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Asa, anonymity and smears Saturday, Nov 5, 2005 By John Brummett This is about "blogs" again, only because Warwick Sabin had a nice little scoop on the subject in his column in this week's Arkansas Times. He came into receipt of an e-mail sent in May by Chris Battle, erstwhile right-wing editorialist for the Little Rock daily newspaper and now campaign manager for Asa Hutchinson. (It's a natural career step.) The e-mail urged Hutchinson supporters to start Web logs. The declared point was to use the mad, mad world of the Internet to supplement Hutchinson's campaign and either bypass or influence the mainstream media. Battle referred in the e-mail to the "liberal media," but I can't imagine what he meant. The Little Rock paper for which this same fellow once wrote editorials is the Washington Times of the South, though not as interesting. Excepting the Arkansas Times, which is not circulated in significant numbers statewide, and the biweekly Leader published in Jacksonville and Lonoke, there's not a liberal newspaper in sight. Battle told me he considered it liberal for an Arkansas newspaper to editorialize in favor of higher taxes for schools. I call it math. As for encouraging these blogs, there's nothing inherently wrong with what Battle has been caught doing red-handed. It's probably from a Republican campaign manager's playbook. Blogs don't cost anything, and free speech is what we're all supposed to be about. Some campaigns elsewhere actually have paid people to run supposedly independent blogs, which is dishonest and chicken. At least Battle stated explicitly in his e-mail that he wasn't looking for campaign fronts, just for people willing to set up blogs and post pro-Asa material of their own choosing if they were so inclined. People were so inclined, though not enough to sign their names. I mentioned in a recent column two vibrant anonymously run blogs that adore Asa consistently and assail Mike Beebe regularly. The only Democrat they seem to like is Bill Halter, which maybe tells you something. One of them posted information about the law enforcement troubles of Beebe's son. One of them actually was launched to support Win Rockefeller, Battle told me, but seems to have made a smooth and effortless intraparty slide since Rockefeller's sad withdrawal for health reasons. Campaigns could always abuse such sites by posting smears from which they could officially wash their hands. But they can do that on any blog with open threads permitting anonymous posts by readers. That's the only real outrage of political blogs: Many of them are run by people maintaining secret identities. Reader posts are usually anonymous and sometimes slanderous. That's vile and cowardly. Conservatives and Republicans seem to do this strategic blogging better than liberals and Democrats. They helped bring down Tom Daschle in South Dakota. The pro-Asa sites I mentioned are unyielding, toeing the party line. Conversely, the Arkansas Times blog is clearly liberal and pro-Democratic, but the two fellows who run it identify themselves - that would be Sabin and Max Brantley - and sometimes criticize Democrats while grudgingly giving a point to Republicans. Sabin was kind enough to send me a copy of Battle's e-mail. Then he called to say he'd actually sent me a second version, which he'd received after publishing his column. This second version did not have the names of the recipients blacked out, as did the first. So, I am able to piggyback Warwick's scoop to tell you that the recipients included such usual Arkansas Republican operatives as Chris Carnahan, Ted Thomas, Bob Brooks, Mark Meyers, David Olive and state Rep. Michael Lamoureux of Russellville. Oh, and this other fellow: State Rep. Jeremy Hutchinson of Little Rock. That's Tim's boy, Asa's nephew. Whether any of them has anything to do with either of these blogs I mentioned, well, that would be a secret. Battle told me he didn't think so, and stressed that he'd sent separate copies of the e-mail to many other recipients. But, then, he couldn't possibly know for sure, assuming these pro-Asa blogs are at the arm's length he claims. ------- John Brummett is a columnist for the Arkansas News Bureau in Little Rock. His e-mail address is jbrummett@arkansasnews.com; his telephone number is (501) 374-0699. |
