On Line

You’ve said that you consider your site to be competing with mainstream journalism.
In some respects.

Then what’s the mainstream media’s primary purpose?
To inform the readers of the newspapers. Good old-fashioned, straightforward, objective news reporting has tremendous value. If I had to choose between all reporting and no commentary and all commentary and no reporting, I’d say to hell with the commentary, give me the reporting. Commentary ought to be the second stage. Straight news reporting digs out facts, organizes them, puts them on the table, and other people should be arguing about what they mean—what conclusions we should draw, how they relate to other facts that are reported someplace else.

The profession of journalism got screwed up beginning in the early 1970s or so. A whole generation of people went into journalism because they wanted to change the world. A generation of reporters wanted to spend their time not telling what the facts are in as fair and objective way as they can, but telling you what they mean and what conclusions we should draw from them and why their ultimate import is that you should vote for a Democrat next time. There’s way too much of that going on. I think it would be good to have a cleaner separation between news reporting and news commentary. One of the problems is that lots of reporters [feel] that guys like us are having all the fun. That they’re stuck with the boring stuff, that it would be more fun to be a commentator. I don’t know, I’m not sure if it’s more fun or not, but I understand why they might think that.

Could you see a dramatic shift in your tone if a Democrat wins this election?
Our sources of information would be a little bit different—we have had friendly relationships with people in the administration. So we’ll have to work out a little bit different relationship there because, like I say, in general our tone has been supportive toward the administration, with very important exceptions. If we find ourselves writing about a Democratic administration, we’ll have to work out how to handle that tone. When we can support them, find good things, we want to encourage that. We don’t want to be naysayers and nothing but critics, but we’ll also try to ride herd on them as best we can.

One thing you won’t see with us is the insane hate you see on the left for the Bush administration. Where does it come from? I don’t know. You hear all sorts of different explanations—some people think it has a lot to do with the fact that Bush is religious. I’m sure that theory has some truth to it. Some of it has to do with—well, talk about an echo chamber, go to a site like the Daily Kos or Democratic Underground. By the way, I don’t really do that. I think I’ve looked at Daily Kos twice in my life. I’ve looked at the Democratic Underground more than that, but not many times more. But just based on the experience I’ve had with those kinds of sites, these people try to egg each other on. It’s like a beehive, and the bees are all buzzing, and there are only bees. They don’t look at an opposing moderating viewpoint. That’s part of it—just the way a lot of these Internet activists, in particular, are set up, where they function, where they organize themselves, lends itself to this kind of endless reinforcement, this ever-growing rage.

Also part of it is that, while demographically Democrats probably skew elderly more than they skew anything else, on the Web a lot of those people are young. And when I think back to the soundness of my political judgment when I was, you know, twenty years old, it wasn’t all that great.

Steve Marsh is Mpls.St.Paul Magazine staff writer.