The Texas Observer

We’ve seen some pretty lame presidential debate moderators this election cycle. But no matter how bad you think George Stephanopoulos or Gwen Ifill were, at least they could lay a claim to journalistic legitimacy. Not so Leslie Ward, an AT&T vice president and lobbyist. Ward was one of three panelists moderating Sunday’s debate between Speaker Tom Craddick and Democratic challenger Bill Dingus. The other two were local radio hosts—you know, journalists. What was Ward doing there? The debate was hosted by TV station KMID, and “sponsored” by AT&T. While it’s not unusual for corporations to underwrite debates, that doesn’t normally buy their lobbyist a seat at the table.

But there was Ward, asking Craddick and Dingus questions such as: “In the Legislature a lot of emphasis is placed on seniority and rank. Does having the Speaker come from Midland make a difference?” Rough translation: Mr. Speaker, how did you become so awesome and why is your opponent beating his wife? Texas Monthly pundit Paul Burka called the seniority question “obviously a softball pitched so that Craddick can knock it out of the park.”

Appropriately, Dingus spent much of the debate bashing Craddick for being too close to lobbyists. Close enough to reach out and touch them, you might say. Ward, who sat just a few feet from the candidates, is the treasurer of the AT&T PAC, which just four days before the debate had given Craddick $50,000. Ward had personally donated $500 to Craddick’s Stars Over Texas PAC two weeks before. The lobbyist/moderator hung around after the debate long enough to get a little defensive with the Midland newspaper.

Ward noted afterward that offering or accepting corporate political contributions is a federal offense. “Nobody in Texas is taking any corporate money,” she said.

It may not be a crime for a lobbyist with financial ties to a candidate to moderate a debate… but it should be a scandal.

The Texas Observer has named as its editor Bob Moser, writer and editor for The Nation, former editor of North Carolina’s Independent Weekly, and author of Blue Dixie: Awakening the South’s Democratic Majority.

Moser succeeds former executive editor Jake Bernstein, now a reporter for ProPublica, a non-profit investigative news organization in New York, N.Y., at the helm of the biweekly magazine.

Past editors of the Observer, based in Austin and published by the non-profit Texas Democracy Foundation, include such nationally acclaimed journalists as Ronnie Dugger, Willie Morris, Robert Sherrill, Molly Ivins and Geoffrey Rips. The winner of countless awards for its investigative reporting since its founding in 1954, the Observer was named America’s best political magazine by the Utne Reader in 2005.

“For more than fifty years, the Observer has set the standard for hard-hitting, well-crafted alternative journalism in print,” Moser said. “Our challenge now is to set a new standard for alternative journalism in the digital age.” The magazine will be stepping up its online efforts, Moser said, along with recruiting and training new reporters reflective of Texas’ fast-changing culture, politics and demographics.

“There is no place in the country evolving more rapidly, or changing more fundamentally, than Texas,” Moser said. “The Observer will aim to deploy our tough, thorough, hard-nosed reporting to nudge the state in a progressive direction. We’ll be keeping the ascendent Democrats honest, just as we’ve been relentless in exposing the corruption and incompetence of Republican leadership in the state.”

Moser cut his journalistic teeth as editor of North Carolina’s Independent Weekly, a National Magazine Award-winning alternative paper modeled on the original Observer. After leaving The Independent in 2000, Moser was a John S. Knight journalism fellow at Stanford University during the 2000-2001 academic year.

From 2001 to 2004, he was an award-winning senior writer for the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Intelligence Report, reporting on American extremists, particularly the religious right and the anti-immigrant movement. He has freelanced for national publications including Rolling Stone, where he won the 2006 GLAAD Award for best magazine article.

Moser’s first book, Blue Dixie: Awakening the South’s Democratic Majority, was published in August by Times Books. Since 2005, he has been writing and editing for The Nation magazine, where he is finishing a campaign-long series, “Purple America,” on the evolving politics of “red” states including Texas.

The Observer’s top-notch border coverage has been the best in the nation, even revealing for the first time that the border wall cuts through family homes and university lands, but stops just short of golf courses and resort developments. The magazine exposed Tom DeLay’s shenanigans and Governor Perry’s secret database and was first to report that Senator Phil Gramm, GOP presidential nominee John McCain’s chief economic advisor, is largely responsible for the nation’s current economic crisis. And it broke the stories about sexual abuse in Texas Youth Commission facilities, as well as the bogus undercover drug busts in Tulia, Texas, that sent innocent citizens to prison.

Hey all y’all lunatic leftists at Nutroots Nation — your uptown competitors at the Defending the American Dream summit hate the MSM as much as you do… but for entirely different reasons.

At a training session on “Understanding and Critiquing the Old Media,” conservative bloggers and activists vented their fury at the dreaded Liberal Media. Right-wing pundit Dan Gainor explained what conservatives seek: “We know the media is over there,” Gainor said, pointing to his far left. “Statistically it’s been proven by every survey.”

But, he said, “We don’t want to move them over here,” pointing to his far right. So does that mean the MSM should be disciplined in its centrism?

Nope. Gainor’s argument is strangely postmodern: The Right only seeks objectivity and unbiased reporting (Fair and Balanced!). But his idea of an unbiased media is apparently one that adopts every right-wing talking point and remains fuzzy, at best, about troubling facts. Global Warming is a Hoax! The Surge is Working! Barack Obama is a Muslim! News outlets must be pressured to shed their liberal bias, Gainor said. Crib the tactics of the Left, he urged. Call your newspapers and complain about biased stories. Praise them when they get it right. “We win by holding their feet to the fire.”

The next speaker, Daniel Glover of Eyeblast.tv, took the audience on a different ride. “We don’t need the liberal media like we used to,” he said. “We can actually be the media.” What followed was the usual blogger boosterism, similar in content, one suspects, to talks occurring at this very moment down at Netroots Nation. Stuff about exploiting the Long Tail. Using video to tell stories online. Creating media narratives through the combined voices of bloggers. Keeping conservative politicians accountable. The power of Web 2.0. Etc. Viewed from one angle, Glover was just pushing conservative bloggers to catch up with their progressive counterparts.

But then the conversation took a turn for the awkward. A woman in the audience pointed out that it was actually a liberal blogger that broke the story on Huffington Post about Obama’s “bitter” comments uttered at a private San Francisco fundraiser. What if a conservative blogger heard a right-wing politician say something similar?, she asked. What if that politician was John McCain? Does the citizen-journalist have a responsibility to report that? The woman thought not, but she wanted some reassurance.

Uh-oh. A real question about ethics! The room seemed ill-equipped to deal with the conundrum. One man suggested that Arianna Huffington allowed the blogger to report the “bitter” comment because Huffington wanted to help Hillary. Glover started talking about the Porkbusters campaign, an effort by conservative bloggers to fight government waste.

The woman pushed her question harder, with a specific example. She said she had attended two intimate John McCain fundraisers, each at a multi-million-dollar mansion. “[McCain] tells this joke all the time,” she said. “He says, ‘Obama wants everyone to own a home, but I want everyone to own a home like this’. Everybody laughs and I go ‘oppph,’ because we’re in a four-million-dollar home, you know what I mean?”

A discussion ensued about how politicians need to be aware that anything they say can and will be reported. “Everyone’s a journalist,” one audience member remarked. The presenter pointed out that some stealth blogger from Netroots Nation could be in the audience recording this very conversation. “Think about that before you say anything,” he said.

How much more meta can you get? A conservative blogger worried that a progressive blogger might blog on bloggers discussing the perils of blogging.

As Netroots Nation commenced this morning at the Austin Convention Center, bloggers, candidates, and netroots activists came together at the Texas Bloggers caucus to discuss the state of the Texas blogosphere and their common goal of “turning Texas blue.”

From the “God-blogger” of Texas progressive blogs, Charles Kuffner, to current state senate candidate Joe Jaworski, speakers agreed that Texas bloggers have come a long way in a very short time.

The Texas blogging community has matured rapidly, said Jaworski. “It has changed the way political reporting is done.”

The Texas blogosphere is the largest in the country, according to Karl-Thomas Musselman, publisher of the Burnt Orange Report. And, contrary to this morning’s Austin American-Statesman article (“Political bloggers gaining clout — but it’s no way to make a living”), Musselman says Texas bloggers are starting to “put their money where their mouse is.”

Musselman, who announced plans to quit his day job after this cycle and devote his time to Burnt Orange, predicts that the rapid growth of Texas blogs will soon create a medium strong enough to supply paying jobs for its prominent writers.

The Texas online community is gaining clout as a political campaign contributor as well, said Vince Leibowitz, chair of the Texas Progressive Alliance, who pointed to the million dollars raised online for the Rick Noriega campaign as an example of netroots potential.

“That is nothing to sneeze at,” says Leibowitz. “If you are from Texas you can walk with your head held high, because we are leading the nation in progressive online activism.”

Melissa Noriega spoke as well, thanking bloggers for supporting both her and husband. “Blogging is re-democratizing our national conversation,” she said. “It is powerful.”

Bloggers, activists and candidates alike hope this growing power will be strong enough to turn Texas Democratic next election.

Kuffner’s aim is to win back the Texas House. “This is the most tangible goal for Texas Democrats,” he said.

Others are shooting beyond the moon. Blogger Annatopia, founding member of the Texas Progressive Alliance, said she believes Texas has a good chance of swinging Democratic in the next presidential election.

“We are standing on the edge of a blue state,” Annatopia said. “Imagine if Texas turned blue … We could lock up the presidency for cycles to come,” she said.

She also said it was time for bloggers to move out from behind the comforting glow of their computer screens and step into the real world—to attend political rallies, fundraising parties and neighborhood campaigns.

“We need to talk to our neighbors,” Annatopia continued. “We need to put shoe leather to the streets.”

Anyone interested in journalism — can we get a show of hands, please? — ought to make a point of taking in Gonzo: The Life and Work of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson, the mad genius/incorrigible iconoclast who most famously offed the American Dream with the literary shotgun blast of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and later killed himself (in 2005) with a single bullet to the head.

(Even if journalism isn’t your thing, you should still check Gonzo out, if only to remind yourself that this most apologetic of contemporary professions once played in the big leagues of American star-culture, right alongside politics and rock and roll.)

Thompson’s full bibliography and influence are too rich to repeat here, but director Alex Gibney (Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room; The Trials of Henry Kissinger) has gained access to never-before-seen archival film of Thompson at work and at play, and it’s revelatory, though it leaves unanswered the most enduring of HST trivia questions: How could a grown man who lived in snow country (Aspen-area Colorado) spend so much of his life wearing shorts?

With the addition of a few unfortunate but brief dramatic reenactments, Gibney has assembled a reasonably full biography and a monument to Thompson’s best years that doesn’t ignore the fact that they were relatively few. Or that having stared down Hells Angels and Richard Nixon alike with his twin senses of humor and rage intact, it was ultimately an enemy as insubstantial as fame that robbed the writer of his mojo.

Remembrances by running-buddies including Rolling Stone publisher Jann Wenner, Margaritaville tycoon Jimmy Buffett, illustrator/collaborator Ralph Steadman and likable xenophobe Pat Buchanan polish the already well-worn legend. Son Juan and two wives add painful human perspective to the apparently more-or-less true mythology of an uncomfortable but irrepressible cartoon character (HST is the model for Doonesbury’s Raoul Duke, of course).

The wealth of firsthand footage is a treat for fans, of whom there was no shortage Saturday night at the Alamo Draft House for the documentary’s SXSW regional premiere. The film shows one more time during the festival, at the same venue, at 10 p.m. on Thursday night, March 13th. If you don’t want to get stuck in a folding chair in the aisle, we recommend you arrive on the early side.

Special if potentially depressing treat for political junkies, of which Thompson was emphatically one: The film’s recollection of the 1972 presidential race, in which an exceedingly Bush-like Nixon beats ascendant out-of-Vietnam-now candidate George McGovern like a bad dog in the general election, is a tart and timely reminder of just how much hope and idealism can be squandered — even in the face of a compellingly evil alternative — by a few stupid mistakes. The contemporary parallels are unavoidable. And, one can hope, imprecise.