Jonathan Strong, the author (bio) of the Daily Caller’s on-going series of articles based on excerpts from emails selected out of the private Journolist discussion list, has been making a name for himself and his upstart online news organization in recent weeks with provocative attacks on the integrity of many well-known writers and bloggers, and his fierce defense of a bright line between political journalism and political activism. Journolist was, of course, a private email-based discussion list for writers, academics, and others that was started by liberal writer Ezra Klein in the winter of 2007 and shuttered in June, after e-mails taken from the list led to the forced resignation from the Washington Post by writer Dave Weigel. In a piece for the New York Post last weekend, under the banner of “The Fix Was In,” Strong explained that a close read of the private list’s extensive archives revealed some of its participants engaging in “intentional liberal bias.” His work has stirred all kinds of conspiracy thinking in what William F. Buckley once justly called the “fever swamps” of the Right, including dark mutterings about how many of the known members of Journolist are Jews.
I suppose I should mention here that, like my colleague Nancy Scola, I was a member of Journolist. I enjoyed the lively and snarky give-and-take of the list, though I was mostly a lurker. Like many of the other participants who have written about it since Strong’s lurid series of reports, I know for a fact that it was not a partisan message-coordination-machine. I’m also pretty outraged by Strong’s partial and selective quotation of various members’ emails, and share their frustration at not being able to respond in detail without breaking the list’s “off-the-record” rule. And yes, I’m Jewish, as if it should matter.
This whole episode brings up a set of old and complicated problems about memory, authenticity, credibility and transparency — but charged by the new and complicated reality of life in the Internet Age, where Google never forgets and everybody is, either by design or default, living more and more of their lives in public — especially the people who make the public sphere turn. (If something being online means it’s de facto public, by the way, shouldn’t everything that the government or private organizations are required by law to make public be made available online? But I digress.)
The Journolist affair, despite its flawed and obsessive focus on the liberal side of the networked public sphere, raises questions that everyone who lives in public these days must wrestle with: Can we talk in private on a private email list, or must we assume that anything we write might appear someday splashed on the front-page of some virtual rag? What about a dinner conversation? Do people need to start declaring to their friends that their chats are “not tweetable”? Should we all get a pass for whatever we said and did when we were young? When is your period of “youthful indiscretion” over?
Or is there some way to navigate the new and empowering transparency of the Internet Age, without expecting, unrealistically, that people–including public figures–have to always be perfect, “always on,” never biased, never mistaken. I’d rather that we admit the obvious: we are all biased by our upbringing and our environment, and as lifelong learners, we are all (hopefully) deviating in positive ways from conformity. It’s high time, especially, that everyone involved in committing acts of journalism — professionals, bloggers, academics, civilians, etc — accepted that there is no such thing as objectivity, and there never was. Rather, as David Weinberger famously said at PdF ’09, “transparency is the new objectivity.” Admit that you have subjective views, but also show your work. And when you make mistakes — which we want to encourage, since mistakes are the product of trying new things, and trying new things is the only way we grow — it’s ok to admit them, in fact, it’s encouraged. In the Internet Age, life ought to be lived as if it is always in beta. Speak honestly in your own voice, be transparent about your history and connections; readers are smart enough to judge for themselves.
But I’m not writing about this just because it’s a moment for reflection about transparency in the Internet Age. I also want to ask a simple question of Strong. Can you fairly cover politics without admitting that you, too, have biases? Personally, I don’t think strong personal beliefs should disqualify anyone from participating in the public arena. But I’d prefer that people own their words, and that we embrace personal transparency and personal complexity as facts of life. Unfortunately, unlike many of the writers Strong has been attacking, who publish on sites that are clearly marked as opinion journals and political blogs, Strong himself hasn’t always made his own politics transparent.
A little Googling around reveals, for example, that Strong, who graduated from Illinois’ Wheaton College in 2006, was during his college years the co-proprietor of a publication called Right Magazine. Right Magazine, the Internet Archives tells us, was a mix of college fare — class hijinks, a campus Peeping Tom — and conservative politics. The site was laced with discussions of Milton Friedman and critiques of things like the liberal position on abortion.
Based on what’s available at the Internet Archive, Strong was clearly one of Right Magazine’s leading contributors. During the 2004 election, Strong posted to the magazine’s house blog an awkward photo of John Kerry wearing ill-fitting industrial protective gear. “Wow,” joked Strong. “Do you want this man as your president?” Strong also posted a rainbow flag with the note suggesting that, Kerry might be fairly considered the “first gay president” in the same manner that Bill Clinton was said to be the first black president. A commenter noted that Strong seemed to be implying that such a thing would be negative. Responded Strong, “Apparently there are ‘lot’s of people’ who agree it’s a bad thing too, since 11 state [anti-same-sex marriage] constitutional amendments passed on Nov. 2. It’s good to know that when it comes to a popularity contest, my argument is doing just fine.”
Tucker Carlson, the founder of the Daily Caller and Strong’s boss has defended his site’s stories on Journolist by saying that the problem isn’t journalists having political opinions. “What we object to,” explained Carlson, “is partisanship, which is by its nature dishonest, a species of intellectual corruption.”
But is Strong a partisan? When I emailed Carlson asking about this, he responded: “I’ve never asked Strong what his politics are and he has never mentioned them. I hired Strong from Inside EPA, an entirely non-ideological publication. It would be dishonest of you not to mention that.” He also pointed to Strong’s pieces on Michael Steele, chairman of the RNC. “Read them and tell me if you still think he’s been carrying water for the Republican Party,” wrote Carlson.
Well, searches of the public Internet for Strong suggests that he has long been an inquisitive, thoughtful, committed conservative, one who engaged in what you might call opinion journalism. In one post on Right Magazine’s blog, Strong decried judicial trends, writing that, “Many of our laws today are clearly unconstitutional, and recent rulings by the Supreme Court absurdly so.” In a 2003 piece posted to Mens News Daily, Strong objected to the court ruling in Lawrence v. Texas, “a decision that effectively found a ‘right’ to homosexual sodomy in the Constitution.” The essay is no longer available on Mens News Daily (a site founded on the principle of the “necessity of cooperation between the genders, and at the same time the inevitability of opposition between them”) but popped up in a public Google Group.
During the primary phase of the 2004 race, Strong’s Right Magazine also produced a video mash-up of Howard Dean’s infamous Iowa scream. Noted MTV, “One of the first remixes to surface, Jonathan Strong’s ‘Dean Goes Nuts Remix’ hosted by Right-Magazine.com, featured Dean’s shrieking yowl set to Aphex Twin’s frenetic electronic ‘Wax the Nip’ from 1995’s I Care Because You Do.” (A copy of Strong’s Dean remix doesn’t seem to have survived the years.)
While at Wheaton and helping to run Right Magazine, Strong also, Google reveals, was an intern at the conservative think tank, the Heritage Foundation. On Fox News last week, Strong testified that what he found so egregious about Journolist was that “people who were on this list understood its power, and the way it could be used to shape the news cycle.” And yet, in 2004, Strong penned a long, reflective piece posted to Right Magazine on his 10-week Heritage internship in which he praised the institution’s focus on selling its ideas.
“[T]he Heritage Foundation concentrates on using ideas to shape those in power,” Strong wrote. “This is not to say that we are incapable of ascertaining the truth of ideas, but merely that the process is, in practice, not as perfect as some would have you believe. This is where the importance for Heritage’s ‘marketing’ approach” — Strong noted earlier in the essay that about half of Heritage’s time was spent on marketing its ideas — “comes in. The research must be done, the truth must be sought, but that truth must be argued cogently, defended, and advanced.”
Strong goes on to celebrate what he was able to learn in an environment of his peers “who all cared about politics, were informed, and agreed with me, at least on the most basic questions.” Beyond that, Strong praised Heritage’s ‘Conservative Thought Luncheon,’ that featured give-and-take with conservative speakers like Clarence Thomas. More recently, in 2007, Strong served as as a staffer in the Capitol Hill office of Republican Rep. Dan Lungren of California. Before being hired by Carlson earlier this year, he was a reporter for Inside EPA, a nonpartisan newsletter. While his online bio at the Daily Caller notes his connections to Lungren and Inside EPA, it does not mention of his college-era connection to Heritage or Right Magazine.
Of course, the path from partisan to reporter is well trod. Just think of Chris Matthews or George Stephanopolous. Neil Patel, whom you might not know, given Tucker Carlson’s high profile, is the co-founder of the Daily Caller news organization. According to the Daily Caller website, Patel served in the Bush White House as Dick Cheney’s chief policy advisor.
Strong did not respond to my attempts to contact him. One of the criticisms of Strong’s early articles that targeted former Washington Post writer Dave Weigel is that Strong failed to make clear that some of Weigel’s offending emails came before he was a Post staffer. It’s a valid critique, so we should certainly note that all of the above, retrieved from the Internet, came from Strong’s college and immediately post-college years. It’s possible that Strong has changed his mind about things he wrote a few years ago; it’s also possible that he can report and analyze things in a fair-minded way and still be a committed movement conservative. But without him explaining his relationship to Heritage and to Right Magazine, we just have to guess. Like the man said, transparency is the new objectivity.
Nancy Scola contributed reporting to this piece.
[Full disclosure: My glancing reference to the Public Information Online Act takes you to a site run by the Sunlight Foundation, which I am a senior technology adviser to, along with Andrew Rasiej.]
August 05, 2010