It occurred to me, as I sat there watching an interracial couple banging, that jacking off in a hotel room was not unlike the larger experience of campaign reporting. You watch two performers. You kind of like it when one of them gets humiliated. You know they’re professionals, so you don’t feel much sympathy for them. You wish you could participate, but instead you watch with a hidden envy and feel vaguely ashamed for watching. You think you could probably do as good a job or better. You sometimes get a glimpse, intentionally or not, of society’s hidden desires and fears. You watch the porn week after week, the scenes almost always the same, none of them too memorable. The best ones get sent around the Internet.

I'm past this. Or at least I think I am.

That’s from Michael Hastings’ (of McChrystal-slaying fame) piece in GQ on covering the 2008 presidential election for Newsweek. While more graphic than average, it’s certainly not the only piece I’ve ever read decrying the banality of covering national politics, and in particular presidential campaigns.

Before I continue writing, I want to make one thing clear: I bear no ill will toward political journalists, and most of them do fine work in an imperfect situation. I am not saying I never want to or never will cover national politics. And, since everything I write here is merely a reflection of what I am thinking at the moment and is unedited, I could change my mind next week.

But I am increasingly of the mind that covering politics – at least on the national level – is no longer the goal of my journalistic career. When I first enrolled at Maryland, the idea of covering a presidential campaign sent chills down my spine. Two of my finest professors made their names covering national politics. I worked at one of the nation’s premier political publications and enjoyed my time there immensely. But the media environment in Washington, D.C. has shifted, and I don’t think I want to be a part of it.

Many of the problems and questions I have about the truth vs. The Truth are centered in national politics, where the obsession with narratives is amazing. I supposed this started with GVPT170 back in school, where Frances Lee (another great professor) taught us about the news industry’s bias toward covering the horse-race instead of issues. I was a wonk even back then, so I found the lack of policy coverage disappointing.

But to me, the more disturbing element is symbiotic relationship between the national political media and political actors. The relationship has been going on for too long at this point, and each side knows how to use the other. I’m not going to go Glenn Greenwald on you and declare that reporters should never be friendly with the people they cover, but the relationship, as outlined here by Hastings, is a little disgusting:

Everyone traveling with the campaigns is completely dependent on them for food and transportation and shelter—not to mention any little interview crumb they toss our way, any remotely intriguing piece of information. Political reporting is founded on very dysfunctional relationships. You need them and they need you, but on some level they hate and distrust you (and on some level you, too, hate and distrust them), and in my experience a lot of that gets sublimated into food. Eat, hoard, scrounge, because you never know if they’ll give you anything more.

Also note that I’m not saying I wouldn’t engage in policy coverage. The idea of covering regulatory agencies or an executive department is tremendously appealing. The idea of going out on the road with a campaign is not. The idea of having to endlessly hyperventilate over President Obama’s polling numbers is not. Wondering whether or not he emoted enough during his speech about the gulf oil spill seems mind-numbingly boring. All of it involves conjecture. All of it involves how the narrative is being shaped. And the press shapes the narrative. It doesn’t seem to be based in fact.

Much of it seems to be irrelevant as well. Chris Beam meant this article as a joke, and as a way to mock political scientists, but I agree with a lot of what is written.

I guess, in the end, it comes down to one last quotation from Hastings:

And for me, the question was, Why the hell am I covering this?

What the hell am I talking about? For the purposes of a lot of what I’m writing here, I’ll distinguish between the truth and the Truth. The truth is simply factually accurate. For example, I’m 21 years old. That’s true. The Truth has more depth than that, and it’s about whether a narrative or a premise of an article is spot-on, it’s about whether the story is complete and whether its assumptions are valid. The overwhelming majority of news articles are true, but a much smaller number of them are True.

Journalism claims to deliver the Truth, complete and unvarnished. But the structure of news stories, as well as human nature, makes this claim virtually impossible to deliver 100 percent of the time.

Partially, this is due to the form’s conventions. To be “balanced,” journalists sometimes air arguments they think are bullshit. A story that’s only budgeted for 10 inches doesn’t leave much room for context. And the need to meet deadline means sometimes voices can get left out of a report, and if the story doesn’t merit a follow-up, tough for the source who didn’t call back by 5 p.m.

Just as often, the Truth suffers because reporters are lazy, or fall victim to inherent psychological biases. What we see is more important than what we know. A single outstanding case outweighs hundreds of normal ones. We take claims on face value without vetting them. We block out information that contradicts whatever narrative we have previously chosen to accept. Sometimes that makes the narrative more True than it was before.

A classic example of this is the press’ treatment of Al Gore in 2000. If you remember the campaign, Gore was basically painted as a serial liar who claimed he invented the internet and said ‘Love Story‘ was based off his life. The fact that he did neither didn’t seem to bother the press that much.

But even if you dig, getting to the Truth is incredibly difficult. I interned at PolitiFact last winter. PolitiFact concerns itself exclusively with the truth. It determines whether statements – generally lasting a maximum of two sentences – are true or false. It doesn’t attempt to tell you if cap-and-trade legislation will create more jobs. It just tells you if “every legitimate group” that has studied the issue thinks it’ll create jobs. But even evaluating seemingly up-or-down statements is complex enough that besides just “true” and “false” rankings, there are also “barely true,” “half-true” and “mostly true” grades. As Jay Rosen recently tweeted:

Did Halliburton defraud the government of hundreds of millions of dollars as Arianna said? @politifact: http://jr.ly/3ydh

Today’s report by @politifact, which took four days to complete, shows how fact checking our televised dialogue can be grindingly difficult.

It took a group of Pulitzer-winning journalists four days to determine whether or not Huffington’s statement was true. Their eventual answer? Maybe.

So if simply determining the truth is that difficult, then uncovering the Truth must be damn near impossible. Obviously, the first step is getting the facts right. If journalists hadn’t endlessly repeated the fact that Gore claimed to have invented the internet, it would have been a lot more difficult for the false narrative about Gore being a serial liar to take hold.

There’s also the case in which a reporter fails to question a narrative, and opts not to pursue the truth. The best example of this can be found in Rosen’s post “The Quest for Innocence and the Loss of Reality in Political Journalism.”

More broadly, any Truth is incredibly complex and has multiple facts and perspectives supporting (and not supporting) it. Getting to its core and getting it exactly, 100 percent right should be the goal of every story. But many good journalists admit that too often, this ends in failure.

This is from an interview with Lorraine Adams, a Pulitzer-winning investigative reporter at the Washington Post who left journalism to become a novelist:

You recently gave an interview to the BBC wherein you stated you left journalism for fiction so that you could write the truth. Could you explain what you meant?

This is a wholly imagined [book], so this is as far from the truth as you can possibly get. And of course, they’re right. This is not the truth in terms of a witnessable, observable scene. But what I would argue is that no reporter is ever allowed to see these things. What happens is we read the accounts of embedded journalists who follow soldiers. Those accounts by those embedded reporters stand in for the truth: They are observed scenes, they are witnessable scenes. But there is a privacy that no journalist ever pierces. That is where the truth resides. Because we live in a culture that believes we must not waste any time on works of the imagination, that we must only be hardworking, very serious people who only read facts, we assume that these nonfiction accounts are the whole truth. In fact, they are as much as a partial truth, for different reasons, as fiction.

In summary, Truth-telling is:

• journalism’s major goal.
• Very hard to do.
• Achieved with less than perfect regularity.

Modern journalism’s theoretical solution to this is to stick to the truth, to not judge and to letter the reader decide. But just rattling off facts and information rarely creates a compelling story. And modern journalism, even “straight” news pieces, are filled with opinion. The very act of filling out a front page is opinion. The lede story, in the opinion of the newspaper’s editors, is the most important one of the day. The lede of a story, in the opinion of the reporter and the editor, is the most important information. And in consigning ourselves to be mere deliverers of information, aren’t we depriving our consumers of our right to the Truth?

These debates might seem stupid and academic, but to be honest, the possibility that an article I write doesn’t deliver the Truth scares the living hell out of me. And what scares me even more is the following possibility: Journalism, as a field, is bullshit.

Someone tell me why I’m wrong.

Here’s my question: Why is this news?

I’m not the type to argue that politicians’ families or family lives are completely off-limits. How a politician treats their spouse and children can often reveal a lot about their personality. And personal actions can reveal public hypocrisy, like when a family values crusader has an affair or when a senator who opposes gay rights is outed.

This has none of those elements. As the Sun notes, O’Malley has pushed measures to crack down on underage drinking in the past. But O’Malley isn’t 18, and he isn’t the one who got drunk. You can argue that it shows he’s a poor parent, but that’s absurd. Did I drink when I was underage? Yep. So did all but three or four of the other 40 kids who lived on my floor freshman year. But that’s not a reflection on our parents, it’s a reflection on the fact that we were 18 and in college.

When a normal person has an affair, it isn’t news. When a politician does, it’s big news, only because it reveals something important about a public figure. But this story doesn’t (actually) reveal anything about O’Malley.

So far, no one is making political hay of this. And I doubt anyone openly will. So it’s easy to say that this story has done no harm. But this is the classic example of undernews, and it’ll show up in backyard conversations and newspaper comment sections for at least the next few months.

I should note that I don’t begrudge any of the numerous outlets that did report it – once Katie O’Malley put out the statement, they basically had to (and were essentially given permission to by the O’Malley family.)

Over winter break, I read Superfreakonomics, a collaboration between economist Steven Levitt, an economics professor at the University of Chicago and freelance journalist Stephen Dubner.

The final chapter of the book deals with some rather odd technological solutions to global warming, proposed by the thinkers at Intellectual Ventures, a think tank run by a former Microsoft CTO. These solutions basically amount to re-engineering the planet’s atmosphere. Their favorite in the book seems to be constructing giant, 18-mile-long hoses that pump sulfur in to the air, which would (theoretically) cool the earth.

The chapter was met by scathing criticism from established climate scientists and journalists with green credentials when the book was first released in the fall. Elizabeth Kolbert of The New Yorker has a pretty definitive take-down attempt, and RealClimate, ClimateProgress (twice! and a third time!) and the Union of Concerned Scientists also chip in, variously accusing Levitt and Dubner of misrepresenting their sources, of being ignorant of climate science and of misleading the public by acting like technological solutions are available if political or policy ones fail.

I am not going to recount the full debate here. I don’t have the time to do that, and I don’t have the expertise to summarize the points, or even fully understand them. And that’s the problem. Despite reading all of these blog posts, and having read the book, I have no idea if Levitt and Dubner are geniuses or fools, or if the ideas they are presenting are brilliant or foolish. I don’t have the background knowledge to evaluate these arguments, and I lack the time to develop this knowlege. I barely understand the lingo, and while I can follow the arguments, I’m stretching my high school and college science courses in order to do so.

So beyond admitting that I’m terrible at science, what point am I getting at? My point is that to the average person, most debates they hear about on the news are like this. I’m going to use politics as an example, since I would point that to that as the single area virtually every journalist understands well. But most people barely understand politics. It’s not that they don’t care, or that they’re dumb. It’s just that they lack the language and thought processes to understand politics the way the average journalist does. I’ll use an example from a great piece Chris Hayes, the Washington editor of The Nation, wrote about canvassing swing voters while campaigning for John Kerry:

[I]t was a fundamental lack of understanding of what constituted the broad category of the “political.” The undecideds I spoke to didn’t seem to have any intuitive grasp of what kinds of grievances qualify as political grievances. Often, once I would engage undecided voters, they would list concerns, such as the rising cost of health care; but when I would tell them that Kerry had a plan to lower health-care premiums, they would respond in disbelief–not in disbelief that he had a plan, but that the cost of health care was a political issue. It was as if you were telling them that Kerry was promising to extend summer into December.

To cite one example: I had a conversation with an undecided truck driver who was despondent because he had just hit a woman’s car after having worked a week straight. He didn’t think the accident was his fault and he was angry about being sued. “There’s too many lawsuits these days,” he told me. I was set to have to rebut a “tort reform” argument, but it never came. Even though there was a ready-made connection between what was happening in his life and a campaign issue, he never made the leap. I asked him about the company he worked for and whether it would cover his legal expenses; he said he didn’t think so. I asked him if he was unionized and he said no. “The last job was unionized,” he said. “They would have covered my expenses.” I tried to steer him towards a political discussion about how Kerry would stand up for workers’ rights and protect unions, but it never got anywhere. He didn’t seem to think there was any connection between politics and whether his company would cover his legal costs. Had he made a connection between his predicament and the issue of tort reform, it might have benefited Bush; had he made a connection between his predicament and the issue of labor rights, it might have benefited Kerry. He made neither, and remained undecided …

Everyone feels an immediate and intuitive expertise on morals and values–we all know what’s right and wrong. But how can undecided voters evaluate a candidate on issues if they don’t even grasp what issues are?

I’m going to argue the feeling I felt when trying to evaluate the Freakonomics dispute is a variant on the feeling the swing voters Hayes met in Wisconsin had. I lacked the tools to ultimately resolve it on my own, and even after seeking out high-quality journalism on the subject, I still wasn’t certain who was right. The swing voters in Wisconsin were likely relying on local TV news and Associated Press briefs to become informed about politics, so how are they going to know any better?

I’m sure everything I read from Levitt and Dubner, and everything I read on the other side of the issue, was true. Someone said it, some research indicated it, etc. And I bet most of the news the swing voters in Wisconsin got was true.

But just because something is based in fact doesn’t make it True. Ultimately, either the solutions proposed by Intellectual Ventures will work or they won’t, and ultimately, either Kerry or Bush was the best candidate for those swing voters in Wisconsin. But the only people who have the tools and access to determine the Truth are journalists. And too often, journalists aren’t finding the Truth. And if they are, they aren’t letting their readers and viewers know about it.

To me, this is the defining problem and potential of journalism in the digital age: the Truth is more elusive than ever and yet, our ability to find it is greater than it has ever been. Consumers have access to more information – much, if not all of it, factual – than they could possibly know what to do with. But this information can easily lead to overload. And the poor nature of significant portions of it – chain e-mails, astroturfing, advertising, slap-dash blog posts – only make the problem worse.

You can point to a dozen other ways the digital age is changing journalism. We all need to learn how to shoot video and edit audio! Our business model is collapsing! We need to master government databases! We need to go hyperlocal! And these things are all well and good, but in the end, journalism is about telling stories. True ones. And if the journalists of the twenty-first century fail to do that, nothing else will matter.

Like many writers, I live every day with the vague nightmare that at some point, someone more knowledgeable than myself is going to sit up and pen a massive screed indicating exactly where my work is shallow and fraudulent and rooted in lame, half-assed assumptions. I see myself labeled a writer, and I get good reviews, and I have the same doubts buried, latent, even after my successes. I suspect many, many writers feel this way.

That’s David Simon, in one of my all-time favorite quotes.

Editors assure me that what I’ve written isn’t stupid and help me come up with other things to consider, other sources to interview, etc. But without the guidance and cover an editor provides, I’m at a loss for what to do as a solo blogger. The way I see it, there are a few options for me:

• Aggregate: My Twitter account basically does this. Anything I really want to highlight, I highlight there. For longer pieces that I want to highlight selections from, or for videos and photos, I’ve created a Tumblr. And it’s not like the internet is short on aggregators.
• Break news: I’m not a solo journalist at this point (vide supra), and although I would love to see this change at some point, any news I break is going on my employer’s site, not on this personal blog.
• Opinion: This isn’t an option at this stage in my journalism career. As much as I think the View From Nowhere might be bankrupt, I can’t go spouting off with my opinions on national issues if I hope to get hired by a mainstream news organization.

So that leaves me with one idea: write analytically, focusing on journalism, since that’s the one thing . Hopefully, you’ll see some of that writing in the coming weeks. But I’m sure my loyal readers (all four three of you) have some ideas. What else should I do with this blog?

And from this point forward, consider what I write here to be a first draft, untouched by an editor. So if my work here is brilliant, all the credit goes to me. If it isn’t, well, remember the old saying:

Anyone who edits their own copy has a fool for an editor.

• I really liked Paul Duggan’s story in the Washington Post last Friday about a D.C. couple who were surprised when a massive package of marijuana was delivered to their house. A drug dealer was supposed to pick the package up from the front steps, but apparently mistimed it. While the story is interesting on its face, what I was really fascinated by was how Duggan wrote it. He doesn’t reveal what the news is until the 20th graf. Instead, he uses a strong, detailed narrative to tell a story, and then after the reveal, it turns into almost an issue story, examining how common this technique is used to deliver drugs and how D.C. police are handling the issue.
• This Slate piece on the history of the relationship between Whales and humans contains this incredibly fascinating tidbit:
  

  In Australia in the early 20^th century, shore whalers at Eden, on the coast of New South Wales, co-operated with a pod of orca led by a bull male named Old Tom. The killer whales—so-called by early hunters because they saw these whales killing their own kind—would herd humpbacks passing by on their migration south toward the Antarctic. The orca would corral the unsuspecting great whales into the cup of Two-fold Bay. There the human hunters would row out to harpoon them. As the carcase sank to the shallow sea bed, the orca would be allowed to claim their part of the bargain: the humpback’s tongue, the only part of the animal they relished. Twenty-four hours later, bloated with gas, the dead humpbacks would rise to the surface for collection by the whalers.

• And finally a trio of really good political profiles: First, an in-denial Rod Blagojevich in Esquire:
  

  “Where the fuck is Woodward and Bernstein? It’s shocking that this could happen in America. Because I’m telling you, I am innocent of every single allegation. Every one. I’ve been falsely accused, I’ve been lied about, I’ve been maliciously treated. Worse than that, my family and my children have to suffer. And larger than that, the people of Illinois had their governor stolen from them based on false accusations that were made knowingly.”

  So you’re saying …

  “He falsely accuses me, falsely says things that the four hundred hours of taped conversations would show, and after he does it — by taking snippets of conversation out of context — he goes into court and gets a protective order that prevents those tapes from being heard by the public and prevents me from telling you what’s on those tapes. Now how’s that America?”

• An eminently practical but profane Rahm Emmanuel in The New Republic:
  

  And then there are the f-bombs, which Emanuel reels off like a verbal tic, sometimes embedding them in other words with Germanic aplomb. There is, for example, “Fucknutsville” (his pet name for Washington) and “knucklefuck” (an honorific bestowed on Republican opponents). In administration meetings, Emanuel will occasionally announce, “I think it’s fucking idiotic, but it’s your call.” (That would be Rahm-speak for: “You have more expertise than I do on this subject.”) He’s even been known to use the imprecation as a term of endearment, as when he signs off friendly phone calls: “Fuck you. See you later. I love you.” As Phil Kellam, one of Emanuel’s star recruits from the 2006 election cycle, recently joked to me, “If you could sum up Rahm Emanuel, it would be: big ideas, big mouth, big heart, little finger.” (Emanuel lost half his middle finger in a teenage accident.)

  Among those most fluent in the Emanuel vernacular are members of the Obama economic team, with whom the chief of staff interacts constantly. For example, on February 10, 2009, Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner delivered a speech laying out the various steps he would take to revive the financial system. The pundits promptly panned it, and the markets began to swoon. Both had expected Geithner to deliver a detailed set of remedies; instead, the secretary offered only the broad contours of a strategy.

  Emanuel went ballistic. “He was like, ‘How could they have let expectations get so out of whack?’” recalls one official. Soon after, he began to take a special interest in Geithner’s work– in the way that a Jewish mother can be said to take a special interest in her son’s romantic life.

• And a Scott Brown whose appeal seems mainly driven by sex in The New York Times Magazine:
  

  “You’re gorgeous!” shouted one woman standing about a dozen feet behind him. “Turn around so we can see your face.” Two other women held up a large sign with a message for Brown, or rather his daughters. “Our Sons Are Available,” it read.

  This mob scene repeated itself that night in Falmouth, a town on Cape Cod, and the next night in Worcester. To prevent people from rushing at and smothering him, Brown promised over and over again to stay as long as necessary to shake every hand. In Falmouth, where a long line stretched out the door and into the 15-degree cold, Nancy Sawyer, 40, told me she was reminded of a Kiss concert from her youth. Ruth Eldredge, 49, said she had decided on her dream ticket for 2012: Romney for president and Brown for vice president, with a promise that they’d make Palin secretary of state. “They’d be so good-looking that people would just love us,” she said, meaning Republicans. “They’re beautiful!”

Until recently, I had been to exactly one Walmart in my life, at the insistence of a friend I was visiting in Natchez, Mississippi, about 10 years ago. It was one of the sights, she said. Up and down the aisles we went, properly impressed by the endless rows and endless abundance. Not the produce section. I saw rows of prepackaged, plastic-trapped fruits and vegetables. I would never think of shopping there.

That’s from Atlantic food editor Corby Kummer’s piece on Walmart v. Whole Foods on selling sustainable foods.

I’m not going to begrudge those who choose not to shop at Walmart, but how have you never been to one in your life? That literally takes effort. They are freaking everywhere, and they carry everything. How has it never been convenient for you to shop at a Walmart?

I should also note I really enjoy Kummer’s writing, and I’m not trying to single him out for criticism. But I’m just baffled as to how you can be middle-aged and only have shopped at Walmart once in your life.

From The Boston Phoenix

Here are my thoughts on the political thunderbolt that just landed in my home state:

1. Shortly after Coakley conceded to brown, Washington Times reporter Eli Like tweeted that a correspondent in Massachusetts had told him that “The American people called. They want their country back.” That statement is simply incorrect.

This was a local failure, and specifically, the failure of a terrible politician who had terrible advisers. Martha Coakley ran a god-awful campaign, and Scott Brown ran a good one. Brown won. Marc Ambinder at The Atlantic has a pretty definitive takedown of her campaign’s argument the failure was a national one. Coakley didn’t even call Boston Mayor Tom Menino — who has the strongest political machine in the state — until this week. The newly-elected Mayor of Lawrence, another Democratic stronghold, wanted Coakely to come swear him in. She never returned his call.

This election had very little to do with national politics, and everything to do with local ones. I don’t mean this in the way Globe columnist Joan Vennochi does — I’m not blaming Beacon Hill for Coakley’s loss. I’m blaming Coakley. This was an atrocious, boring, uninspiring campaign.

Brown’s campaign, on the other hand, was exciting and bold. He’s a Republican and he compared himself to JFK, ferchrissake. (Coakley is not Lloyd Bentsen.) He campaigned energetically and had a simple platform — tax cuts for everyone! He needed to make noise to overcome the inherent advantage Democrats have in the Bay State, and he did that.

National politics did play a role in this election. Dissatisfaction with Democrats nationally gave Brown an opening with which to attack to Coakley and a way for him to raise money out-of-state, but she could have shut the door pretty quickly by just waging a normal campaign, responding to him and making a case for a Democratic policies. She didn’t. She hunkered down, said nothing, avoided debates and acted like she had something to hide.

2. A lot of people — including Tucker Carlson on Sunday — were making the case that this was about health care, and that more specifically, it was a rejection of Massachusetts’ own experiment with universal health care. Um, not really. The last Globe poll on the issue — from September 2009 — showed Massachusetts residents supporting the plan by a two-to-one margin. Massachusetts residents like their health care, even if that doesn’t fit the national narrative.

And Scott Brown didn’t campaign against the Massachusetts health care bill, even writing in a Globe op-ed that “I hope other states follow our example.” He did take a stance against national health care reform, but that was because, as he wrote, “we are way ahead of the rest of the country with our own state reforms, we will get nothing in return.” He had more substantive objections to the bill — he said it would cost too much and cut too much from Medicare — but these were secondary to his “Tax Cuts for All!” enthusiasm.

3. Hey, MSNBC. You keep putting this guy Mike Barnicle on TV. Yeah, he seems nice. But he’s an unethical plagiarist hack and possible fabricator. How can anyone trust anything he says? I realize he’s not reporting, but to those who know Barnicle’s history, it makes the entire network harder to trust.

More points after the jump…

4. It’s not totally ridiculous for Massachusetts to elect a Republican. Yes, I suppose it might be true that the Bay State is “the most liberal in the union.” But before Deval Patrick, we had sixteen straight  years of Republican governors. John Kerry only beat Bill Weld 52-44 in 1996 — the last time he or Kennedy was seriously challenged. In a special election to replace retiring Rep. Marty Meehan in the 5th Congressional District in 2007, Democrat Niki Tsongas only beat Republican Jim Ogonowski 51-45. I realize a bigger upset is a bigger and better story, but keep your pants on.

5. Looking forward, I think this points to a serious problem: Massachusetts Democrats don’t seem to have much of a bench. In 2006, you could have pointed to four rising stars in the party: Coakley, Patrick, Lieutenant Governor Timothy Murray and Treasurer Tim Cahill. Coakley’s career is probably over. Patrick is slumping in the polls, and Cahill is running as an independent, challenging him for the governorship. Only Murray still looks good, and he’s tied to Patrick.

And the Massachusetts legislature is absurdly dysfunctional and corrupt — the past three House Speakers have resigned, and two have been sent to prison. The FBI caught a state senator on tape last year stuffing a bribe in her bra. (New York‘s — ironic, I know — Jason Zengerle has a great wrap-up of the various malfeasance), And the Massachusetts state legislature hasn’t produced studs for higher office recently. Look at the top Massachusetts officials, and what their backgrounds are:

• Gov. Deval Patrick – Justice Dept. official, private lawyer
• Lt. Gov. Tim Murray – Mayor of Worcester
• AG Martha Coakley – DA of Middlesex County
• Treasurer Tim Cahill – Norfolk County Treasurer
• Sen. John Kerry – Assistant DA, Lt. Governor
• I’m not going to list all the U.S. Reps, but only four of ten served in the state legislature – Barney Frank, John Olver, Ed Markey and Stephen Lynch. Of these, Lynch left the legislature in 2002. Before that, Olver left in 1991. Frank and Markey both left the legislature decades ago.

I’m going to attribute some of this to the influence of the James Michael Curley, who many Massachusetts politicians hold up as a role model. This leads them to dominate political machines at home and model themselves after legendary Boston Mayor and Massachusetts Governor James Michael Curley, instead of going off and serving the country on the national level.*

6. OK, National politics, Massachusetts wants you to go away now. From David Bernstein at The Boston Phoenix:

It’s been interesting to have the national political attention on a Massachusetts election. We haven’t had that probably since what, Weld-Kerry? And even that was just one of several going on.

We seldom get this kind of thing — the independent groups running nasty ads, the national blogosphere ranting, the 24/7 news channels talking about us. A bunch of other states get this periodically: Ohio, Florida, California, Pennsylvania, any Presidential ‘swing state,’ and of course Iowa/New Hampshire etc. I always enjoy travelling to other states when they happen to be in the middle of one of these, with the constant TV ads, one more outrageous than the last, and the interplay of local and national analysis.

We got the full effect the past couple of weeks, and I don’t think it both attracted and repulsed Bay Staters. You can’t help but get sucked into its eddy, but it just makes you more and more unhappy with the very politics that you are becoming more engaged in.

And from Massachusetts resident Dan Drezner, blogging at Foreign Policy:

Ohio, you can keep your swing state status all to yourself.  I no longer want any part of it.

For those readers who have never had the privilege of living in a battleground state, let me explain what the experience is like.  Every other television commercial is about the campaign.  Day after day, the race dominates the front page of the newspaper.  Your mailbox is stuffed with fliers for or against one of the candidates.  Your friends and neighbors talk about the campaign — and who you support can affect your friendships.  You can’t escape either the race …

Over this weekend, by my count, we have received ten phone calls asking us to vote for or against someone, and then a few phone calls on top of that polling us about our voting intentions (weirdest call, hands down, was a recorded message from Pat Boone.  The Official Blog Wife got that call, and the end of it had no idea who Boone wanted her to vote for).  Since these inquiries can’t be put on the Do Not Call list, the phone will not stop ringing.

It’s worth noting that my father was similarly annoyed by the constant phone calls, and was equally baffled by the Pat Boone call, which was apparently just on behalf of the AARP. As a Republican, my dad found the whole thing exciting, but I don’t think he would like to go through it every two years.

Unfortunately, Brown’s victory basically guarantees they’ll have to go though this again in 2012. Which will be fun, I guess.

*Ironically, Curley had plenty of national ambition, but besides for four terms in the House during his 50-year political career, they went largely unfulfilled.

He makes some good points, as does Spencer Ackerman in talking about how modular journalism like that practiced at The Washington Independent (which I am a big, big fan of) can solve many of the problems Kinsley raises.

Serious question: Is it possible to have a civil and edifying comments section on a political blog? If so, how? Advice welcomed.

I’ve often said that if you ever want to lose faith in humanity, you should just read online comments on newspaper stories – it doesn’t matter which paper, what kind of story it is, or when it was posted. Many, if not most, of them are going to be ill-informed, vitriolic, filled with grammatical and spelling mistakes or all of the above.

The Diamondback is, sadly, generally no exception to this rule. The first comment I ever moderated was on a story about the College Park City Council. It boldly asserted that there was no College Park City Council, and that the only two cities in Maryland were Annapolis and Baltimore. This is demonstrably false.

But the comments never got as bad as they did this semester. The university was in the midst of several controversies focusing on campus diversity, which led to a lot of outright or borderline racist remarks being posted (for obvious reasons, I’m not going to repost them here.) The system we used to monitor comments didn’t do a good job of filtering, and we weren’t alerted when comments were posted. This meant I or the web editor would check the site in the afternoon, only to find a mess of vitrol, often too big for us to contain.

Soon, this problem expanded, thanks to the efforts of one very persistent, very annoying commenter.

She (or he) went by the name “Cynthia” – at least most of the time. The persona they would post as was as a black woman engaging in reverse racism – damning whites to hell, saying she hoped the whites on campus would die, claiming all white people were racist, even threatening the university president – which earned us a call from University Police. She also threatened to come to the newsroom and “beat the ass” of several Diamondback editors multiple times.

The posts would come several times a day, on articles of all types, even ones having absolutely nothing to do with race. It got progressively more and more absurd. Cynthia’s rhetoric was so inflammatory, so over-the-top, that I’m convinced it wasn’t actually an angry black woman, but someone simply trying to start fights. “She” would also occasionally post racist remarks under multiple names – we could tell they were all “here” because the IP addresses were identical and the comments would be made within minutes of each other.

And “her” attempts to provoke worked. Her posts would draw angry responses, usually from white people. Relatively often, these responses would be racist themselves. Which would prompt more anger, more accusations and more INTERNET SHOUTING.

Eventually, we switched to a new commenting system, which notified us every time a comment was made. We could quickly respond when Cynthia posted, or when other racist or otherwise offensive remarks went up and put out fires before they started. The incivility, the racism and the SHOUTING all quickly went away.

So why does this matter? It shows how one person who, either as a joke or because they are actually an incredibly rude and/or racist and/or incivil person, can quickly cause an entire commenting system to slowly devolve into a basically worthless mess. This has major implications for how journalists are going to interact with their readers in the digital era. To me, it indicates that to keep comment sections civil, informative and truly useful, there must be something approaching a zero-tolerance approach.

Many of the responders to Cillizza’s question say the solution to this problem is to engage with regular readers and commenters, to make the commenting section a  two-way street, and to vigorously moderate the comments or to create a membership model, where people’s real names and e-mail addresses are somehow checked and verified.

The more successful commenting sections on the internet, such as those at the The New York Times and the Voice of San Diego, follow at least one of these rules. The Times approves all comments before they appear, and the Voice uses a membership model with verified e-mail addresses and names.

But there are issues will all of these solutions.

By stopping every possibly inflammatory comment, are journalists restricting freedom of speech? At least philosophically, don’t extreme views (“Obama hasn’t accomplished anything during his first year, and his health care plan is going to cause the elderly to die” OR “Bush was a fascist who should be tried at the international criminal court, and is a bigger terrorist than Bin Laden will ever be”) deserve the same treatment as moderate ones (“Obama’s first year was a mixed bag” OR “While I disagree with Bush’s national security policies, his domestic ones were fine”)?

And in a time of declining newsroom budgets and shrinking monetary and personnel resources, how much time can reporters necessarily spend monitoring comments on their articles, never mind thoughtfully engaging in discussions with regular readers. And how many editors are going to be comfortable with their reporters responding publicly to commenters without editing?

As for a membership model, could that have a negative impact on Web traffic? And verifying e-mail accounts or names would again consume precious newsroom resources. Similarly, most newspapers can’t afford to hire a staffer who focuses solely on moderating or approving comments.

As you might be able to guess, I’m not too optimistic about keeping online comments civil in the future. Any real solution is likely going to require a mixture of the solutions discussed above. Some news organizations might stumble upon the right combination of moderation and membership to keep comments civil without resorting to censorship, while keeping journalists at the right level of involvement.

This is a sticky issue, and these discussions are taking place in newsrooms across the country. In one of them, a fix to the problem might arise.