Austin Paper’s Slam Of Netroots Nation Makes National Headlines

As a former newspaper editor myself, I know one thing to be true: when Editor & Publisher, the magazine that covers the newspaper business, covers your newspaper, your newspaper just merged, is facing financial ruin, or you’ve either done something really good or really terrible.

In the case of the Austin American-Statesman, it falls in the latter category.

In an article in Sunday’s Statesman, the paper essentially made fun of Netroots Nation, but not in a very good way. Of course, the national netroots (many of whom happened to still be in Austin on Sunday), raised a stink, and Greg Mitchell has voiced his opinion on it at Editor & Publisher:

Anyway: Media coverage had been fairly positive (with the usual inaccuracies), probably because the attendees, and their friends, had proven instrumental in helping to hand Congress to the Democrats in 2006, then sparked wins in a few special elections, and seemed poised to repeat all that this November.

But frankly, when I bought the Austin American-Statesman at the Hilton’s lobby coffee shop on Sunday morning, I was just looking to catch up on some national news and the baseball scores. Yet, staring me right in the face, just below the fold on the left side of the front page, was a report on the conference by one Patrick Beach, who was IDed as a “feature writer.” That label often means trouble on the front page, and it certainly did here.

Beach described the gathering in stereotypes that better fit the aging Old Left of years ago than the much younger Netroots of today. I mean, how many of these bloggers have ever read much of Chomsky, as he suggested?

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.

It was the front-page placement that irked me.

I’ve got to concur with Mitchell. If this had been on the Op-Ed page, while I would have disagreed with its conclusions 100 percent, it wouldn’t have been as bad as putting it on the front page. It was like the Statesman‘s news judgment suddenly became non-existent.

This lapse of news judgment on the part of the Statesman is one that will go down in history, like their idiotic endorsement of George W. Bush for President.