Media Whores Online

» see mediawhoresonline.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

in 2002 i was eighteen and the internet i could reach was mostly in turkish. media whores online was american media criticism written for americans who watched american cable news, which puts about three layers between it and an internet cafe in ankara. i am writing it up for the way it ended, which has since happened to enough things that it reads as familiar.

the site went up in 2000 and nobody ever established who ran it. a person posting as jennifer kelly claimed the editorship in 2001 and then stopped appearing. the premise sat in the name: the reporters covering american politics were not neutral observers but performers with an audience to keep, and the site's job was to say so daily and by name, without the hedging a magazine would have demanded.

it was not a blog in the shape everyone later settled on. no comment section, no reverse-chronological stream of dated permalinks. it was a hand-built frameset that pulled its actual content from a second domain called mediahorse.com, with a column of links down the left and a long unsigned essay filling the middle. the writing was funny in a register that political writing was not yet allowed to use.

by 2002 james carville and paul begala were quoting it on crossfire, and in 2003 brendan nyhan ranked it eighth most influential blog for the online journalism review. a new yorker profile of al gore the following year mentioned he kept it bookmarked. that is a strange amount of reach for a site whose author nobody could name.

~ the record ~

~ what it actually did ~

the recurring feature was a roster, a running list of named reporters and columnists the site considered compromised. william safire and sean hannity were fixtures. so was chris matthews, which complicates the idea that this was just partisan bookkeeping. matthews was nominally on the same side and got rougher treatment than most of the people who were not.

the other half was direct action. when a reporter wrote something the site objected to, it printed the newsroom contact details and told readers to write. in 2002 aaron brown of cnn compared the site's tone to protesters who call doctors murderers and received hundreds of emails for saying it. a washington post reporter went further than complaining and contacted the employers of two people who had written to her. tucker carlson called the whole rationale revolting on air while begala, sitting across from him, defended it.

~ the sidebar ~

the most useful thing left of the site is its list of links. it is a complete map of the american liberal web in early 2004, before any of it had money attached. eschaton, daily kos, calpundit, buzzflash, talkleft, tbogg, this modern world, the daily howler, mydd, pandagon. a separate block called exile sites pointed at columnists who had been pushed out of newspapers and were publishing on their own. a third block just tracked ann coulter and bill o'reilly so that you did not have to.

almost none of those names survived the decade in the form they had then. some were bought, others took jobs at the papers they had spent four years attacking. the sidebar reads now like a list of people who were about to become professionals and did not know it yet.

~ out to pasture ~

there was no shutdown announcement. sometime in the first months of 2004 the front page was replaced with a graphic of two horses and the words out to pasture, and everything else stayed exactly where it had been. the sidebar kept working and so did the archive. the copyright line still read 2004 in november.

david neiwert wrote to the operator that april and got back an answer that explains nothing and everything at once: real life had intruded and bandwidth was becoming a problem. asking readers for money was not on the table. the site hoped to be back before the election, possibly as early as may. it never returned in any form. one of the most-read political sites in america was a single person with a day job, and when that person got busy the whole thing stopped.

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