The San Diego Union-Tribune’s editors must have thought they had a major scoop on their hands. On January 12, the paper reported on its front page that the Bush administration had asked Carol Lam, the US attorney for San Diego, to resign. The firing of a single US attorney might not normally make for splashy headlines, but Lam was not your typical US attorney. At the time she was asked to step down, Lam was in the midst of unravelling a congressional scandal of historic proportions. She had already put away California Representative Randy “Duke” Cunningham on bribery charges, with the longest sentence ever given to a member of Congress, and indictments of several other big Washington players appeared to be forthcoming.
If the Union-Tribune’s editors did think they had an important exclusive, they must have been disappointed the next day to discover that not one of the major US papers had picked up the story. The New York Times wouldn’t get around to mentioning the Union-Tribune piece until a January 15 editorial and didn’t report the story on its news pages until January 17 – and then only on page 17. The Wall Street Journal wrote about Lam on the 16th. The Washington Post failed to pick up the story until the 19th.
But to one blogger, at least, the news about Lam seemed like a big deal. “I was stunned by it,” says Josh Marshall, of the blog Talking Points Memo. “Normally, in a case like that, the prosecutor would be untouchable.” For the past year and a half, Marshall had been following Lam’s work on the Cunningham case and its various threads as closely as any news organisation in the country. Marshall is the editor and publisher of TPM Media, a small news blogging outfit that publishes the websites TPM Muckraker and TPM Cafe in addition to the flagship Talking Points Memo. By 11.08am on the morning the Tribune ran its Lam story, Marshall had already flagged it on Talking Points Memo. At 11.29am, a second post appeared on TPM Muckraker with several hundred words of background on Lam’s work on the Cunningham case. By the time The New York Times reported on the story, TPM sites had already posted 15 items related to Lam’s firing.
It was in the second of these posts that TPM Muckraker pointed out another tantalising titbit buried in the Union-Tribune story: California Senator Diane Feinstein was claiming that Carol Lam was only the tip of the iceberg. The Bush administration was quietly pushing out US attorneys across the country.
Over the next several months, Marshall and TPM’s deputy editor, Paul Kiel, kept up their steady coverage of the firing of Carol Lam and the eight other US attorneys forced out as part of what became known as “the US attorney purge”. Thanks in large part to Marshall and Kiel’s tenacity, by mid-May, three top Justice Department staffers had resigned. Today, the future of Alberto Gonzales, the US attorney-general and a longtime Bush loyalist, is in doubt, with even some Republicans calling for him to step down.
“Marshall almost single-handedly kept the attorney purge story alive,” says Eric Boehlert, a senior fellow at the progressive media watchdog organisation Media Matters for America. “He pulled off a textbook example of what new media and online media can do.”
Since Marshall launched TPM in late 2000, he’s provided a number of these textbook examples. Marshall’s first big breakthrough came in 2002, when he was widely credited (including by a Harvard Kennedy School scholarly analysis) for playing a critical role in driving incoming Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott out of his leadership position. At a birthday celebration for the notoriously racist Senator Strom Thurmond (who died in 2003), Lott remarked that America would have been better off had Thurmond won the presidency in 1948. Once the predictable cycle of denouncement and half-hearted apology came to an end, the story appeared to be drifting out of the headlines. It was only when Marshall reminded his readers, post after post and day after day, of the seriousness of Lott’s offence that other media outlets returned to the story and the pressure on Lott became too much for the Republican party to bear.
Since then Marshall has been at the forefront of a series of important stories. He was eight days ahead of The New York Times in noting that CIA agent Valerie Plame’s cover had been blown – in a story that led to a conviction of US vice-president Dick Cheney’s top aide, I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, on five felony counts. The Los Angeles Times has cited TPM Media for being ahead of the pack in its coverage of the spiralling Jack Abramoff lobbying scandals – which involved pay-offs to an array of government officials and their families – and for helping to sink Bush’s 2005 attempt to privatise Social Security (the US health insurance programme for pensioners). And it was Marshall’s leadership on the Duke Cunningham bribery tale that allowed him to instantly see the importance of Lam’s firing.
“I’d say he’s a progressive Matt Drudge in the ascendancy, but Josh actually does the journalistic spadework, information isn’t spoon-fed to him,” says John Kerry, Massachusetts senator and the Democrats’ presidential candidate in 2004, in an e-mail.
The journalistic spadework isn’t the only difference between Talking Points Memo and Matt Drudge’s Drudge Report. The Drudge Report is essentially an aggregator of other organisations’ news that occasionally posts a few sentences of original gossip along with its links to other sites. It may be one of the most popular sites in the world, but Drudge, who has a habit of linking to false news reports with his own splashy tabloid headlines, isn’t an especially respected journalist. Marshall, by contrast, has earned the grudging praise of even some of his political opposites. “I think Marshall’s a special case if not truly unique in that he’s a serious intellectual journalist who has decided to become a serious activist,” Jonah Goldberg, editor-at-large of the conservative National Review Online, wrote in an e-mail. “I think he’s done some impressive work.”
The decor of TPM Media’s HQ, an 800 sq ft, third-floor walk-up in Manhattan’s Flower District, is in keeping with the websites’ no-nonsense blogging. The walls are bare, but for three flat-screen televisions. Marshall’s four New York employees – he has two more in Washington (five of the six are men) – wear jeans and T-shirts. Marshall recently replaced the fold-up tables with desks, but some staffers still sit in fold-up chairs.
Marshall, 38, speaks with the same deliberation with which he writes. Sitting at his desk at one end of TPM’s office, he still sounds surprised by the success of Talking Points Memo. He started the blog as a side project, never imagining he would one day make a career out of it. He had initially set out on an academic track. Born in Missouri and raised in southern California, Marshall graduated from Princeton in 1991, then enrolled in a PhD programme in early American history at Brown University. He is sometimes sarcastic on his blog, but the jokes never mask his fundamental seriousness. His mother died in a car accident when he was still in primary school and Marshall thinks the experience of loss made him more focused.
In 1996, while still in the thick of his dissertation, Marshall decided to try his hand at non-academic writing. “I was spinning my wheels trying to figure out how to submit stuff,” he recalls. He wrote one of his first published pieces – about free speech on the internet – for the progressive political magazine The American Prospect. That led to a job offer.
Marshall was still working for The American Prospect and freelancing when he launched Talking Points Memo with a first post about the presidential election recount then taking place in Florida. “I just thought the blog would be fun,” he says. At around that time, the bottom dropped out of the freelance market and Marshall began to post on Talking Points Memo the reporting he couldn’t sell as freelance work.
Marshall provides plenty of the commentary and links of the type found on most political blogs, but it’s the reporting that distinguishes Talking Points Memo from the vast majority of other blogs. Says New York Times columnist Frank Rich, one of Marshall’s regular readers: “It’s just good journalistic writing. It would be true if it was published in a paper or on the internet.”
The detailed reporting can make reading the site feel a bit like getting your hands on an investigative reporter’s private notebook. But unlike an investigative newspaper story, in which questions are posed and answered in a single article, Marshall posts his hunches and discoveries in real time. For a certain type of political junkie, the effect can be intoxicating. When news broke that one of the fired US attorneys, David Iglesias of New Mexico, had been pressed by two members of Congress to investigate a state Democrat, Marshall began to think aloud on Talking Points Memo as to whom those two members of Congress might be. TPM Muckraker listed the names of New Mexico’s lawmakers and announced they’d be calling each one. Marshall and Kiel then posted the responses from the lawmakers as they came in, a process that led to other reporters chasing down New Mexico’s congressional delegation on Capital Hill.
The wonkish nature of the site can also make for difficult reading. Newcomers, in particular, run the risk of being overwhelmed by the intricacies of the stories Marshall is covering – a problem he has tried to address with video summaries of the latest developments. Still, the popularity of TPM has risen steadily over the years. During the run-up to the 2002-midterm elections, the number of daily visits reached 8,000. Today, traffic to the three TPM sites ranges from 400,000 to more than 500,000 page views a day – numbers that, according to the traffic-ranking website Alexa.com, put TPM Media’s traffic well beyond the websites of prominent left-leaning magazines, including The Nation and The New Republic.
The growth in traffic, coupled with the onset of blog advertising, meant Marshall went from being a journalist often unable to pay his bills to the owner of a profitable business. (Marshall won’t reveal TPM Media’s annual revenue, but ad rates run as high as $40,000 for a prominently placed ad.) In 2005, after an appeal for start-up funds from his readers, he launched TPM Cafe, a series of blogs on politics and culture which allows readers to leave feedback on the site. TPM Muckraker, a blog with original reporting on political scandals, followed the next year.
But the new traffic also changed the content of Talking Points Memo itself. Marshall admits he doesn’t have the resources to go head-to-head with major newspapers on most stories, but he does boast fervent, well-informed readers who are eager to contribute to his investigations. Plenty of bloggers receive tips from their readers, but it was Marshall’s innovation to turn these into a fundamental part of the reporting process. “From the beginning, the readers dimension of it has been sort of the core to the way that I did my reporting,” says Marshall.
Almost as soon as TPM Muckraker posted its first item speculating on a widespread campaign to fire US attorneys, readers began posting comments on the site and sending e-mails about other US attorneys who had lost their jobs. Later, when the Justice Department released 3,000 pages of documents relating to the firings, Marshall asked his readers to help TPM Media’s staff read through them. On the same evening the 3,000 pages were released, a TPM reader noticed a suspicious 18-day gap in the Justice Department’s e-mail correspondence, and at the next day’s White House press briefing, reporters were asking the press secretary Tony Snow to explain the gap. He seemed caught off-guard and struggled to explain it.
Media critic and NYU journalism professor Jay Rosen has called the blogosphere “a court of appeals” for the mainstream media’s attention, meaning that when a story such as Lott’s remarks about Thurmond falls out of the headlines, the blogs have a second chance to revive it. By this analogy, Marshall might be thought of as the blogosphere’s chief prosecutor. In late February, when the US attorney scandal was in danger of fading away, Marshall began a post summarising the story by more or less calling on mainstream media journalists to do their job: “Sometimes a really big story is sitting there, right in plain sight. That’s the case with the firing of San Diego US Attorney Carol Lam and the ongoing Duke Cunningham investigation. As per Washington conventional wisdom we’re now supposed to accept that the firing of seven US attorneys around the country was, yes, perhaps unprecedented, but more an example of Bush cronyism than an effort to short-circuit one or more investigations. But the firing of Lam just doesn’t bear out that reading...”
While Marshall’s early posts about the US attorney scandal mostly kept tabs on which attorneys had been fired and when, he gradually began to piece together a larger story about the relationship between the firings and a broader strategy by Karl Rove, Bush’s chief political adviser. Rove, Marshall argued, wanted the Justice Department to prosecute individuals on charges of voter fraud – even when they seemed bogus. The charges were important to Rove, Marshall maintained, because they tended to target minority voters and minorities tended to vote Democratic. Indeed, Justice Department documents later revealed that several of the axed US attorneys had been targeted for firing after refusing to prosecute voter fraud charges.
This is typical of Marshall’s work; his influence probably has a lot to do with weaving seemingly unrelated news stories into coherent narratives and explaining why they matter – what he calls “intelligent aggregation”.
Critics of Marshall have occasionally called his stories conspiracy theories, which is what Time magazine’s Washington Bureau chief Jay Carney dubbed Marshall’s claims about the US attorney firings...But Marshall’s record on a wide range of scandals is sound. Indeed, Carney later acknowledged he had been wrong about the US attorney story. “My hat is off,” Carney wrote on Time’s own Washington politics blog, Swampland. “Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo and everyone else out there whose instincts told them there was something deeply wrong and even sinister about the firings deserve tremendous credit.”
Of course, Marshall could provide all the intelligent aggregation in the world and still not have much influence without the right readers. The final and perhaps most crucial ingredient in TPM Media’s successful formula is a readership that includes a wide array of other bloggers, journalists from the mainstream media and political functionaries on Capitol Hill. “You’ll find other progressive bloggers with bigger traffic,” says Eric Boehlert, “but I think you could probably say his readership is the most influential.”
That a single blogger could play such an important role in politics might come as a surprise to some in the UK, where political blogs tend to be less popular and influential. Tim Worstall, a popular British blogger, claims between 100,000 to 200,000 page views a month, less than half of Marshall’s daily views. Some of the disparity comes down to the vastly different volumes of internet users interested in US and UK politics. But a better explanation centres on differences between mainstream US and British journalism. UK national newspapers tend to be more transparently partisan than most American newspapers, which strive for an even-handed tone; as Americans have become increasingly partisan in the past decade, political blogs offer a more honest reflection of the public’s political passions.
Paul Berger, a freelance journalist who writes the An Englishman in New York blog, says: “In Britain if you want a vitriolic rightwing point of view you can open The Daily Mail or The Sun. If you want a more nuanced but leftwing view you can open up The Guardian or The Independent, whereas in America, you don’t have nearly as much choice.”
The idea that blogs appeal most to those who feel their views are not being expressed in the public arena might explain why the American left has gravitated more to the blogosphere than the American right, as many progressives have felt politically disenfranchised for much of the Bush presidency. (Which is not to say that conservative blogs aren’t also popular in the US. The conservative blogosphere had its own breakthrough moment in 2004 when blogs picked apart the evidence used in a critical CBS News report raising questions about George Bush’s military service.)
With the influence of bloggers continuing to rise and TPM Media gaining in acclaim, further expansion might seem an obvious next step for Marshall. But he says that he’s realistic about the limitation of TPM Media. “I could hire a bunch of different people to write about different things,” Marshall said, “but then I’d just be a really undercapitalised version of [online magazine] Slate. It would suck.”
Instead, he wants to stick to his current model of picking out stories that he thinks TPM Media can add to and then hammering away at them with all his energy. Pressed on whether TPM’s growth could eventually turn it into something resembling the mainstream media against which it defines itself, Marshall gestures to the rest of TPM’s humble headquarters and can’t hold back a laugh. “I don’t think there’s any danger in that.”
Excerpts from TPM Media
January 12 The epic Duke Cunningham scandal gets weirder: Carole Lam, the San Diego U.S. Attorney who prosecuted the corrupt former lawmaker, is being quietly pushed out by the Bush administration...The [San Diego Union-Tribune] raises the possibility that Lam isn’t the only US Attorney who’s being pushed out. Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) told the paper, “We don’t know how many US Attorneys have been asked to resign – it could be two, it could be ten, it could be more. No one knows.”
January 16 A handy provision of the USA Patriot Act allows the White House to replace these fired USAs with appointees who don’t need to be approved by the senate. Given that these new USAs are being plopped into offices currently investigating Republicans and other administration officials and others into states with 2008 presidential candidates, there’s certainly ample opportunity for mischief.
January 17 So who dropped that little-known provision into the Act? The hidden hand appears to be that of Sen. Arlen Specter (R-PA) – acting at the request of the Bush/Gonzales Justice Department.
February 6 It gets better. Now Sen. Specter (R-PA) says his staff was responsible for inserting that US Attorney provision into the Patriot Act [but] he didn’t know anything about it until Sen. Feinstein (D-CA) told him about it.
February 28 The evidence builds that the administration fired a group of federal prosecutors in December just to install political loyalists in the spots. Salon [the online magazine] is reporting that two of the prosecutors were told as much when they asked why they were being forced out.
February 28 The silence is starting to get a tad deafening. Fired US Attorney says two members of Congress contacted and nudge[d] him on getting a Democrat indicted before election day. Everyone seems to be denying it was them. Except for two folks. No one seems to be able to get a call returned from Rep. Heather Wilson (R-NM) or Sen. Pete Domenici (R-NM).
March 5 Breaking: Heads rolling in advance of tomorrow’s rumble? We’re hearing that Michael Battle, executive director of the Executive Office for USAs has resigned. He’s the one who made the firing calls on December 7th of last year.
March 13 The story emerging is that at least some of these US Attorneys were fired because they weren’t aggressive enough in investigating Democratic “voter fraud”. Like I said last night, I’ve been reporting this stuff for years. And this is a horse that shouldn’t even be let out of the gate.
March 20 We’ve been combing reader postings as fast as we can on the emails released by the Justice Department last night. Some gems: Ousted US Attorney David Iglesias was lauded as a “diverse up-and-comer” in 2004. Rove’s former aide was apparently a party to the scheme to have him installed as the US attorney without Senate confirmation. And the documents actually show DoJ officials brainstorming on the reasons that they’d fired the USAs. Hindsight’s 20/20!
April 3 The president just refused to answer the question of what role Bush “loyalty” should play in hiring and firing US Attorneys. He didn’t allow follow up. No answer.
June 28 No other agency in the government has as much power over the lives of citizens as the Justice Department. That’s what has made the US attorney firings scandal so urgent.
Compiled by Whitney Kisling
