Chautauqua: John Harwood Blog

If there was any sarcasm in my post on John Harwood not being able to remember the URL of his new weblog — and there was — I take it back completely. John emailed me today to let me know where to find the blog, discovering the post I’d written on him as he — I assume — gets acclimated to scouring blogs on himself. Thanks, John, for jumping in with both feet and shooting off the quick correction: Political Capital with John Harwood.

I spent just a few cursory minutes reading the blog and the only thing I find missing is any comment system. I did not register for the CNBC site, which could have been the problem. Still, I’d love to be able to interract with Harwood on the site in a more substantial fashion.

Chautauqua Day 5: David Marash

David Marash is one of those Emmy-winning journalists who trucks in a different kind of celebrity than the name-trotting sort headlining newscasts today. He’s a genuine article, deep in voice and language, the rare breed of television media personality who believes in the strength of long-format journalism, reporting stories to conclusion, rather than fatigue, and he’s got the resume to back it up.

He’s most known for his 16-year stint with Ted Koppel on Nightline, winning awards for his coverage of the Oklahoma City bombing and TWA Flight 800. But, when that show was cancelled, he made an interesting move: Al Jazeera English.

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Chautauqua, Day 4: Juan Williams

National Public Radio’s Juan Williams is funny.

No, you can’t tell from the picture. Here he looks angry. Brooding. Somber. Morose. He came out on stage and sat in the chair awaiting his introduction for nearly a full minute looking just… like… this.

Scarey.

But then, the humor came, delivered secretly in that NPR monotone taking us all by sweet surprise. Jokes about drugs and penises. Jokes about Chautauquans and good manners. But mostly, he joked at the expense of the media.

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Chautauqua, Day 3: Arianna Huffington

In an IM earlier this morning, I told my friend Curt that I would be heading into the Chautauqua lecture by Arianna Huffington. He said, “Heh… make sure you slap her for me.”

I admit. I had the same thought. I’ve always sort of ascribed Huffington with the Ivanna Trump vibe — funky accent, firey speech, not a lot there. Now that I’ve seen her up close, I know that two out of those three are correct. I’m just not sure which two.

Obviously, she was here to contribute to the discussion on media, new media, ethics in media, and media bashing. To be sure, there’s been a boatload of each. But while the other folks in the discussion were from inside the fold, working in traditional media newsrooms and desperately trying to wrap their arms around this non-traditional whatnot, Huffington is coming at it from a different angle. She founded HuffingtonPost.com in 2005 and while she contends hers is one of the highest trafficked sites on the net, she doens’t hold much of a candle to the other representatives who’ve shared the stage with her so far this week. Click on the graph below to see Alexa.com’s rankings comparing her site to ABCNews.com, WashingtonPost.com, and nytimes.com (she’s at the bottom).

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Chautauqua, Day 2: David Westin

Let me start by saying that, as far as executives inside major corporations go, my experience heretofor has been that company lawyers are about the last folks you want to invite to the big chair, to Presidencies and Chief-Executiveships. That’s not to say that savvy business people can’t be lawyers too, but those folks who specifically exist to protect the organization by managing relationships vis the law have a strange and wonderful perspective on growth and development of initiatives. They say “no” a lot.
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Chautauqua, Day 1: John Harwood

John Harwood was an interesting choice to have kick off the Chautauqua season, and the week one series of discussions on ethics and the media. His focus, in a sort of round-about way, was that political party polarization both feeds, and is fed by, the drive for viewership of a sensationalism-hungry media.Harwood refers to parties as “brands”, and says that in the political sphere, these brands have done nothing but solidify, cementing public participation in a binary system. This simplification is driven by the notion that people, by-in-large, want to know what they’re getting in a particular candidate or party.Historically, Harwood contends that this calcification in the party systems stems from Barry Goldwater’s opposition to the Voting Rights act in 1964. The dems became the pro-civil rights party and the republicans the anti-civil rights party. From then on out, you knew what you were getting. If you wanted smaller governement, fewer services, larger civil defense, and focus on waning deterioration of social values, you were a republican. If you favored increased federal services and gun control, enironmental protection, and abortion rights, you’re a democrat. [Read more]