The resignation of Alberto Gonzales was one of the brighter moments of the past seven years, a fleeting reprieve for the rule of law and democracy and all that. Still, there was a downside. "As you can imagine, we're in something of a state of mourning here at TPM," Josh Marshall deadpanned in a short video produced by TPM Media, the company he started seven years ago in his D.C. apartment and that now employs nine people headquartered in a cramped New York City walk-up above a flower shop. "We've grown used to a steady diet of lies and bamboozlement and ridiculousness from Attorney General Alberto Gonzales. And we're not gonna have that anymore." Fortunately, there's a record for posterity, a library of statements and testimony preserved on digital video. "So in honor of the day," Marshall went on, "and in honor of Al, we've put together the ten best moments of Alberto Gonzales in the period of time over which all these different scandals engulfed him and he eventually had to throw in the towel and get out of town."
What followed was five minutes and forty-six seconds of the chief law-enforcement officer of the United States lying, bamboozling, and being generally ridiculous.
No journalists in America have a better institutional knowledge of the former AG's pathologies than Marshall and his staff. Their published work on the firing of nine United States Attorneys alone—a scandal virtually unmentioned by other journalists for months after TPM started covering it—could fill a book. Indeed, when Gonzales finally got around to quitting in September, TPM's dominance in chronicling him had long been both an accepted fact—its work was repeatedly cited by newspapers—and a journalistic curiosity in itself. The thing is, Josh Marshall is a blogger. The reporters and editors who work for TPM are also bloggers, a term that deserves italics because it is now so broad as to be meaningless. It is, however, inherently diminutive, even when it's being used kindly, which it usually is in relation to TPM.
For instance: When the rest of the press was catching up to what a weasel Gonzales was, the Minneapolis Star Tribune called Marshall THE BLOGGER WHO MIGHT BRING DOWN GONZALES, and the Los Angeles Times punned, in regard to TPM and Gonzales, BLOGS CAN TOP THE PRESSES, as if they'd discovered a new and exotic form of reporter in the digital wilderness. Columbia Journalism Review weighed in with a slightly more sober HOW TALKING POINTS MEMO BEAT THE BIG BOYS ON THE U.S. ATTORNEY STORY.
None of those headlines are untrue (though the Star Tribune's is endearingly generous). On Gonzales and the United States Attorney debacle, TPM did beat the big boys, assuming "big boys" means all the newspapers, magazines, and television networks that ignored an enormously important story about the rule of law being systematically hijacked by political thugs. TPM dogged it for two months before the national press piled on in March. At that point, TPM was perhaps most valuable as an archive for all the other journalists getting up to speed.
It is not surprising, then, that the day after Gonzales resigned, Marshall's in-box was overflowing with praise. "There were a lot of messages saying, you know, congratulations," he says. "Which I really found kind of—" he's looking for the right word here—"uncomfortable."
That is not surprising, either. Marshall, 38, is a modest man with the thoughtful manner of an academic (he has a doctorate in history from Brown). He does not see himself as David standing alone against Goliath. He is not a zealot wielding the Righteous Flaming Sword of the Netroots. He is a journalist. He runs a journalism company that employs other journalists who produce very good journalism that is read by approximately 700,000 people who tend to be well educated (84 percent have college degrees), well paid (60 percent make more than $75,000 a year), and politically active (90 percent give to a cause or candidate). If TPM were a paper-and-ink medium, Marshall would be in the upper tier of American media: The Boston Globe, one the nation's best papers, has a daily circulation of barely more than half of TPM's readership.
The difference is that he happens to publish in the blogosphere, another term that deserves italics because it, too, is pointlessly broad, encompassing tens of millions of people with modems who send into the digital ether billions of words, of which very few are read by anyone other than their author. Even among its most intelligent and widely read practitioners—say, Atrios or Andrew Sullivan or Glenn Greenwald—blogging is typically a platform for opining and critiquing and excoriating, for commenting on what is already known. Marshall, though, has optimized the medium as a journalistic enterprise: Working in digital bits, TPM can report emerging stories in real time, updating at will, linking to other sources (including my GQ piece on Ralph Reed, in August 2006), weaving compelling narratives out of disparate threads. On a good day during the United States Attorney scandal, TPM posted more than a dozen updates.
"TPM is something new under the sun—it's in part an opinion blog, but it's also an investigative-reporting shop," says New York Times columnist Paul Krugman. "And it's having a big influence. Josh and crew did more than anyone to break the U. S. attorneys story, they've played a big role in uncovering the Blackwater scandal, and more. At this point, it's hard to see how we ever lived without something like TPM. I rely on them a lot."
"You're making a mistake if you're not checking in," says Time Washington bureau chief Jay Carney. "That's not ideological at all: They're good at what they do. They're the best of a breed."
Which is exactly the kind of praise Marshall wants—and deserves. "It sounds sort of clichéd," he says, "but we just want to do good reporting. People can read what we do and make their own judgment."
On december 5, 2002, some 500 guests, including more than a dozen reporters, gathered to celebrate the one hundredth birthday of Senator Strom Thurmond, who ran for president in 1948 on a platform of maintaining legal segregation. Mississippi's Trent Lott, the then majority leader–elect of the Senate, offered one of the tributes. "I want to say this about my state," Lott said. "When Strom Thurmond ran for president, we voted for him. We're proud of it. And if the rest of the country had followed our lead, we wouldn't have had all these problems over all these years, either."
Now, one of the most powerful men in America waxing nostalgic about whites-only swimming pools is probably one of those things about which the general citizenry should be informed. Yet Lott's remarks went unnoticed the next day by any newspaper reporter or broadcaster.
So it fell to Marshall, who posted the full quote on Talking Points Memo the next afternoon.
At the time, Marshall was making his living in print journalism, writing mostly for center-left magazines and insider political journals—The American Prospect, Washington Monthly, The Hill—and, for a while, doing a column in the New York Post. He'd also been writing Talking Points Memo for two years, a sideline gig for stuff he couldn't fit into print pieces. "To me, it was kind of a loss leader for my freelancing," he says. "And I think the honest answer is, I just liked doing it."
Marshall treated Lott's comments the way a journalist should. When the senator offered a half-assed apology, mumbling about his remarks being taken out of context, Marshall dug up the wider context: the old speeches and interviews and, most damning, an amicus brief Lott filed in 1981 supporting Bob Jones University's right to racially discriminate. The noise from Talking Points Memo and a few other sites vibrated into the dailies and the networks, and on December 20, Lott resigned as Republican leader. (The Washington Post, alone among traditional news operations, ran a story on page A6 two days after the party.)
A nascent Web star was born. THE INTERNET'S FIRST SCALP, conservative pundit John Podhoretz announced in the New York Post. Krugman claimed that Marshall was "more than anyone else…responsible for making Trent Lott's offensive remarks the issue they deserve to be."
Marshall, though, wasn't gloating. Scalp a senator All he did was practice basic journalism—a feat that only appeared remarkable because so many other reporters didn't. Six days after Lott resigned, in fact, Marshall was demurring. As he told media critic Mark Jurkowitz, "I really don't like this blog triumphalism."
"When i was writing for the [American] Prospect," Marshall says now, "the idea that someone was reading my stuff was purely notional. If someone came to me and said, ‘Hey, no one ever read that piece,' there'd be no facts to contradict it."
Amen, brother. A billion pulp trees fall in the forest and they barely raise a rustle. Print is a solitary medium, writers pecking at keyboards so their words can be inked onto paper where they probably will be read, but there is rarely confirmation of that fact. Print is less a dialogue between writer and reader than a lecture. Writing on the Internet, on the other hand, is a communal ercise. Marshall knows people read TPM's sites because they tell him—in hundreds of e-mails and comments every day. "Intimate maybe overstates it," he says, "but you do have a relationship with these people."
Actually, intimate doesn't overstate it by much. TPM's readers do more than just read; they contribute two indispensable commodities: money and information.
Let's start with money. The first incarnation of Talking Points Memo, like a lot of blogs, had a link for the reader to toss a few bucks into the operational kitty, if he felt like it. But in fall 2003, Marshall went further: He asked his readers to pay for a reporting trip to New Hampshire to cover the 2004 presidential primaries. He could've gotten a magazine to pick up the tab, but he would have had to save his best stuff for his benefactor. He preferred to write online, in real time. So on October 26, 2003, he mentioned in a post that he was considering asking for travel funds. Less than twenty-four hours later, he'd collected $4,864. "I never thought I'd say this," he wrote, "but: No More Contributions!" He ended his fund-raiser before it had officially begun.
He went back to the well in the spring of 2005 to fund a new project called TPMCafé, an electronic salon with guest writers and roundtables and the like. Six months later, he put the hat out again. Freshly indicted money-laundering suspect Tom DeLay had just resigned as House majority leader; Jack Abramoff's bribery ring was falling apart; Randy "Duke" Cunningham was setting a new record for corruption by a sitting congressman; Ney and Burns and Reed and Safavian were all imploding. "It just occurred to me that if I could come up with the money to hire two people to do this full-time, there was just so much stuff to dig into," Marshall says. A brief fund-raiser later, TPMmuckraker—which does exactly what the name says: rake muck—was online.
That kind of reader support has multiple benefits. For one, it feeds upon itself: The cash allowed Marshall to put more of his professional efforts into Talking Points Memo, which made the site better, which drew more readers, which drew advertisers, who by the middle of 2004 were providing Marshall's livelihood and who now cover all the operational costs. Two, Marshall has never had to serf himself out to a financial overlord. No one's counting beans or scrutinizing posts or suggesting he add Britney to the mix to bring in the kids.
Perhaps more important than money, though, is information, the stream of which flows both ways between TPM and its readers. It's endemic to the medium, of course, with comment threads and e-mail. But what Marshall has done so well is to deputize his readers as researchers, which both deepens TPM's content and expands its reportorial reach by a factor of thousands. It would have been brilliant if he'd planned it. "Input from readers has always been key to how we do it," he says. "But I'd never really given it much thought in terms of a new kind of journalism."
TPM has among its audience countless experts in law and government and broadcasting and history and pretty much everything else, a considerable number of whom will offer that expertise where appropriate. (One routine example: When Marshall wondered aloud whether Senator Larry Craig could legally withdraw his guilty plea to cruising an airport bathroom, three criminal-defense attorneys promptly offered detailed, if conflicting, answers.)
In addition to the contextual nuance readers offer up is their willingness to gather facts and act upon them. They—TPM and its audience—were perhaps at their finest in 2005, when Bush was flogging his plan to privatize Social Security. Marshall and his staff set out to put everyone on the record: They scrutinized statements issued by congressional offices, and readers passed on clippings from hometown papers, tracking which rep was taking which side. Those politicians who didn't take a public stand started getting phone calls from their constituents, who also happened to be TPM readers.
Newspapers don't have that advantage. No reporter has the time to call every senator and representative, and most editors wouldn't care if they did (a Massachusetts newsroom typically isn't concerned with how a California rep might vote on a bill that might never be filed). But with a national audience of die-hard readers willing to make phone calls to their local reps, TPM eventually compiled an extensive database of who was for (the Fainthearted Faction) and against (the Conscience Caucus) dismantling one of the most successful federal programs in our nation's history. In the end, Bush's plan died a quiet death, and it might have anyway, considering how unpopular it was with the public. In any case, Marshall isn't claiming credit. But the fact is, TPM kept a few hundred thousand people focused on killing it, and those people pressured their senators and representatives. Surely, that had an effect.
Which brings us back to Alberto Gonzales. On December 16, 2006, David Kurtz, TPM's editor-at-large, linked to a story in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette about the chief federal prosecutor in Little Rock, Bud Cummins, getting fired and replaced by J. Timothy Griffin, whose primary qualification seems to have been that he was an aide to Karl Rove specializing in opposition research. Not quite a month later, Marshall linked to a piece in the San Diego Union-Tribune about United States Attorney Carol Lam being asked to quit, supposedly because she hadn't prosecuted enough drug smugglers and gun dealers. Not at all coincidentally, Lam had also convicted corrupt Republican congressman Randy "Duke" Cunningham, and she was close to indicting a number of other GOP stalwarts, including Kyle "Dusty" Foggo, the number three man at the CIA—scandals TPM had covered extensively.
"Carol Lam was a big fat tell," Marshall says. "She should have been untouchable." The appearance of propriety, to say nothing of respect for the rule of law, would have prevented any other president from canning a prosecutor he'd appointed when she was sniffing around his party's operatives.
Marshall and two others, deputy editor Paul Kiel and reporter Justin Rood (now at ABC News), started working their sources that afternoon. Four days later, on January 16, Marshall posted a short, prescient note: "You've probably already seen some of the news about the Bush White House engaging in a seemingly unprecedented spree of firings of U. S. attorneys across the country. Conveniently, they're being replaced without Senate approval under a provision of the Patriot Act. We're digging into it now and we're finding a bunch. More soon."
Reams more.
By that afternoon, TPM had compiled a list of seven United States Attorneys, all appointed by Bush, who'd either been fired or pressured to resign. Eventually, two more would be added to the list. Every day, TPM had another piece of the scandal, another detail, another bit of context and background. For weeks, TPM kept the emerging scandal "on a low boil," as National Public Radio put it—until late March, when the rest of the press began piling on.
Which is when the headlines about TPM "beating the big boys" and a blogger "topping the presses" appeared. Which is also the part, like the congratulatory messages when Gonzales resigned, that makes Marshall uncomfortable. Grateful and proud, sure, but still, a little uneasy.
That goes back to his modesty—"What I like about Josh," says Time's Carney, "is his temperament. He's not hysterical"—and frankly, to his realistic perspective on the media and TPM's niche in it. Marshall knows he wasn't the only person to smell the stink of a political purge: The New York Times editorialized about the Griffin appointment on January 15 (POLITICIZING PROSECUTORS), Senator Dianne Feinstein hinted at a wider scandal the next morning on the Senate floor, and Paul Krugman wrote about it on January 19 (and prominently noted that TPM "has done yeoman investigative reporting on this story"). TPM had the collective instincts to stick with the story—but it also works in a medium that allowed it to do that in a way that print outlets simply can't.
"A key thing for us is people sending us articles in small publications that contain facts that have larger implications when seen in the framework of larger stories," Marshall says. "So you end up with lots of chapters or vignettes of a story out there, but no one's integrating them. Part of our niche is, we don't have the slightest problem saying, ‘Hey, McClatchy's got this great new scoop.' And you take that scoop and see it in context of what the L.A. Times wrote last week and what the Arkansas Gazette wrote the week before and the original reporting we've been doing, and it all comes together. And that aggregation function, that pulling together of narratives, is a big part of what we do."
Newspapers can't do that, either; they have a finite amount of space, for which every story has to compete. "A reporter in San Diego could write a one-day story—Carol Lam got fired, yeah, it looks funny—but from an editor's point of view, that reporter can't come back the next day without a news peg," Marshall says. "And we don't need a news peg." Web space, of course, is unlimited.
"It's inherently difficult to judge the impact of your own reporting," Marshall says. "But you know, I feel confident that we helped build a narrative and maybe brought the story to the fore sooner than it might have been."
Undoubtedly true. And so maybe TPM won't have Alberto Gonzales to kick around anymore. But there's always Senator Ted Stevens in Alaska and Blackwater guards in Iraq and another whole year of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney and…
Sean Flynn is a GQ correspondent.
