Friday, February 22, 2008

Not exactly crazy

Today I was going to write more about the Cold Cocking incident. But the point I wanted to make has already been made here

...Except I am not so sure that Nagin is that crazy. More, as my trite headline suggests, crazy like a fox. What is hiding behind the public buffoonery is a concerted program of looting the city recovery money via extravagant, no-bid contracts to his contributors. I plan to come back and work on a post, in fact hope to fulfill some of the mayor’s paranoid delusion by encouraging other bloggers in New Orleans to take up Bayou St. John David’s call for a concerted campaign to publicize the clear appearance of corruption in City Hall.

For now, visit his blog–Moldy City– and Dambala’s American Zombie and read what real journalism looks like. The WWL-TV piece promises some of that tonight, but if you want to see it in black-on-white, you can forget the daily Times-Picayune and the weekly “alternative”/lifestyle magazine Gambit. You’ll have to read the best of citizen journalism in the NOLA Blogosphere to start to see the real reason Nagin is mostly invisible when he’s not playing the fool or tossing gasoline on the smoldering racial tension in the city. It’s a great cover for doing with what’s left of the recovery dollars that weren’t already carried away by friends of the White House (which is where most of over $100 billion has gone).


And also here

As you may have inferred, I'm inclined to disagree with the consensus opinion that the mayor is deranged. Attacking the media is a perfectly sane tactic. The mayor might have employed the tactic in a seemingly deranged manner, but seeming deranged worked wonders for him once before. Anyone who's ever worked for a quick temper artist knows that there's a certain level of premeditation to that kind of display. That doesn't mean it won't prove to be stupid, but I doubt it.


This isn't to say that it isn't germane to point out that the Mayor is acting childish/clownish/nutty when he is clearly doing so. If you can't have fun at the expense of power wielded idiotically, you likely just have no sense of humor whatsoever. But David and Mark (and many others) have consistently pointed out that there often seems to be a method to the Mayor's madness which too often gets left out of the story.

Even when expressed in the amusing Nagin/NOLA vernacular, what we're seeing are media intimidation tactics that directly result from reporters (like Lee Zurik) doing their jobs and asking questions. This looks suspicious.

Nagin is clearly agitated by the very thought of a reporter asking what should be very mundane questions about his official schedule over the past year. Agitated enough, in fact, to have "a one on one" with that reporter's boss "in the parking lot." Why the massive retaliation? Is it because someone is too close to something sensitive? Or is it because Nagin just thought he had these people trained already?

One can hardly blame the mayor for thinking all he has to do is shake his fist (or gun) at local media to get them to back down. This is exactly what happened a few weeks ago when the T-P retracted its poorly chosen photo of Nagin playing with unnecessary and expensive riot gear. The paper acknowledged its "error" in running an inflammatory photo but completely ignored the larger point of the story which again boiled down to the Mayor and Police Chief not doing their jobs very well.

It is also of some interest that the Mayor chose to name "the blogs" during his rant. At first glance it seems as though Nagin is confusing the diverse and populous NOLA blogosphere with the racist trolls who live in the bowels of the NOLA.com comment threads. But upon closer examination of the Mayor's specific complaints, it appears as though he's actually concerned with the more substantive journalistic inquiry that appears in places like American Zombie.

It's a convenient line of attack for Nagin to lump all internet-based criticism together. To many casual observers, the word "blogger" simply means "angry nutcase". But the internets are a big tube system. Anyone who reads the local blogosphere(particularly blogs like AZ and MC) can reasonably assume there are a lot of potential dragons rooting around City Hall which, for some reason, go largely unslain by our crusading press.

Is this starting to change? Maybe. Lee Zurik's report, bland as it is, seems to have ruffled some feathers and that can be considered a step in the right direction. Hell, even Clancy Dubos is starting to come around. This shold be a link to audio of Clancy fumbling around on WWL radio yesterday afternoon. In it, he describes his recent experience with blogging as having been "called all kinds of names" by "a handful of people" who "say all kind of spiteful things". I believe the comment thread below this post is what he's referring to. You can draw your own conclusions about Clancy's description of it. But the matter of import here is that the publisher/editor and much of the staff of the Weekly "Alternative" is at least engaging on this turf. Because in the end (even the substantive) bloggers aren't going to publish the stories that make the difference in this community. The professional journalists who have the time, resources, and readership to do so can. And knowing that some of those people do indeed pay attention is encouraging. Someday we may even get one or two of them to stop backing down in the face of a possible "cold cocking"

Updated post to fix a link

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