted by ogged | Link to this comment | 09-20-06 10:57 PM
In comments at Nyhan's place. And Simmons' just Wire-blogged again, with a nice riff on why we want to watch Gridiron Gang and not The Wire.
Posted by SomeCallMeTim | Link to this comment | 09-20-06 11:04 PM
Could someone wheel out the fainting couch for Mr. Nyhan? Fainting couch for Mr. Nyhan, please. Thank you.
Posted by joeo | Link to this comment | 09-21-06 1:17 AM
for me the killer was the last line about liberal bloggers who always rail at capitalism.
The best indication that someone is fundamentally an old-fashioned right-winger is their persistent illusion that they are still battling old-fashioned left-wingers.
I mean--Josh Marshall? Black? Yglesias? Hilzoy? Katherine? These people rail against capitalism?
He might as well have claimed that liberal bloggers are all SDS members.
Posted by kid bitzer | Link to this comment | 09-21-06 6:20 AM
I posted the bit below to the Time Blog, but like K Emerson I don't expect to see it any time soon...
In spite of a link from Unfogged, no comments have yet appeared here. Perhaps because they "will not appear on this weblog until the author has approved them", and everyone thinks you're a wanker.
Posted by dave heasman | Link to this comment | 09-21-06 6:24 AM
No comments by anyone are visible at Time at this point.
Posted by John Emerson | Link to this comment | 09-21-06 6:36 AM
My considered opinion of Nyhan has been posted at my site. It's always a good idea to wait 24 hours before expressing yourself on something controversial, because that way you don't say anything that you'll regret.
Posted by John Emerson | Link to this comment | 09-21-06 6:55 AM
Not my Idiocentrism site. Go to my link here.
Posted by John Emerson | Link to this comment | 09-21-06 6:55 AM
That dig about 'capitalism' at the end is especially bizarre. After he gets done whining that he was asked by a commercial publication to write things that the subscribers enjoy instead of things they hate, he ends with a dig at liberals for not understanding market forces? Really?
Posted by neil | Link to this comment | 09-21-06 7:03 AM
Also, he bitches about Atrios commenters as if they were the only ones who were complaining about his crappy work. You can compare the timestamps on Atrios links to the timestamps on the comments to see that his links increased the frequency but certainly didn't introduce the theme of Nyhan being a wanker.
ObPrediction: we'll see him working for McCain within a year.
Posted by neil | Link to this comment | 09-21-06 7:06 AM
After he gets done whining that he was asked by a commercial publication to write things that the subscribers enjoy instead of things they hate, he ends with a dig at liberals for not understanding market forces?
This is why I was totally bewildered. Even if Nyhan were totally correct and providing careful analysis ('but Ann Coulter is very intelligent!'), unless something very weird is going on at TAP, it's not unheard of for an editor to offer criticism and direction. In fact, it might even be the job of an editor! It seems they offered the criticism privately, and he had to mount the barricade, wave his little flag, and expire.
So he didn't even get fired. I just know this is the sort of guy who pickets freshman dorms for grad student rights with his gourmet coffee in hand, priding himself on his proletarian cred, yo.
Posted by Cala | Link to this comment | 09-21-06 7:26 AM
You're all wrong. Brendan Nyhan is brilliant and wonderful.
Posted by Sprezzatura | Link to this comment | 09-21-06 8:07 AM
I'm not sure I'd ever read the guy before he started posting at TAP. Then I saw the one where he complained about comparisons between current events/politicians and Nazism/Hitler, providing "balance" by matching examples from leading administration figure and various flaks with . . . Sean Penn! The latter speaking for all liberals, of course. "Wanker" was pretty much the thought that crossed my mind at the time.
The defense that TAP should have known what they were getting has an unfortunate grain of truth--one wishes they had thought about it more before hiring such a wanker--but ultimately doesn't hold up. They presumably liked some of the stuff he had done and figured that he'd be willing to work with them--that the crappy "pox on both houses" stuff he may have done in the past was not all he could do.
Posted by JL | Link to this comment | 09-21-06 8:28 AM
47: More and more I think that Nyhan set up TAP in order to get visibility. He hopped right to Time (courtesy Wonkette) with his whine.
To the traditional "big media liberal" (Alan Colmes, Richard Cohen) is being added the "big media blogger". When Time decided they needed a representative of the blog demographic, they unerringly chose Cox. Why? Because I think that could tell that she would be willing to play. Nyhan's working that angle: he'll play with Time, but not with TAP, and I could see that coming a year or two ago (just as I could with Cox).
Going a little further: by now, in any social group of young liberals or young Democrats of the journalistic type there will be a few who figure out that 1.) being too liberal or too Democratic is a serious career disability and 2.) there's a niche for someone who's willing to play ball with the media while purporting to represent liberals and Democrats. "Being willing to play ball" = "being a team player" = "Mafia loyalty" = "knowing who to blow" = "getting real" = "getting with the program" = "knowing what you can say".
I've watched two whole generations play this game by now, going on three.
Posted by John Emerson | Link to this comment | 09-21-06 8:43 AM
JL, check out the spinsanity archives. It's all he can do [claim retracted below]. I'm going to randomly check out a week from the first year of the archives...
Oh foo. Two posts from Nyhan that week, and neither go after liberals. OTOH, the other posts do, including an amazingly wankerrific one from Bryan Keefer complaining about how Daschle used rhetoric to address Bush's fiscal irresponsibility, boo hoo wah.
OK, looking at the next couple of weeks, I wronged Nyhan. Apparently he was once capable of going three weeks without a silly attack on liberals. Maybe when he severed the association with Keefer he felt it necessary to incorporate his wankery.
Posted by Matt Weiner | Link to this comment | 09-21-06 8:44 AM
Prediction: magazines like Time and Newsweek will all be in the crapper within twenty years. Or they won't be, and I'll be sad.
Posted by text | Link to this comment | 09-21-06 8:48 AM
49: I was so disappointed in Spinsanity. It seemed like such a good idea when I heard about it, and all it was was one false equivalence after another.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 09-21-06 8:54 AM
I remember Nyhan on Spinsanity playing the equivalence game and making rather silly accusations against Democrats and liberals. It was especially stupid because he was doing this at a time when the Democrats were cowed and incredibly timid, and the Republicans were vicious and running completely wild. The Republicans haven't gotten any better, but the Democrats have slightly improved.
One thing he did (and still does) was balance major Republicans with minor liberals. A little anthology of Tom Delay's worst statements (or Limbaugh's, or Pat Robertson's, or Dobson's, or Gingrich's, or Norquist's) would be almost as bad as an Ann Coulter anthology, and there's no one important on the Democratic side who's equally bad. (The example given is always Sharpton, who doesn't hold any office and is just a middle-level power broker -- not Speaker of the House or Majority Leader).
Posted by John Emerson | Link to this comment | 09-21-06 8:57 AM
I remember being outraged with Spinsanity's distortions during my phase when I was a dedicated Naderite who believed there wasn't a dime's worth of difference between the parties. So I don't think it's just my latent partisan demagoguery that makes Nyhan look like a wanker to me.
Posted by neil | Link to this comment | 09-21-06 9:01 AM
One of the Spinsanity authors gave mono to a friend of mine, but I can't remember which one.
Posted by Tia | Link to this comment | 09-21-06 9:04 AM
You have two friends?
Posted by John Emerson | Link to this comment | 09-21-06 9:04 AM
Nice try Emerson, but even your tendentious misreading of my comment cannot possibly support the interpretation that I have only two friends! It could be which one of a thousand! That said, I have only two friends.
Posted by Tia | Link to this comment | 09-21-06 9:07 AM
That said, I have only two friends.
They're both IT guys she met on Craigslist, who agreed to be her friend in exchange for feeling her boobs.
Posted by apostropher | Link to this comment | 09-21-06 9:11 AM
They're only in IT until they can save enough money to open a dog shelter.
Posted by gswift | Link to this comment | 09-21-06 9:13 AM
Don't blame me for being able to see the good in people.
Posted by Tia | Link to this comment | 09-21-06 9:15 AM
I'll be your friend if you feel the fake scrotum in this box.
Posted by apostropher | Link to this comment | 09-21-06 9:17 AM
But that would make me feel exploited.
Posted by Tia | Link to this comment | 09-21-06 9:18 AM
You think you feel exploited? It's not your nuts in a box all day. I mean, uhhh, your fake nuts.
Posted by apostropher | Link to this comment | 09-21-06 9:21 AM
but otherwise how will you know if you catch testicular cancer?
Posted by text | Link to this comment | 09-21-06 9:22 AM
Yeah, first you have to practice catching testicles, which can be harder than it sounds.
Posted by apostropher | Link to this comment | 09-21-06 9:25 AM
It depends what you're using to catch them.
Posted by Tia | Link to this comment | 09-21-06 9:26 AM
the hooks tear through awful easy.
Posted by text | Link to this comment | 09-21-06 9:26 AM
I was imagining some softer, more muscular, gripping devices. I can think of a couple. But it would require some coordination on the part of the catcher.
Posted by Tia | Link to this comment | 09-21-06 9:28 AM
65 -- you can catch more testicles with honey (IYKWIM) than with vinegar (AITYD).
Posted by Clownæsthesiologist | Link to this comment | 09-21-06 9:32 AM
"But it would require some coordination on the part of the catcher."
With all that gear on, and the mitt, it sure would.
Posted by text | Link to this comment | 09-21-06 9:37 AM
It's really not wise to engage in these activities without protective gear, you know.
Posted by Tia | Link to this comment | 09-21-06 9:45 AM
70 -- y'mean like galoshes?
Posted by Clownæsthesiologist | Link to this comment | 09-21-06 9:48 AM
(JFTR -- all claims for anything to be "the greatest thing evar" or similar superlative praises are a priori false; "Bulbous Bouffant" holds that distinction in perpetuity.)
Posted by Clownæsthesiologist | Link to this comment | 09-21-06 9:51 AM
my health teacher said the face mask was just for decoration.
Posted by text | Link to this comment | 09-21-06 9:52 AM
What a joke. Nyhan believes that in his article he was "as clear as [he] could possibly be" that he was fired. And he extensively quotes Andrew Sullivan who clearly is under the impression that Nyhan was fired.
I'm beginning to think Nyhan is fully aware that he's distorting and obfuscating the facts just as much as any politician or actor. He just doesn't care.
Posted by neil | Link to this comment | 09-21-06 1:02 PM