The incident started with this postby Yglesias about a think-tank called Third Way:
Apparently this was too much for the powers at CAP where Yglesias works and on Sunday night there was this poston his blog written by the acting CEO:
I don’t know what Palmieri hoped to achieve but quite predictably her post has drawn forth an avalanche of criticism with 250+ comments on the blog as of now. It’s been linked to on Kos and Atrios and looks like erupting into a full-fledged blogstorm.
It’s not a big issue but it nicely illustrates the cosy relationship that exists between various DC insider outfits which tends to mute criticism. It also illustrates how clueless these insiders often are about how the blogosphere works. If Palmieri hadn’t intervened most people would have forgotten the original post. Now vastly more people will have read it and many will find that their opinion of both Third Way and CAP stands diminished.
It will be interesting to see how Yglesias handles the whole thing.
Palmieri is under consideration for a position at the DoD. I wonder how well that’s going to go after this splendid demonstration of level-headed editorial privilege?
It should be noted that Matt’s original Third Way post has 16 comments. In other words, no one was even reading it. It would have faded into the primordial ooze of blogdom without a bit of controversy.
But it appears that someone at Third Way DID read it and got a hair up their butt about it, and picked up the phone. And Palmieri went ahead and basically exploded the whole thing into blogdom legend. This is a classic case of “Don’t call attention to things you don’t want paid attention to”.
Didn’t she have to say that, though? If this guy is an employee of the Center of American Progress and posting editorials on their website, then that makes him a spokesman for the CAP, right? So, if he’s saying things, isn’t that assumed to be the position of the group he’s writing for?
CAP sponsors his blog, but the blog is HIS blog. It’s called “Yglesias”. He is the blogger. It’s pretty much understood that a blog isn’t a traditional editorial.
But the bigger picture here is that this is the executive officer of CAP making a CYA entry in someone else’s blog. It has electrified the issue 1000x more than just leaving well enough alone would have. If Palmieri was TRYING to make this a cause celebre and attract all the attention in the world to it, she did exactly what she should have done. If she was trying to deflect attention away from CAP over Matt’s words, she just had an epic fail.
But CAP isn’t like LiveJournal, is it? I mean, you can’t just go on CAP and set up a blog there. And the CAP pays him for his work, I believe. It’s his blog in that he writes it, of course.
And I agree that the executive officer of CAP acted inartfully, but I can also understand why she didn’t want to just not do anything.
If Palmieri does get that DOD PR job let’s hope she learns something about the Streisand effect. The fact is that the netroots are no longer some marginal bloggers with no influence. They are now a major constituency in the Democratic party who provide money, volunteers and ideas. You could make a strong case that without the netroots Obama wouldn’t have beaten Hillary and therefore wouldn’t be president-elect. Some of the bloggers who have commented on this issue include Berkeley economist Brad de Long and Brendan Nyhan (who is doing his Phd in Political Science at Duke): IOW the kind of people who are and will be part of the policy community that think-tanks aim to influence.
Palmieri’s silly post has damaged the reputations of the CAP, Third Way and herself with perhaps millions of blog readers in the space of less than a day. Quite a feat for someonewho is basically a PR person.
Meanwhile poor Yglesias is keeping mum about the whole thing and getting grief from his commenters.
Actually I am not sure why she couldn’t just let it go. I bet the CAP has a relationship with a vast range of people and institutions on the Democratic side. Are they going to jump in the blog every time Yglesias criticizes one of them? They should just put in a standard disclaimer on the blog saying that Yglesias doesn’t necessarily represent the views of CAP and be done with it.
I’m with Ezra Klein on this – you’d rather the bigwigs at CAP called Yglesias on the carpet internally and gave him editorial guidelines in secret which we’d never know about? Of course not – this was somewhat hamhanded, but without doubt the best possible solution. Yglesias, it appears, is just as free as he was a week ago to call Third Way hypertimid incrementalists, and everyone knows he isn’t an official spokesman for CAP. And people who comment on blogs are proven to be chickenlittles yet again. (And yes, that includes this semi-regular commentor on Yglesias’ blog.)
I have no idea what Third Way or CAP are, or who this Yglesias person is. I believe that in Palmieri’s position, I would (1) never host an employee’s blog, (2) discipline any employee who made disparaging comments about a business partner in any public forum, (3) fire such employee if possible, (4) make damn sure that my business partners and everyone else knew that Mr. Asshole Blogger was speaking only for himself.
Palmieri did her job. That post is so mild you could feed it to baby cows. What’s the problem again?
The problem is that a small comment in a little known blog is now all over the internet. If they had done nothing then 99.999999% of the world would go on having no idea what Third Way or CAP or yglesias is, and now because of her comment this is now a huge deal. It seemed pretty clear cut to me, its like solving an embarrassing problem by screaming about it at the top of your lungs to everyone who can hear.
Maybe I’m just a bit slow right now, but I don’t quite understand why Palmieri’s post is so inflammatory. She’s just saying that Yglesias is only speaking for himself, not his employers. Is there some other disciplinary thing going on here that’s not mentioned in the OP? Why is that so objectionable?
I don’t get what the controversy is: it’s SOP ass-covering procedure to say “The views expressed here do not necessarily reflect our opinion”.
She didn’t yank his blog, she didn’t censor him, as far as we know, she didn’t make him promise to recant or not discuss it further, she just tossed a boilerplate disclaimer into his blog.
So? I honestly have no idea what could prompt anything resembling outrage. Anyone able to explain what I’m not seeing here?
Fenris
:: shakes fist at Miller! Curse you, you fast-posting scoundrel! ::
Actually, having read some more of the verbiage this has created, I’ll add:
Palmieri didn’t insert anything. She wrote a statement and asked Yglesias to post it in his blog. If Mr. I R A Jernulist had properly labeled this as quoted material, instead of allowing his rabid fans to think she hijacked his blog, , there’d be a lot less fuss.
And I still can’t figure out why these guys are hosting blogs.
Because they’re a think tank, and they want to demonstrate that they have thinkers, and one way to do that is to pay thinkers like Yglesias to blog. This isn’t a case of a CAP employee having a blog; it’s a case of a blogger being paid by CAP to do his thing, with editorial independence. It buys them cred with the progressive side of the spectrum to support progressive bloggers.
Really, the screwup here is Matt’s: when he posted Palmieri’s CYA note, he should’ve done so explicitly noting that he was doing it on request. A lot of the initial flames were fanned by outraged blogospherians shrieking about Palmieri “hijacking” Yglesias’s blog to do damage control. Better would have been to have Yglesias write the “This is just my opinion, not CAP’s” post himself.
The basic problem is not the disclaimer itself but that Palmieri felt the need to insert it in the blog specifically in response to a post critical of Third Way and then go on to say what a wonderful organization Third Way was. No one would have a problem if CAP put in a general disclaimer in the corner somewhere on the blog.
As it stands now, the episode obviously undercuts Yglesias's authority and credibility. How can it not when your boss contradicts you on your own blog? In the future you can bet that Yglesias will think twice about criticizing Third Way or any organization working closely with CAP. This reduces the value of the blog to its many readers.
Even apart from all this, as an objective fact the incident has triggered a huge response on the blogosphere, most of it highly critical of Palmieri. It has diminished the reputation of Third Way and CAP far more than the original post. In PR terms it's unquestionably been a fiasco. Not a good sign for someone looking for a PR job with the Pentagon.
The larger issue which I think is fascinating is how the Democratic establishment reacts to the increasing power of the netroots and comes to terms with the fact that the netroots doesn’t behave like the insiders they are used to working with.