Rove V. Kos
All Hail Kos! Or The Return of Rove! The responses varied from blood in the water to ho-hum to "what have we come to."
In an online column – featuring a salty expletive, I gotta warn you – Columbia Journalism Review prognosticated:
A prediction: Meacham will succeed in getting Moulitsas and Rove's articles linked on plenty of political blogs, and that will allow Newsweek to claim success, But I would be shocked if either one writes anything that isn't utterly predictable or that falls outside the narrow realm of the worlds inhabited by their ideological fellow-travelers.And Jeff Bercovici at Portfolio shrugged:
Is that what it's about? Balance? So you have a liberal shouting on one side, and a conservative shouting on the other side, and if their voices exactly cancel each other out, you've done your job? That sounds like Crossfire, or like the obligatory post-debate spin room, not like a magazine with an outsize regard for its own reputation.The Nation didn't seem all that thrilled at the prospect of having Kos represent their left in the magazine:
This is an odd pair on several levels. First, it makes Kos look huge. His web commentary and grassroots organizing have earned him a media perch on par with one of the most powerful people to ever work in the Bush White House…And on the right, blogger Edward Morrissey tried to diss Moulitsas with a pretty shoddy sports analogy:Second, it reveals a common misunderstanding of partisanship in the traditional media. In this model, Rove and Moulitsas automatically balance out each other's partisanship, because they are political operators. I doubt it.
Markos' hire is puzzling. Rove has led and won at least two Texas election efforts and three national efforts for the Republicans, before losing his fourth in 2006. Markos exists in a completely different league in political organization. It's as though ESPN hired a Hall of Fame NFL quarterback and a Division III college QB to analyze the upcoming playoffs.(Note to Mr. Morrissey, do you really want to make folksy big league/little league observations this fall, after what Appalachian State did to Michigan in football? Or what Gardner-Webb did to Kentucky in hoops?)
As far as the difference in experience, I agree with the premise that Rove is an accomplished architect in the field of politics. But I also recognize that in a Ron Paul/Howard Dean webbies-against-the-world environment, the influence of Kos is to be underestimated at one's own peril. And the false equivalency of one partisan shrieking at another, well, that's pretty much covered ground in this space.
But my main contention with this decision is this: Here are two partisans -- Kos who derided and chided the 'traditional media' and Rove who famously ignored and avoided the mainstream media "filter" for years. And now they are accepting the embrace of the beast they tried to slay. Do they assume we have no long-term memory? Or do they assume that our cynicism has hit a point where we're longer surprised by these things?
I don't know what's worse. But I know that MediaLand just got a bit more polarized.