Reply #34: OK, first things first: I am not a him.

[Plaid Adder]

I am a woman. I've mentioned that plenty of times in print. Now you're up there talking about "his articles." Is this a deliberate attempt to question my previously uncontested record of femaleness? Or could it possibly be an honest mistake produced by careless reading or not having all the information at your disposal?

I'm willing to cut you some slack and assume it was the latter. Perhaps this act of generosity will induce you to do the same for Bernard.

If you want to know why Weiner put Sweden in that list, I would suggest you email him and ask him. He's easy enough to track down over at http://www.crisispapers.org . I'm sure he'll be happy to talk to you about it. He's got a lot more energy, patience, time, and good humor than I have.

As for the credibility of DU, well, that is kind of an interesting question, but the way into that discussion is not by berating Bernard for one possibly mistaken assertion. In the interest of making this discussion potentially more useful and enlightening for DUers, let me provide some information that praxiz perhaps may not have:

* DemocraticUnderground is pretty much a volunteer organization. Skinner, Elad, and EarlG get paid because for them, running this place is pretty much a full-time job. Apart from the Top 10 Idiots, the front-page content is written by other people, none of whom are getting paid. We write out of many different motivations, but I would imagine most of us are animated primarily by a burning desire to provide an alternative to the constant barrage of right-wing news and opinion that is blaring out of all the corporate media outlets in this country 24/7 .

* There are many benefits to this arrangement. The main one is that we are working for ourselves, the cause, and the truth as we know it, and not for some corporate conglomerate that has a financial and ideological investment in producing a particular kind of spin. Another is that because DU can't pay the kind of dough that Molly Ivins and Paul Krugman command, it publishes primarily non-professionalized writers who are not part of the journalism/media/infotainment complex and whose voices would otherwise not be heard. This is one of the reasons DU stands out from a lot of the other crap on TV and on the 'net, and personally I wouldn't want it to change.

* There are also some downsides. One is that the editors don't have the time or the resources to fact-check. I have often submitted columns that I thought were accurate at the time only to email EarlG with corrections two hours later after looking up some things I had misremembered. This is not really something correctable, unless you want to set up an endowed fund out of which to pay an intern to spend all day running down every reference in every article that goes up there.

* Does this potentially hurt DU's credibility? Sure. Unfortunately, however, we live in an age where 'media credibility' is an oxymoron. Dan Rather just got trounced in public for having used a single document of dubious provenance. The hordes of broadcast 'journalists' who put out stories using NO DOCUMENTARY EVIDENCE WHATSOEVER, FORGED OR UNFORGED, many of which later turn out to have virtually no basis in fact (cough, SwiftVets Against Kerry, cough cough) and are concocted purely out of slander, rumor, and spin have somehow managed to get away with it. The New York Times--the goddamn paper of record for this godforsaken country--recently fired one reporter for having made up his stories wholesale, for years, and then apologized for having allowed Judith Miller to turn Chalabi's fantastic and false tales of WMD into a viable pretext for a war that as it turned out nobody needed and from which nobody is liable to benefit. And, of course, we are discovering that many of the right-wing pundits who have been flogging Bush's agenda have been paid more or less outright by the Bush administration, using our tax money, to do it.

As a journal/ezine/blog/whatever, DU's strength is in opinion and analysis. For all the reasons I listed above, DU doesn't have the resources or personnel necessary to develop a line in credible investigative reporting. For that, you have to go to established professional alternative outlets like Mother Jones, where you have trained journalists who are given the time and space necessary to do a decently worked-up in-depth investigation of an actually important issue. Or, you can go to magazines like The New Yorker, which is suddenly becoming an important source of news on the Iraq war, or Vanity Fair, which is emerging as a surprisingly ballsy alternative to the Bushwhacked mass media.

The sad, sad, sad thing is that in the course of producing these opinion and analysis pieces, amateur pundits like myself, who are basically working off what we can find on the web, are often going into these stories in more depth and detail than many of the people who do this kind of thing for a living. That just should not be; but it is, and woe is us that it is so.

So, you know, sure, if DU were a professional media outlet there would be an established 'line of defense,' as it were, that might flag things like that reference to Sweden for investigation/verification before things went to press. But if DU were a professional media outlet, we'd probably have other problems.

This has already gone on too long and by now it's no longer really a response to praxiz. My point is that before you judge the credibility of a piece of news you should know something about how it's made--whether it's something you see on DU or something you see on ABC News. And my other point is that DU is first and foremost a labor of love. That's unlikely to ever change; and so the pros and cons are also unlikely to change much.

C ya,

The Plaid Adder