The Wall Street Journal has this one-on-one debate (free feature) between former Clinton spokesman now turned telco lobbyist Mike McCurry and Craigslist co-founder Craig Newmark on the subject of net neutrality.
In truth neither opponent sheds much light on the issue, although McCurry is clearly a brave man. The guy has been skewered by many of his Democratic party allies for being a paid spokesperson on behalf of big telcos and has stepped, unknowingly, into a blogosphere maelstrom.
The New Republic’s Keelin McDonnell has a excellent round-up (free registration) of how much McCurry has been roughed up because of his new gig. Part of the problem — and I think it’s kind of a crime for a politico, not to mention a media-oriented politico — is that McCurry seemed generally unaware of the power of blogs in politics.
While McCurry was busy reincarnating himself as a techno-communications whiz, the media universe went through a transformation of its own, birthing scads of unruly liberal bloggers that he seemed only dimly aware of. And McCurry seems to have understood their culture about as well as Karen Hughes did the Middle East’s. Confident in his once glorious old-media taming skills, Washington’s former ringmaster made the tragic mistake of confusing the blogosphere with the quaint world of the White House briefing room.
The vitriol against McCurry really ratcheted up when MyDD’s Matt Stoller decried McCurry’s “sell-out” of his services to the highest bidders, phone companies, no less, that want to create a toll-gated Internet.
For my money, I’m particularly saddened at what’s become of Mike McCurry, the former press secretary for Bill Clinton. Bill Clinton changed the world, and while I don’t agree with everything he did, I did look up to the professionalism and idealism of the staffers who worked in the White House with him. McCurry was in the eye of the storm as press secretary, and handled a hostile press corps and a strange media environment with grace and kindness. He was set after his time there to do remarkable and wonderful things for the world, yes maybe make some money along the way, but set to continue a career in politics and public service doing what he thought was right. Like David Gergen, a lot of options were and still are open to him.
Instead, he seems to have taken a different path, selling his service and brand name to whoever will pay the most. In this case, that means heading up a mostly-astroturf group HOTI to eviscerate the free internet. It’s so rare to have a Democrats with the kind of experience that McCurry has, and yet, he chooses in this pivotal moment in history to dedicate his talent and his name to something as grand as … the short-term interests of the telecommunications industry?
Two days following Stoller’s post (a search of MyDD yields several subsequent posts attacking McCurry), McCurry himself posted a comment on MyDD saying “I have to make a buck, sure.” And it was all downhill after that.
McCurry jumped deeper into the doo by defending himself on The Huffington Post a few days after that, with one post filled with rage and typos. The bloggers, as McDonnell in TNR says, then smelled blood.
Here’s how The Huffington Post’s David Sirota put it:
Mike McCurry is in one of those tailspins of dishonesty and contradiction that is so wildly out of control, you just have to sit back, grab some popcorn and watch with laughter.
Against this back-drop, McCurry, then, is a gutsy human being to go toe-to-toe with Craig Newmark in The Wall Street Journal. He’s inviting more blogosphere feeding frenzies but hey, he’s getting the big bucks. And now, at least, he knows what he’s in for.
McCurry, for his part, has finally realized that blogging is less like a witty exchange with Sam Donaldson and more, as he now puts it, like “a primal scream in the darkness.”
Cynthia Brumfield at 10:07 PM|Comments(0)
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