Today's New York Times plugs the respected Columbia School of Journalism's new website, campaigndesk.org. "Staffed by responsible journalists whose job is to monitor, critique and praise the campaign press on a daily basis," the new site's staff includes Bryan Keefer, 25, a co-founder of a similar site, Spinsanity .com; Zachary Roth, 28, a former intern at The Washington Monthly; and Thomas Lang, 22, a former intern at The American Prospect. These, we note, are alumni of left-leaning, Democrat favoring publications, although Spinsanity delights in de-bunking BS from both ends of the political spectrum.
While a number of links had yet to go live as of this afternoon, Campaign Desk promises to parse media coverage from a number of pov's: "postings" are categorized by "medium," "angle," "issue," and "candidate." An on-topic sample is Thomas Lang's rebuttal of Slate's Chris Suellentrop's odd round-up of Clark quotes meant to expose his eccentricity and verbal impulsiveness. (Suellentrop has since claimed his piece was satirical and is dismayed it wasn't taken as such).
After submitting each of Clark's quotes to careful analysis and finding them reasonable in and of themselves, Lang concludes:
The danger is that Suellentrop's illusions, masquerading as headlines, could be picked up by other media outlets and echoed across the web. In fact, that process has already begun. NewsMax.com, a conservative political news outlet, posted a feature article with the headline, "Clark: Bush 'Never Intended' to Get Bin Laden." That article was nothing more than a carbon copy of Suellentrop's piece with a dollop of added bias.Josh Marshall has a similar deconstruction of Suellentrop's day trip to David BrooksWorld at Talking Points Memo.
Note to Campaign Desk: your Movable Type design is attractive and well laid out, but do add permalinks to the postings (the link above only points to the "Angle/Distortion" sub-category, not the article itself). Also, the "small text" or "large text" option isn't working, and trust me, eyes older than 22 need it. If I didn't know better, I'd assume that the tiny default font size was chosen for the same reason I can't read the ingredients on a can of Friskies cat food.
PS: Suellentrop's name is spelled correctly in the first instance. Eight subsequent references are spelled "Sullentrop." No pun intended, I'm sure.
Posting in "Best of the Blogs," Josh Hammond finds Wesley Clark ably fitted for the presidency in a manner both unique and timely:
. . . What do we know about the kind of president Clark would make? I don't know the man and haven't worked for him, but there are two key elements in his style that I have studied over the years and they signal that Clark would be a very different kind of president from both Dean and the current temporary resident of the White House. One, Clark talks about leadership, not the presidency or being commander-in-chief. Two, Clark, by discipline, training and experience is a trainer and a leader--30 years worth.One of Hammond's more interesting insights is that, far from being managed "top-down" or from a pre-determined set of assumptions, modern military management is, in theory, if not always in practice, a model of open-mindedness and broad participation among experts trained to consider a problem in the context of a variety of disciplines.. . . Clark, a Rhodes Scholar like Clinton, is schooled in the theory and practice of scenario planning and scenario training. While this highly sophisticated management technique was first developed by Shell Oil Company in the 80s, the U.S. Army has developed it into a science. All Army officers are required to go through the training and then train others in return. All untested Army programs and all new Army situations need to go through scenario planning and testing BEFORE they are used or implemented.
In the U.S. Army scenario planning is a form of participative management (democracy) that openly assesses the effectiveness of new programs or strategies before they are implemented or adopted. The process involves a comprehensive assessment of what worked in the dry run and what didn't work and why. And this is the key dimension: the analysis is on multiple fronts to determine if the failure was a function of leadership, training, communications, technology, or other factors. Once identified, corrective action can be taken collectively.Hammond even gives Clark political props based on his non-political background:
With Clark making a move now in the primaries, I sense he has taken his troops through this process to assess why he fell back in the pack after a good start. What we are now seeing is Clark benefiting from his own scenario analysis. Look out, Dr. Dean.Imagine a president who is able to evaluate intelligence independently, based on an understanding of how the data came to arrive on his desk. While Howard Dean's medical training may give him a highly useful grounding in scientific method, it cannot substitute for Clark's intimate understanding of geo-politics and the precise strengths and limitations of US military power. And the rational flexibility both Democrats can bring to problem-solving is certainly an improvement on the faith-based methods now in place.