digital emunction

The Washington Post has a nice story up about Danielle Allen’s efforts to trace the origins of the Obama-is-a-Muslim smear.

I should start by saying that Allen is something of a hero to many us who know her even slightly, and not just because she earned two doctorates by the time she was 29. I don’t know her at all well, but as Dean of the Humanities Division at the U. of C. she was the university officer most directly responsible for Chicago Review.

Ben Smith at Politico takes a swipe at Allen–or at least the Post’s validation of her research–for coming too late to a story that’s already been covered by him and others:

There’s some interesting stuff in the story about how a smear spreads, but I’m not sure where the two doctorates come in. Indeed, Allen could have made it to her key discovery—that the author of the smear was a marginal Illinois character named Andy Martin—without even resorting to The Google. Chris Hayes (who, with Jonathan Martin and me, has been obsessing about this since last fall) tracked it back to Martin in his Nation piece last October.

This kind of turf-guarding is fairly predictable, especially when it’s journalists and academics who are standing on opposite sides of the picket fence. (Smith, joking about Hayes: “Give that man a Ph.D. Or two.”)

But Smith’s self-confessed superciliousness seems misplaced. [Read more]

…is, they’ve been telling us since March 4, how the race for the Democratic nomination was going to end. And sure enough, the whimpering has begun in earnest. How do we know? Ben Smith at Politico is going on vacation.

If that doesn’t convince you, consider how quickly Adam Nagourney’s article in yesterday’s New York Times has become the cornerstone of the new conventional wisdom about the race. [Read more]

I’ve been reading a lot of political coverage this primary season—too much for my or anyone’s health and sanity. And in the course of that reading I’ve developed a number of pet peeves about political reporting. Many of these, I realize, are common and long-standing complaints: from the echo-chamber aspect of it all to the too-predictable cycle that carries “news” from a campaign conference call on Day 0 to sites like TPM and Politico on Day 1 to articles in the newspapers and in Slate on Day 2.

But one major complaint that I haven’t seen aired before is that both the campaigns and the news media appear to share an assumption that seems to me mostly unwarranted. [Read more]