Extremely Online: The Untold Story of Fame, Influence, and Power on the Internet

Posted on January 17, 2024 by Luke Ford

The world is a big oozing mess, but to create meaning and order in our lives, we develop and sanctify boundaries between the clean and the dirty, the heroic and the cowardly.

Here are some excerpts from this 2023 book by Washington Post journalist Taylor Lorenz:

* In April 2007, he confronted the masterminds behind Socialite Rank. It wasn’t a group of top – tier socialites teaming up behind the scenes; in fact, it wasn’t anyone most people knew at all. The all – powerful website was run by a completely random pair of Russian émigrés named Valentine Uhovski and Olga Rei. The duo was not remotely born into high society and they had essentially created the blog as a social experiment.
New York Magazine ran a cover story on the shocking reveal. Elite society was astonished. They realized they had been brought to their knees, to tears, to a frenzy — by two people they wouldn’t have given the time of day. The outsiders had upended the ultimate insiders, and it had cost less than a trip to the hair salon.

* Most legacy publications didn’t see blogs as a threat at first. Bloggers looked like curious eccentrics, a band of second – rate scribblers with too much time on their hands. The old guard scoffed that bloggers’ writing wasn’t up to the standards of the New York Times or Vanity Fair. They doubted that bloggers could ever break consequential stories without the access and talent monopolized by legacy media.
Readers, on the other hand, enjoyed the lack of polish. The media environment of the 1990s was centralized and corporate after waves of mergers left only a handful of conglomerates whose content was middle – of – the – road, burnished, and safe. In 2002, Wired declared “The Blogging Revolution,” a paradigm shift in how people distributed and received information: “Readers increasingly doubt the authority of the Washington Post or National Review, despite their grand – sounding titles and large staffs. They know that behind the curtain are fallible writers and editors who are no more inherently trustworthy than a lone blogger who has earned a reader’s respect.” Blogs offered readers everything that legacy media couldn’t, revealing what writers really thought. What’s more, blogs also enabled real – time interaction between writers and readers through comments sections attached to posts. Unlike message boards, blog posts primed the discussion with original, substantial content that was ripe for debate.

* By 2009, fashion bloggers like Bryan Boy and Garance Dore made their foray into high – brow fashion circles. Bloggers were suddenly sitting in coveted front – row seats during New York Fashion Week, then at Dolce & Gabbana’s show at Milan Fashion Week, in a shocking upset that fashion insiders dubbed “blogger gate.” “Bloggers have ascended from the nosebleed seats to the front row with such alacrity that a long – held social code among editors, one that prizes position and experience above outward displays of ambition or enjoyment, has practically been obliterated,” wrote Eric Wilson of the New York Times.

I want to share with you an Andrew Gelman (Columbia University Statistics professor) blog post from November 2011:

Journalist Jonathan Rauch writes:

This is the blogosphere. I’m not getting paid to be here. I’m here to get incredibly famous (in my case, even more incredibly famous) so that I can get paid somewhere else. . . .

The average quality of newspapers and (published) novels is far, far better than the average quality of blog posts (and–ugh!–comments). This is because people pay for newspapers and novels. What distinguishes newspapers and novels is how much does not get published in them, because people won’t pay for it. Payment is a filter, and a pretty good one. Imperfect, of course. But pointing out the defects of the old model is merely changing the subject if the new model is worse…

Yes, the new model is bringing a lot of new content into being. But most of it is bad. And it’s displacing a lot of better content, by destroying the business model for quality. Even in the information economy, there’s no free lunch…

Yes, there’s good stuff out there. But when you find a medium in which 99 percent, or whatever, of what’s produced is bad, there is a problem with the medium…

I believe there are inherent problems with the blogosphere as a medium. Lack of a payment model militates against professionalism and rewards noisiness…

In terms of the environment and the incentives it creates, the blogosphere, I submit, is the single worst medium for sustained, and therefore grown-up, reading and writing and argumentation ever invented.

Andrew Gelman responds:

I wonder if his problem is that he’s aiming for too big an audience. We have something like 5000 subscribers here. Maybe if Rauch were willing to settle for an audience of 5000 rather than millions, he could be mild, moderate, think things through, and get it right. To be all these things and have a huge audience? I think that takes a huge amount of luck. It happened with John Updike, and Francis Fukayama, and Tyler Cowen, and . . . not so many others. But if you’re willing to accept a niche audience, you can be as serious as you want…

Rauch writes that journalists like himself are “the kind of people who punched their tickets on newspaper police beats where they learned quaint notions of fairness and accuracy and keeping one’s opinions out of it and all that.” Given that Rauch is currently posting nothing but opinions and has stated that he will do no reporting on his blog, and given that I haven’t seen any police reporting from him lately, I think it’s safe to say that he doesn’t actually view fairness, accuracy, and the traditions of the police beat as valuable in themselves but rather as some sort of hazing that you had to do in the old days before you could get to the fun stage of opinionating. So I can feel his frustration that bloggers today feel free to express their opinions in public–just like Rauch, but they never had to do all that police-beat stuff first. Rauch had to eat his spinach but these dudes get to skip right to the dessert. Talk about violating “quaint notions of fairness”!

Life is like that. Just when you finally become an expert on something, your expertise becomes obsolete. You spend a couple decades getting good grades and becoming really good at taking tests, then suddenly you never need to take a test again. You master the skills of diaper-changing, then all of a sudden your kids are walking around wearing real underwear and you have no place to apply your talents. You’re Derek Jeter and you get to be really really good at hitting, throwing, and catching, and then before you know it, it’s time to retire. And so on.

Rauch is in a difficult position, I think, in that his particular journalistic niche includes a lot that people are happy do for free. His most recent book, “Gay Marriage: Why It Is Good for Gays, Good for Straights, and Good for America,” is the sort of thing you might very well see on a blog.

Academic publishing

Rauch writes that blogging, and the internet in general, is “displacing a lot of better content, by destroying the business model for quality.” What really struck me about this remark was how different things are in academic publishing. Nobody pays us to write journal articles: we do it for free and we always have. We get paid to teach and to do research. Publications can indirectly make us money–if I publish an important article, it can help me get a research grant–but no part of this system requires the readers of my work to pay for it. If every journal were to become free and online overnight, everything could proceed just as before. The argument that paid writing is better than free writing just doesn’t apply in my world.

Journalists view their profession as a holy calling (they have their own hero system). As noted in the 2021 book, All the News That’s Fit to Click: How Metrics Are Transforming the Work of Journalists:

* …journalism is an anomalous case of cultural production in that its practitioners operate according to a set of normative, rather than artistic, commitments. As media scholar Mike Ananny puts it, “Unlike artistic fields of cultural production, the press—ideally and principally—pursues its autonomy in order to advance public interests.”

* A range of established journalistic norms and practices, such as refusing gifts, denying sources quote approval, and establishing a “wall” between the editorial and business sides of news organizations, stem from efforts to maintain autonomy.

* As sociologist Herbert Gans wrote in an oft-quoted passage from his classic newsroom ethnography Deciding What’s News, journalists “had little knowledge about the actual audience and rejected feedback from it. Although they had a vague image of the audience, they paid little attention to it; instead, they filmed and wrote for their superiors and for themselves, assuming . . . that what interested them would interest the audience.”

What makes a piece of writing “journalism” and hence protected by the First Amendment is somewhat subjective. Journalists, like other professionals, guard their status zealously. They are in an awkward position because their job is essentially making judgments that are not subject to objective criteria. They are often quick to dismiss many bloggers, for example, for the cardinal sin of not doing journalism.

In his work-in-progress, Conservative Claims of Cultural Oppression, philosopher Rony Guldmann writes:

* Questioning whether the post-war professionalization of education, business, and journalism was genuinely necessary, Gelernter observes that universities had an obvious interest in “convert[ing] as much of the landscape as possible into fenced-off, neatly tended, carefully patrolled academic preserves,” so that the “smooth, manicured green lawn of science” might replace the “wild sweet meadow-grass of common sense.” Justified or not, this trend toward professionalization doesn’t strike liberals as essentially political… Professionalization is just another expression of liberalism’s ordering impulses and monkish virtues, the artificial devaluation of knowledge borne of encounters with anti-structure—the “wild sweet meadow-grass of common sense”—and an exaggerated respect for knowledge that, shielded from that anti-structure, can be “scored by those with authority.” To maintain their dominion, liberals must discredit knowledge that originates in “embodied feeling” and “nonexplicit engagement with the world” as mindless habit and reflex, lax and disorganized folkways to be uprooted.

* As a dissident culture, conservatism is by definition in a position of weakness. The elites of the dissident culture “cannot begin to match, in numbers or influence, those who occupy the commanding heights of the dominant culture, such as professors, journalists, television and movie producers, and various cultural entrepreneurs.” Even religion has fallen under the dominant culture’s sway. One might have expected it to be at the forefront of the resistance. But “priding themselves on being cosmopolitan and sophisticated, undogmatic and uncensorious,” the mainline churches have offered “little or no resistance” to the “prevailing culture.”

* The Ford Foundation, the New York Times, and Hollywood are just the latest iterations of the “unnatural” life of court society, of the unhealthy self-consciousness and other-directedness that stands in sharp contrast to those who pour their hearts out singing the Star-Spangled Banner, surrendering to the excitement of their hearts “unhindered by ‘cold reason.’”

* The now overthrown WASP establishment “saw itself as the nation’s high end, the top of a vertical spectrum.” But the new ruling class of “PORGIs”—post-religious, globalist intellectuals—see themselves “as separated by a cultural Grand Canyon from the nation at large, with Harvard and the New York Times and the Boston Symphony and science and technology and iPhones and organic truffled latte on their side—and guns, churches and NASCAR on the other.”

Laura Ingraham notes: “If you’re an elitist who’s spent his entire career working for the Ford Foundation, the New York Times, or a Hollywood studio, concepts like valor, bravery, and sacrifice are probably alien to you. You don’t take them seriously, you don’t know anyone who does, and you naturally think that anyone who does profess to live by them must be mentally defective, even evil.”

Does anyone fret anymore that blogs are killing the MSM?

Taylor Lorenz writes in his her new book:

* As blogs boomed, traditional media felt the hurt, especially local and regional newspapers. Subscription rates everywhere plummeted now that the internet gave readers access to a wealth of free information, including articles from the very newspapers they no longer purchased in physical form. The industry’s century – old business model crumbled, forcing newsrooms around the country to hemorrhage staff and shut down. As they did, gatekeepers went from dismissive to hostile. In testimony before Congress, David Simon, a former reporter for the Baltimore Sun and creator of The Wire , warned that the blogosphere was causing a media death spiral: “Readers acquire news from the aggregators and abandon its point of origin — namely the newspapers themselves. In short, the parasite is slowly killing the host.”
By the end of the 2000s, it looked more like the parasite and host had merged. As top blogs expanded their headcount by hiring professional reporters, designers, and support staff, they came to resemble traditional media companies, complete with newsrooms and sales departments. Many legacy publishers realized that their best strategy was simply to invite bloggers in. Major publications, from the New York Times and the Atlantic to Glamour and Elle, hired the top crop of bloggers to fill out their ranks of writers and reporters. These same organizations also started major blogs of their own, or bought successful sites outright. By 2009, nearly half of the fifty most – trafficked blogs were owned by corporate media behemoths like CNN, ABC, and AOL. Yet while star bloggers in tech and politics received top billing, another class of bloggers was quietly ushering in a larger shift.
In the end, the defining figure of the blog era wasn’t the nerd or the wonk. It was the mommy blogger.

* JULIA ALLISON WAS A JUNIOR at Georgetown University in 2002 when she started a dating column in the school paper called “Sex on the Hilltop.” Sex and the City was one of the hottest shows on television. As her column became a campus sensation, Allison felt like Georgetown’s own Carrie Bradshaw. The university’s location in Washington, D.C., brought national coverage to her column. (When she wrote about dating an anonymous young congressman, the Washington Post was swift to reveal his identity.) Her peers enjoyed her candid style, but within months, her headlines began to enrage Georgetown alumni and some students. “I didn’t write about sex very much,” Allison told me, “but all the conservatives at Georgetown were so upset. I became this lightning rod.” Still, Allison soon landed bylines at national outlets like Cosmopolitan and Seventeen. Film producer Aaron Spelling even optioned her life rights when she was twenty – one.

* [Julia] Allison got an idea when she saw Tom Wolfe on a book tour that year. Everywhere he went, he appeared in his iconic white suit. “He’s a brand,” she realized. “I’ve got to be known and become a name.” Wolfe built his brand in another era, but he wasn’t the only archetype for Allison to follow.

* Nearly every article documenting Allison’s rise contained a disturbing level of misogynistic language and tropes. Tech journalists, who were overwhelmingly men, implied that Allison was promiscuous. They used highly gendered language to slut – shame her and question her credibility as an expert on media and technology. She was accused of trying to sleep with the powerful men in tech whom she interviewed or partnered with. Fast Company ran a piece titled “Sometimes Breasts Aren’t Enough, Julia Allison.” Wired and the rest of the tech press was similarly hostile.

* By 2012, she decided that she couldn’t handle any more online assaults. “It had been about ten years of my life, and I was exhausted,” she said. “I felt beaten down, I felt completely disillusioned, and I wanted a different reality. More than anything, I wanted to be off the internet. I was like, ‘I don’t know how I’ll make money, but I can’t make it this way anymore.’ And I never looked back.”
She set out to erase herself from the internet. She spent hours deleting over 14,000 tweets, one by one. She removed Tumblr posts, made other accounts private, and restricted access to her viral YouTube and Vimeo videos.
Every so often she dipped her toe back in, and each time she regretted it.

* Allison lives a quieter life now. She resides in Cambridge, Massachusetts, with her fiancé and was recently accepted into a master’s program at Harvard’s Kennedy School in leadership and public policy.

* In 2013, creators were happy to wander into malls with no security and get mobbed by fans. But that was a naïve dream years later. The turning point came in June 2016, when the YouTuber and music artist Christina Grimmie was murdered by a fan in Orlando. Grimmie had posted on social media asking people to attend a concert she was giving and, after her performance, she stuck around to meet her followers. As she opened her arms to give a twenty – seven – year – old fan a hug, he fatally shot her once in the head and twice in the chest. Police later revealed that the fan had stalked her for years online and fantasized about the two of them being together. When he realized he couldn’t have her, he chose to murder her.

* Before YouTube’s algorithm change, users would hop frequently between short, catchy videos. Afterwards, creators noticed that the more they let fans into their daily lives, the deeper the engagement they’d generate on their videos. The algorithm was encouraging a return to the Lonelygirl15 era.

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Why Is The Right So Dumb?

Posted on January 16, 2024 by Luke Ford

Nathan Cofnas writes:

The Academic Ranking of World Universities (ARWU) ranks the world’s universities based on objective criteria such as the number of publications they produce in Nature and Science and how many of their alumni have won Nobel Prizes or Fields Medals. It gives more weight to achievement in the hard sciences, which conservatives consider “real subjects,” than in the humanities. According to the ranking, 5 of the top 20 universities in the world are in California—the bluest and gayest state in America. In the top 50, there are 28 American universities, of which 25 are in blue states. The three in red states are Duke University (ranked 22nd in the US), the University of Texas at Austin (25th in the US), and the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center at Dallas (27th in the US). All three of these red-state universities are located in solidly blue cities (Durham, Austin, and Dallas), and none of them are conservative institutions—in fact, they are about as woke as their blue-state counterparts. The only relatively conservative university in the US that’s even listed on the ARWU is Brigham Young University, whose global ranking is in the 501–600 range. I say BYU is “relatively conservative” rather than “conservative” because it still leans liberal, with 61% of its political donors giving to liberal rather than conservative causes. If conservatives are just as smart and intellectual as liberals, why have they failed to create even a single major conservative-friendly university that is remotely competitive with the top liberal universities?

The right has a handful of think tanks that in some cases employ scholars who are as good as, or better than, those at elite universities. But these are relatively small operations. The annual expenditures at the conservative American Enterprise Institute are less than $50 million. At the Manhattan Institute, they’re less than $20 million. If conservatives seriously cared about building elite institutions of learning and scholarship, they could do better than this. The fact that they don’t is further evidence that they are not as intellectually oriented as liberals.

Tucker Carlson recently said: “Let’s keep dumb people and crazed partisan demagogues away from our financial system and our power grid. They can keep the sociology department—have fun. But why don’t you stay away from the fundamentals that keep the country running.” A liberal commentator would never say something like this, because most liberals understand that culture is influenced by ideas, and surrendering idea-generating institutions to the enemy is a bad strategy. Carlson himself is far more intelligent than most professors of sociology. But he knows that, to his conservative audience, the notion of studying social phenomena in a scholarly way (what sociology is supposed to be) is literally a punchline. The fact that conservative leaders often express this kind of attitude is evidence that the average conservative doesn’t get why ideas are important.

Journalism is another area in which conservatives display less intelligence and competence than liberals. In a moment of lucidity at the 2009 CPAC convention, Tucker Carlson lamented the fact that conservatives have been unable to create institutions like the New York Times. Over boos from the audience, he noted that “yes they are liberal, yes they twist it. But they are still out there finding the facts and bringing them to people.” He said that “conservatives need to mimic that in their own news organizations.” They should “not just interpret things they hear in the mainstream media but gather the news themselves.” And yet, 14 years later, after Carlson was fired from Fox News and the fetters were off, he started trumpeting fake news about UFOs and Barack Obama’s gay affair. He was ultimately pulled down to the level of his conservative audience.

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All the News That’s Fit to Click: How Metrics Are Transforming the Work of Journalists

Posted on January 15, 2024 by Luke Ford

Journalism is judgment about what matters. It is the primary thing we use to see the world beyond our experience.

This judgment springs from the particular hero system that made Russiagate the most important news story in America from 2016 to 2019 and George Floyd’s death the most important story for the summer months of 2020 (along with Covid).

Here are some excerpts from this 2021 book:

* …journalists… “occupy jobs centered on the construction and dissemination of what might be called interpretive information or knowledge” rather than aesthetic or artistic products. Whereas individual creativity and self-expression are idealized in artistic fields, journalism’s occupational ideology prizes considered judgment—the ability to quickly absorb, adjudicate between, and publicly communicate complex and conflicting sources of information. Furthermore, journalism is an anomalous case of cultural production in that its practitioners operate according to a set of normative, rather than artistic, commitments. As media scholar Mike Ananny puts it, “Unlike artistic fields of cultural production, the press—ideally and principally—pursues its autonomy in order to advance public interests.”

Therefore, while artistic workers seek aesthetic autonomy, journalists primarily seek professional autonomy—the ability to practice newswork according to a set of collective normative values and with relative insulation from political actors and the market.40 Yet because the U.S. press is heavily commercialized, many of the management tensions and challenges are the same as those found in other forms of industrial cultural production. If aesthetic cultural work is defined by the art-commerce
relation, we might say that journalism is characterized by the democracy-commerce relation.

* It is difficult to publicly measure something or someone without changing it or them in some way. Thus a second thing that evaluative numbers do in the social world is elicit a response from the people and organizations they measure. Scholars call this phenomenon reactivity.

* All mediated forms of culture—from music to television to books—are “carriers of meaning” that influence how we understand the social world.1 Journalism is among the most powerful cultural industries in this regard—not for nothing has it been called “the primary sense-making practice of modernity.”2 It is mainly through news consumption that many of us encounter political leaders and other powerful figures, cultivate a sense of empathy (or antipathy) toward people in different life circumstances, learn about and contextualize contemporary events that are outside our immediate, observable environs, and develop a sense of the crucial issues animating public life.

* Much of journalism history in the United States can be understood as the profession’s ongoing efforts to establish independence from the state and the market, both of which are generally viewed as corrupting influences on editorial freedom and journalistic integrity.6 A range of established journalistic norms and practices, such as refusing gifts, denying sources quote approval, and establishing a “wall” between the editorial and business sides of news organizations, stem from efforts to maintain autonomy.

* As journalism scholar Michael Schudson puts it in an essay pointedly titled “Autonomy from What?”: “What keeps journalism alive, changing, and growing is the public nature of journalists’ work, the nonautonomous environment of their work, the fact that they are daily or weekly exposed to the disappointment and criticism of their sources (in the political field) and their public (whose disapproval may be demonstrated economically as readers cancel their subscriptions or viewers change channels).”

* As sociologist Herbert Gans wrote in an oft-quoted passage from his classic newsroom ethnography Deciding What’s News, journalists “had little knowledge about the actual audience and rejected feedback from it. Although they had a vague image of the audience, they paid little attention to it; instead, they filmed and wrote for their superiors and for themselves, assuming . . . that what interested them would interest the audience.”

* print-era journalists rejected audience research because doing so was one of the only means to protect their always-tenuous professional status. Sociologist Andrew Abbott has characterized professions as “somewhat exclusive groups of individuals applying somewhat abstract knowledge to particular cases.”

* The accessibility of journalistic language is helpful for informing the public, but it also renders journalists’ claims to specialized expertise potentially suspect. In the absence of a structural closure mechanism that limits entry into the profession or a repertoire of abstract knowledge, journalists create and maintain boundaries
around their profession by “doing things a certain way and privileging certain rationales for those actions.”

* the opinions and assessments of other journalists—rather than outsiders—typically hold the most weight when considering whether the job has been done well or not.

* editors also often perceive metrics as a threat to their own managerial authority and their privileged position atop the newsroom hierarchy.

* In Deciding What’s News, Gans presciently noted that the indifference to audience research that he observed among journalists might well change “should commercial considerations become more urgent” within news organizations.

* There is arguably no other publication in the United States—possibly the world—with
its [New York Times] symbolic significance and level of reputational capital.

* To excel at the traffic game, journalists needed a mixture of luck and skill that was elusive and difficult to reliably reproduce. Journalists spoke regularly of being surprised by traffic. Pieces they expected to be “hits” often drew a smaller-than-
anticipated audience, while articles that seemed “niche” could unexpectedly become popular.

* Grinding in the blogging world had an additional element of intrigue: there was always the tantalizing possibility that any ground-out post could become a surprise viral hit.

* Gawker Media staffers told me their moods rose and fell with the traffic numbers reported in the dashboard, sometimes to a degree that alarmed them.

* “Ideas about separating, purifying, demarcating and punishing transgressions have as their main function to impose system on an inherently untidy experience. It is only by exaggerating the difference between within and without . . . that a semblance of order is created.” (Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger)

* Journalists at the Times, for example, frequently drew positive contrasts between the Times’s approach to metrics and that of other publications… When I prefaced a question to Cynthia, a Times reporter, by mentioning that the Washington Post had a real-time display of the paper’s top-ranked stories on its newsroom wall, she was incredulous: “They have that at the Washington Post? . . . Oh god, this is so depressing to me.”

* Given the Times’s long-held organizational self-perception as the apex of journalistic professionalism in the United States…

* Although Gawker staffers like Felix and Alison saw BuzzFeed’s editorial approach as synonymous with clickbait and “cheap viral crap,” BuzzFeed itself emphatically rejected this characterization, going so far as to publish a post in 2014 headlined “Why BuzzFeed Doesn’t Do Clickbait.” Ben Smith, who was BuzzFeed editor in chief at the time, argued that those who associate BuzzFeed with clickbait “confuse what we do with true clickbait,” which was, in his view, a headline that baits the reader into clicking by overpromising on what the story, once clicked on, actually delivers. By contrast, Smith wrote, BuzzFeed’s headlines tend to be “extremely direct”: for example, “ ‘31 Genius Hacks for Your Elementary School Art Class’ is just that.”

* Metrics confront journalists with a powerful mixed message. If they ignore the data altogether, they risk being seen as foolishly obstinate, patronizing toward their audience, and behind the digital times—in effect guaranteeing their professional obsolescence and possibly facing managerial censure or even job loss. But if they rely on metrics too much, they risk corrupting their sense of professional integrity and autonomy, and potentially sullying their reputation. To make matters more challenging, there is no widely agreed-upon normative standard within the profession for how to navigate between these two extremes.

* In the common spaces of the New York Times headquarters in midtown Manhattan,
displays of any kind of metrics data were conspicuously absent. Unlike at Gawker, where vast swaths of wall were occupied by large flat screens displaying various
real-time traffic rankings of stories and writers, some of the Times’s prominent wall space was covered with framed reprints of each of the paper’s Pulitzer Prize–winning
stories, of which it has published more than any other news organization. The Times’s Pulitzer Wall, as it is known, was a point of pride for staffers, symbolizing the organization’s formidable prestige.

* Editors’ sense of “news judgment” is intuitive and inscrutable (and thus difficult for reporters to argue with). By contrast, metrics had the potential to be equally visible and accessible to all staffers in a newsroom. And because of metrics’ interpretive ambiguity, a reporter could look at the same data as her editor and draw her own—possibly contradictory—conclusions.

As such, Times editors restricted reporters’ access to metrics because they perceived the data as a potential threat, not only to the quality of the paper’s journalism but also to their own managerial authority.

“If you think about an editor, really the only thing an editor has—like their full job is based on their judgment. Because that’s really what they do, is they just sit and use their judgment to edit stories and decide how important they are and where they should go on the site. And so replacing that with metrics of some sort is a massive threat to their livelihood and kind of value in the job.”

* Although they withheld systematic access to metrics, Times editors would strategically disclose particular data points to reporters when they wanted to accomplish a specific managerial purpose or elicit a desired reaction.

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Did Biographer Doris Kearns Goodwin Sleep With Her Subject LBJ?

Posted on January 15, 2024 by Luke Ford

Slate: “The best example is Doris Kearns (now Kearns Goodwin), who spent many hours interviewing Lyndon B. Johnson at his Texas ranch. The author probably didn’t help matters by admitting that LBJ liked to climb into her bed for interviews. But she insists that she never joined the former president in bed, and there is no evidence that a romance occurred.”

Report:

Sycophantic LBJ biographer Doris Kearns Goodwin was having an affair with Lyndon Johnson

LBJ pressured Kearns for sex, later asked her to MARRY him!

Was LBJ biographer Doris Kearns having an affair with Lyndon Johnson? Here is the response of a well known JFK assassination researcher when I posed that question to him: “No doubt about that one ….” Sally Quinn had said some rather provocative things about Doris Kearns-Goodwin’s relationship with LBJ in those “final years.” Here is a reference to that in a Wash Post article (“A Tale of Hearts and Minds, 8/24/75) alluded to in the LA Times in 2002:

Goodwin’s first dip in the waters of infamy came in 1967, when, having received a White House fellowship, she was photographed dancing with Lyndon Johnson at a reception. The story turned on the fact that the president’s dance partner, then Doris Kearns, had just co-written a piece for the New Republic under the headline: “How to Remove L.B.J. in 1968.”

Later, in the early 1970s, Kearns and Richard Goodwin, lovers but not yet married, set off a literary scandal that attracted national media attention. It involved a “psychobiography” that Kearns was writing about Johnson, based in part on intimate conversations they’d had on his ranch in Texas, and a decision to bring Goodwin aboard as a co-author.

Their plan was to expand what had begun as a scholarly work–intended to help secure for her a tenured professorship at Harvard University–break with a smaller publishing house and sell the book elsewhere, for about five times the money. As the dispute grew, the story oozed outward to include speculation in print about whether Kearns might have had an affair with Johnson.

Sally Quinn, flying at her highest as a feature writer in the Washington Post’s Style section, wrote a lively, at times almost embarrassingly explicit, account of the chaos that had come to Kearn’s love and literary life. The piece ran for what seemed like forever, and it included a rather tart summation:

” Kearns has always gotten what she wanted–and made it look as if she didn’t even try. She got elected student-body president at Colby College in Maine, got the best grades, got the best beaux, got into Harvard, got a White House fellowship, got Lyndon Johnson, got her Ph.D, got her professorship at Harvard, got her book, got author Richard Goodwin and got Goodwin to collaborate with her on the book. Those are all things she wanted, or thought she wanted when she got them.”

At one point in the story, the then-32-year-old Kearns is quoted as saying: ” I really believe that Johnson was picking a person he wanted to write about him. People say he was in love with me and things like that. Partly that’s true. But it was much more serious than that.”

Here is another excerpt from Sally Quinn’s 1974 article

“Johnson was terribly possessive of her time, more and more as he came closer to death. She was seeing many men at this point in her life but had no real attachments until she met Richard Goodwin six months before Johnson’s death.”

One time Doris Kearns gave a lecture and said that Lyndon Johnson had compared her to his mother. [LBJ’s mother was quite the enabler of him; as was Lady Bird.] When Kearns comments became public and appeared in print, LBJ said:

“So I’ll just take the knife out of my heart and close up the wound, and we’ll have you back here and we won’t look back in pride or shame. We’ll just start from here and we’ll go on with your book without Parade. We’re both still alive and that’s what counts.”

Kearns has later admitted that Lyndon Johnson used to crawl into bed with her and just talk, but with nothing else going on….

As for me, I am not buying that nothing else went on. The Doris Kearns case is just another example of Lyndon Johnson’s ability to manipulate people and even turn them into sychophants protecting his legacy decades later. Jack Valenti would be another good example.

Doris Kearns Goodwin: “I got to know this crazy character [Lyndon B. Johnson] when I was only 23 years old…. He’s still the most formidable, fascinating, frustrating, irritating individual I think I’ve ever known in my entire life.” [Academy of Achievement June 1996 interview, p.1]

Doris Kearns also told authors Richard Harwood and Haynes Johnson about her relationship with LBJ in an interview that Sally Quinn refers to:

“They both took copious notes. In the interview Kearns told the reporters that her relationship with President Johnson was extraordinarily complicated, that she was still having trouble placing it in perspective, that she was troubled about how to handle her personal relationship with Johnson when she published her own book.

“She told them that the essence of their relationship was that LBJ was in love with her, that he ‘pressed me very hard sexually the first year,’ that he courted her aggressively, that he asked her to marry him, that he was jealous of other men in her life.”

[Sally Quinn, Washington Post, 8/24/75 “A Tale of Hearts and Minds”]

My comment: Really, this kind of behavior from Lyndon Johnson was typical. It is how he behaved his whole life, and I don’t just mean sexually. I am referring to his narcissism, neediness, ability to manipulate people, ability to turn folks into sycophants and slaves and have them do things they would not normally do.

I guess this just reproves the old saying that women love power; even if power is an old bloated, craggy man and a paranoid, mendacious, delusional nut job.

Here is an email to me from a Harvard alum and a nationally known author:

“Robert,
I was a graduate student at Harvard in the Political Science Department when Kearns was writing her LBJ book — the gossip at Harvard was always that she was LBJ’s lover — Kearns was first and foremost an opportunist — if sleeping with LBJ advanced her career, I doubt she hesitated.”

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Assume Nothing: Encounters with Assassins, Spies, Presidents, and Would-Be Masters of the Universe

Posted on January 15, 2024 by Luke Ford

Here are some excerpts from this 2023 book by the late Edward Jay Epstein:

* Indeed, it was from [Gerald Ford] that I first heard the term “political truth,” a concept in which facts may be tempered to fit political realities.

* John J. McCloy: “J. Edgar Hoover likes to close doors. I told Warren we had to reopen them.”

Had the [Warren] commission’s investigation faced limits in what it could report? I asked.
He answered by describing Thornton Wilder’s novel The Bridge of San Luis Rey, in which an investigation uncovered a series of unrelated sexual liaisons. He compared the book to the investigation, saying, “We had uncovered a lot of minor scandals, but they were not relevant to our investigation. We decided not to publish them in the report.”
When I pressed him on what these scandals involved, he replied, “It was as if someone picked up a rock and the light caused all sorts of bugs to run for cover.” He said the Secret Service needed to obscure the indiscretions of its agents the night before the assassination, the FBI had to expunge embarrassing incidents from its reports, and the CIA had to hide its unauthorized domestic activities. He added that even Attorney General Robert Kennedy, the president’s brother, had put his own man, Howard Willens, on the staff to deal with “inappropriate revelations.”

* He said that while no one on the commission had any doubts that Oswald was the shooter in the sniper’s nest, the real mystery for him was “why Oswald was there with a rifle.” He believed there was persuasive evidence that Oswald had been trained in espionage in Russia and that Oswald might have been “a sleeper agent who went haywire.” Warren did not buy his theory, and he lost the argument because “Warren was, you need to understand, stubborn as a mule.”

* [Attorney Wesley J.] Liebeler gave me his own account of the investigation. He ridiculed the seven commissioners, saying the staff called them the Seven Dwarfs because they refused to question the claims of Oswald’s Russian wife, Marina (who was Snow White). He said Dopey was Chief Justice Warren, who dismissed any testimony that impugned Marina’s credibility.
I asked him, “Who was Sleepy?”
He said Allen Dulles, the former director of Central Intelligence. Dulles received this appellation because he often fell asleep during the testimony of witnesses and, when awakened, asked inappropriate questions. For example, an FBI fiber expert was describing the bullet holes in the front of Kennedy’s shirt when Dulles woke up, looked at the blowup of the bloody shirt, and said, “He wears ready – made shirts, huh?” At another point, he spilled a wad of tobacco on a photograph of three bullet fragments and said, as if he had discovered new evidence, that he saw four fragments.
McCloy was Grumpy. According to Liebeler, he became angry when staff lawyers did not pay sufficient attention to his theories about possible foreign involvement.
Liebeler was also scathing about the initial FBI investigation, which he called “a joke.” As for the CIA, he said one of its theories was that Oswald might have been “brainwashed” into serving as a “Manchurian Candidate” assassin. He noted the agency had no basis for this “ridiculous theory” other than a decade – old study it had conducted on brainwashing techniques.

* Arlen Specter: “I showed them the Zapruder film frame by frame and explained that they could either accept the single – bullet theory or begin looking for a second assassin.”

* “Did you examine the color autopsy photos?”
“No,” he answered. “I never saw the autopsy photos.”
“Did anyone else on the commission or staff see them?”
“Not to my knowledge.”
Obviously they were missing. Looking him straight in the eyes, I asked, “Why not?”
Specter shook his head. “You need to ask Rankin.”

* This crucial omission showed that the Warren Commission, no matter how decent and virtuous its seven members, did not conduct an exhaustive investigation. Indeed, it did not even examine the basic autopsy evidence of how the president was killed.

* Numerous fireflies were blinking in the distance. Calling my attention to them, Angleton said the female firefly uses a sort of Morse code of flashes to signal her availability to males. He added, lest I assume it was a chance observation, “Of course, one can’t be sure it’s a firefly.” He explained that the assassination beetle, which was the firefly’s natural predator, had learned over time to replicate this code of flashes. “The firefly responds to this mating call, and instead of finding a mate … is devoured by a beetle.” In this case, the assassination beetle provoked the firefly into flying into the fatal trap.

* [Edward Banfield’s] idea of an intellectual was someone who could see controversial issues in shades of gray, as opposed to a man of action, which included a politician, who saw them in black and white.

* I had learned that projects such as moviemaking, which required the cooperation of many other people, were not for me. My moviemaking ambitions were an ego – driven mistake. I needed to find something less entangling. I decided to move forward with my writing career, a career in which I could be the sole author.

* [Graham Allison] introduced me to Diplomacy, a board game in which seven players are assigned seven countries in pre – World War I Europe and make their strategic decisions. Since there could be only one winner and alliances were necessary to win, the rules permitted players to lie, cheat, and deceive each other.

* As a teacher, I found a marked difference between my Harvard and MIT students. The former were socially transactional. Those in my seminar did not hesitate to attempt to negotiate a better grade on their papers. As I enjoy verbal argument, I usually acquiesced in the negotiations to reward their efforts. One student, Tom Werner, even broadened the negotiations to include an idea to collaborate on a TV series based on a Robert Ludlum thriller. (He went on to produce The Bill Cosby Show. ) On the other hand, MIT students tended to accept their grades as the fate they deserved. They evidenced little interest in engaging in social interaction or negotiations. I did learn from them, however. Unlike their social science counterparts at Harvard, they were the future electrical engineers and computer scientists who would usher in the age of internet.

* I had lunch with Pat [Moynihan] every day while awaiting Kate’s arrival. He was furious at the “minions” in the Nixon administration who were telling him to work to shut down the production of opium in India. “It’s idiotic,” he said. Although India was the world’s largest producer of opium, much of it went to pharmaceutical companies to manufacture codeine, an antitussive. “If they shut down Indian opium, they are going to cause a global coughing crisis.”
It was a role reversal for Pat. When he served in the Nixon White House two years earlier, he had advocated overriding ambassadors and using the threat of military action to suppress opium. I realized that Pat, a chameleon, adapted his views to coincide with his position. In other words, he was a political animal.

He explained that when he joined the Nixon administration, there was a concern that drugs and street crime were linked. He suggested to Nixon that the link theory could be tested by temporarily disrupting the supply of foreign drugs into the United States. What he had not foreseen is that “the Mormons” would expand his idea into policy. “I was as surprised as anyone when they turned my suggestion into the war on heroin.”

* [Tom Wolfe said] that a memoir to be true would have to describe the writer’s most painful humiliations, as Jean – Jacques Rosseau did in his Confessions. He said that would not be easy because a human brain is not wired to relive painful moments. To test Wolfe’s proposition, I later tried to recount one but, as he predicted, it was too traumatic.

* Some five years later, in 2008, the day after Barack Obama won the Democratic nomination for president, I received an email from Katie Rosman, then a reporter for the Wall Street Journal, asking about an exchange I had with her and Obama in 2003 when he was serving in the Illinois Senate… Katie said Obama was standing with Vernon Jordan, whom I also did not know and did not recall ever meeting. She went on to say that she was so impressed with our conversation with Obama that immediately after Tina’s party, she pitched the idea of doing a piece on him to an editor at the New York Times Magazine, but it was rejected on the grounds that a story about an unknown Chicago politician did not belong in the New York Times.

* network television news is a product manufactured by an organization, not by individuals… And while at one level a newsperson chose and prepared individual stories, at another level the organization chose the newsperson. Those who were able to adapt to the networks’ values were retained and promoted. Those who were not able to accept those values were weeded out and shunted aside. From this perspective, it was the organization, not the individuals, that determined the pictures of society represented on national television.

* [New Yorker’s William] Shawn offered me the opportunity to do so by assigning me to investigate the allegations of a conspiracy by the Nixon administration to murder the entire leadership of the Black Panthers, a group of militants opposing the government oppression of Blacks. The New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, and other newspapers had reported as fact that the police had killed 28 Panthers. Shawn told me to find out whether the murder of 28 Panthers by the police was, as he put it, “part of a pattern of genocide.”

…That left four questionable deaths in shoot – outs, and all of them were with local, not federal, police.
While “four deaths, two deaths, even a single death must be the subject of the most serious concern,” I wrote, I concluded that false numbers bandied about in the press had only confused the issue of police violence with a conspiracy theory about government genocide.

Afterward, to their credit, many newspapers, including the Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times, who had lazily repeated the false numbers of Black Panther deaths, printed editorial apologies to their readers.

* I had learned in my work on the Warren Commission that contemporaneous memoranda were far more valuable to understanding a complex issue than the retrospective memories expressed in even the most candid interviews with people involved in the issue.

* Times had changed from the mid – 1960s, when I could get access, unimpeded by a communications officer, to the members of the Warren Commission and its staff. By 1980, all government agencies employed press communications officers, whose job it was to prevent outsiders from getting anything but approved sound bites.

* After the Miami Herald published an exposé of his exploitation of women in November 2018, Epstein sought help, as I learned from one of his close friends, Steve Bannon, Trump’s former strategic advisor. Epstein befriended Bannon after Trump fired him in 2017 and even planned a trip with him on his plane to the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia. Now he sought Bannon’s help restoring his public image. Bannon suggested Epstein should go public by giving an exclusive interview on CBS’s 60 Minutes or another high – profile TV show. Bannon then became his media coach and schooled him on how to take control of a television interview. To this end, in March 2019, Bannon prepared him through a sham 60 Minutes interview in the living room of Epstein’s mansion with a TV camera crew and indoor lighting. Playing the role of a 60 Minutes interviewer, Bannon fired questions at Epstein about the source of his money, his guilty plea, and his relations with women. Although Epstein thought he did well in this trial run, according to a person who attended this mock interview, he decided against having Bannon try to arrange a real 60 Minutes interview.

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