MOTY: Give This Man a Pulitzer
With Talking Points Memo, Josh Marshall—along with his obsessive band of political reporters—is building the prototype of what an Internet-based news-gathering organization might one day look like. Don’t believe us? Just ask Alberto Gonzales.
By Sean Flynn; Photographs by Phillip Toledano
The resignation of Alberto Gonzales was one of the brighter moments of the past seven years, a fleeting reprieve for the rule of law and democracy and all that. Still, there was a downside. “As you can imagine, we’re in something of a state of mourning here at TPM,” Josh Marshall deadpanned in a short video produced by TPM Media, the company he started seven years ago in his D.C. apartment and that now employs nine people headquartered in a cramped New York City walk-up above a flower shop. “We’ve grown used to a steady diet of lies and bamboozlement and ridiculousness from Attorney General Alberto Gonzales. And we’re not gonna have that anymore.” Fortunately, there’s a record for posterity, a library of statements and testimony preserved on digital video. “So in honor of the day,” Marshall went on, “and in honor of Al, we’ve put together the ten best moments of Alberto Gonzales in the period of time over which all these different scandals engulfed him and he eventually had to throw in the towel and get out of town.”
What followed was five minutes and forty-six seconds of the chief law-enforcement officer of the United States lying, bamboozling, and being generally ridiculous.
No journalists in America have a better institutional knowledge of the former AG’s pathologies than Marshall and his staff. Their published work on the firing of nine United States Attorneys alone—a scandal virtually unmentioned by other journalists for months after TPM started covering it—could fill a book. Indeed, when Gonzales finally got around to quitting in September, TPM’s dominance in chronicling him had long been both an accepted fact—its work was repeatedly cited by newspapers—and a journalistic curiosity in itself. The thing is, Josh Marshall is a blogger. The reporters and editors who work for TPM are also bloggers, a term that deserves italics because it is now so broad as to be meaningless. It is, however, inherently diminutive, even when it’s being used kindly, which it usually is in relation to TPM.
For instance: When the rest of the press was catching up to what a weasel Gonzales was, the Minneapolis Star Tribune called Marshall THE BLOGGER WHO MIGHT BRING DOWN GONZALES, and the Los Angeles Times punned, in regard to TPM and Gonzales, BLOGS CAN TOP THE PRESSES, as if they’d discovered a new and exotic form of reporter in the digital wilderness. Columbia Journalism Review weighed in with a slightly more sober HOW TALKING POINTS MEMO BEAT THE BIG BOYS ON THE U.S. ATTORNEY STORY.
None of those headlines are untrue (though the Star Tribune’s is endearingly generous). On Gonzales and the United States Attorney debacle, TPM did beat the big boys, assuming “big boys” means all the newspapers, magazines, and television networks that ignored an enormously important story about the rule of law being systematically hijacked by political thugs. TPM dogged it for two months before the national press piled on in March. At that point, TPM was perhaps most valuable as an archive for all the other journalists getting up to speed.
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http://men.style.com/gq/features/full?id=content_6203
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