By Howard Kurtz
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, January 8, 2007; 7:32 AM

John Edwards is ridiculing his political consultants.

"You know, they gave me a really great memo," he says, waving the document, which advises him to highlight the importance of public education when addressing teachers. "I pay a lot of money for people who have the expertise to tell me this."

An unscripted moment caught on a cellphone camera? Not exactly. The video of the presidential candidate chatting on his plane is on Edwards's own Web site. The former senator seems unusually frank about the absurdities of political life -- or is this just carefully choreographed candor, packaged for the YouTube age?

The 2008 campaign is "totally going to be on steroids this time in terms of what a candidate can do," says Joe Trippi, who masterminded Howard Dean's Internet-driven bid in 2003 and 2004. "You're going to see reality, and you're going to see savvy manipulation under the guise of something that's authentic and real." But Trippi warns against candidates' secretly scripting such moments: "If you get caught, you're dead."

Veteran journalist and blogger Jeff Jarvis says that "candidates will try to look more transparent, whether they are or not. Obviously you're not going to put something out there that's not flattering. If the casual moments come from the campaign, I can recognize them for what they are."

Mathew Gross, Edwards's Internet strategist, says the campaign is "trying to reach an audience that is increasingly segmented into different channels . . . You peel away the artifice of the campaign to show what's really happening."

Edwards' second bid for the White House, announced shortly after Christmas, was overshadowed by the death of Gerald Ford and the hanging of Saddam Hussein. But Edwards generated plenty of online buzz by hiring friendly bloggers or paying their travel expenses, which would be ethically unacceptable for mainstream journalists.

"We live in a world in which everybody has the power to capture and then broadcast," says Gross, a Dean campaign veteran, noting that the bloggers have full editorial control over their own words and pictures.

Edwards has gone deep into the blogosphere, posting profile pages on MySpace and Facebook and fielding questions -- with his wife, Elizabeth -- on the popular liberal site Daily Kos. His daughter Cate also blogs on the campaign site.

What's striking about the "Webisode," in which Edwards chats on his plane with a freelance video crew, is that it looks like a television documentary, with quick-cut editing and a jerky handheld camera. Edwards, in a work shirt and jeans, is seen chatting with others, not looking at the camera. He says he wants to be judged "based on who I really am, not based on some plastic Ken doll . . . You're trained to be careful. You're trained to close off, if it feels sensitive, if it feels personal . . . We're conditioned to saying the same thing, we're conditioned to saying what's safe, we're conditioned to be political, and it's hard to shed all that."

The campaign hired Andrew Baron, founder of the satirical news site Rocketboom.com, to provide advice and to shoot Edwards's announcement video, which was posted on YouTube the night before the candidate personally declared his candidacy in New Orleans. Rocketboom also conducted a separate interview for its Web site, consisting of such softball questions as "What is the John Edwards candidacy about?"

Baron says Rocketboom "is not a journalistic platform" and sets its own ethical standards. As for Edwards, Baron says by e-mail, "this is his opportunity, along with all of ours, to use the video medium to show who he really is/we really are."

Chuck Olsen, a Minnesota freelancer paid for his work by Rocketboom and the campaign, writes on his blog: "For what it's worth I'm convinced Edwards is a passionate, smart, authentic person who would make a great president."

Robert Scoble, a blogger and former Microsoft staffer, paid his own way -- except for the flights on the Edwards campaign plane during the multi-city announcement tour that began in New Orleans. "Was I used by the campaign? Absolutely," he writes on his blog. "I was there to give a different look at the campaign than the Washington Post or CNN could give." Responding to criticism by another blogger who accused him of "doing exactly what his handlers wanted, namely, giving Edwards pseudo-legitimacy among the technophile idiots," Scoble says: "I got to know his staff instead of trying to ask a question that'd get Edwards angry or give me an answer that he wouldn't give Matt Lauer on the 'Today' show."

The slimmed-down Wall Street Journal looked colorful but cramped last week after debuting at its reduced size, with a huge "What's News" digest and a display ad squeezing the front-page stories into three remaining columns. But the more important development has nothing to do with the money-saving layout.

"The culture here has changed dramatically in the last few years," says Managing Editor Paul Steiger. He says 80 percent of the paper's articles will now stress analysis, interpretation or feature writing, with only 20 percent of the what-happened-yesterday variety. As if to underscore the shift, the lead of Thursday's paper was an opinion column by Alan Murray, saying that the CEO of Home Depot had "failed most spectacularly" as a public spokesman. The news story on Robert Nardelli's resignation and $210-million golden parachute ran to the column's left.

The late Journal editor Barney Kilgore once said that "it doesn't have to happen yesterday to be news," Publisher Gordon Crovitz recalls. "To which I'd add, just because it happened yesterday, it may not be news to our readers."

Steiger says he assumes that most readers, though not all, have already seen the day's news online. The paper plans to break most of its exclusives on its subscription-only Web site, which has 800,000 customers. When the Journal learned that Los Angeles Times editor Dean Baquet would resign rather than make corporate-mandated budget cuts, it put the story online -- prompting Baquet to confirm the news to his staff -- and came back with a more detailed piece the next morning.

As for the smaller paper's 5 percent loss of news space, Steiger insists tighter editing (plus info-graphics in the USA Today mold) will make up the difference.

Some Journal staffers, meanwhile, are quite upset over an incident last month in which advertisers were told in advance that the paper planned a story on jets that rent time to clients, allowing the handful of companies in the field to buy ad space in the Personal Journal section.

Insiders say that Hilary Stout, the section's editor, objected to the advertisers' involvement and declined to assign the story, and that travel columnist Scott McCartney refused the assignment after a jet company called him to ask about the story. Another reporter was drafted and wrote a balanced piece.

Steiger says the story -- which was first noted by Women's Wear Daily -- was "much too narrow" for advertisers to have been notified in advance, as opposed to a story or package on a larger industry. Such arrangements, he says, could "create confusion and make people think the story might be an advertorial . . . I'm glad that some reporters raised questions about it." He says the paper will be "more diligent" about what it tells advertisers in advance.

Jacqueline Gonzalez, a San Antonio Express-News columnist, resigned last week after editors found her lifting information without credit in three columns. An internal inquiry began after Gonzalez was found to have ripped off the online encyclopedia Wikipedia for material on the origin of Dec. 25 as the observed birth date of Jesus Christ.

Washington journalists must be getting famous. In a "tribute" to the 110th Congress sponsored by the Creative Coalition, the "celebrity delegation" touted in the invitation includes not just Heather Graham, Morgan Fairchild, Fran Drescher and Rip Torn, but Newsweek's Howard Fineman, MSNBC's Tucker Carlson and CNN's Bob Franken. The Jan. 31 event is a $1,000-a-ticket fundraiser for the lobbying group.

"I'm not a delegate to anything," Fineman says. "Even though there's nothing wrong with it, it looks like they're dangling us all on a revolving stage. I'm not even sure I'm going to be there."

Franken says he is a "celebrity wannabe" and that "this will cause a lot of people to say, 'Who the hell is Bob Franken?' "

Now for the latest news...More leaks about the new plan for Iraq, in the NYT:

"President Bush's new Iraq policy will establish a series of goals that the Iraqi government will be expected to meet to try to ease sectarian tensions and stabilize the country politically and economically, senior administration officials said Sunday."

Um, haven't we heard this before?

Madam Speaker is talking about the war:

"House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said yesterday that Democrats would not give President Bush a 'blank check' to continue the war in Iraq, and suggested that Democratic leaders may seek to deny the administration funding to send more troops to Iraq," says the Boston Globe.

She didn't quite say her party would use the power of the purse, just that Bush would have to "justify" any request for more troops.

"Before Barack Obama was a senator," Newsweek reports, "he opposed the war in Iraq. Now that he is one, he says that sending more troops would be 'a mistake that compounds the president's original mistake.' But don't expect Obama--or most other Dems--to try to block George W. Bush when he asks Congress in the coming weeks for another billion-dollar bundle for the war. The party won't deny the funds, and may not even try to attach conditions to them. Obama made that clear last week when I saw him in his office . . . 'To anticipate your question,' said the Harvard-trained lawyer, 'is Congress going to be willing to exercise its control over the purse strings to affect White House policy? I am doubtful that that is something we are willing to do in the first year.' "

In the New Republic, Michelle Cottle doesn't have huge expectations for Hill Democrats:

"I feel safe going out on a limb and forecasting that this year's Democratic takeover will not, in fact, be a culture-changing, paradigm-shifting, watershed moment in modern politics. With a little luck, Dems will tighten up some ethics rules, allow Bush's more egregious tax sops to the rich to expire, and maybe even find a way to start extracting us from the sinkhole that is Iraq. But they will not bring peace to the globe, end legislative gridlock (thank God), or uproot most of the corrupt pay-to-play fundamentals on which Washington operates.

"As for changing the much-obsessed-about political 'tone'? Forget it. (If nothing else, Dems know all too well that trying to play nice with Rove's Republican Party is a good way to get a Tickle Me Elmo doll rammed right up your bum.) But all this is OK, because, even if the Pelosi-Reid Congress doesn't result in the purest, most effective, most bipartisan legislature in history (and, honestly, what fun would that be?), it will still have accomplished a couple of important goals simply by assuming office.

"For starters, even if congressional Democrats succumb entirely to self-serving partisan political machinations, they will almost certainly do a better job of reining in the White House than did the Bush-coddling Republicans. As previously noted, this president is too uppity to work well without strict oversight. Fortunately, it is in both the interest of the Democratic Party and the nation as a whole for Pelosi, Reid, et al, to put a hitch in W's swagger, reminding him early and often that his title is not, in fact, Caesar . . .

"In a related vein, the Democratic takeover will hopefully remind everyone around Washington that political power is cyclical. Every time one party gets a tiny toehold on power, the entire city starts babbling about sea changes and political transformations. (Gingrich's Revolutionaries would change everything forever! Rove's permanent GOP majority was on the rise!) Hooey. This is Washington. The folks in power can always be counted on to screw up badly enough, grow complacent enough, and abuse their power egregiously enough eventually to get themselves kicked out."

Meet the new boss, same as the old boss?

A very different view from National Review Editor Rich Lowry, who sees the Dems playing small ball:

"If Democrats want to be faster than Gingrich, they don't want to be as grandiose. This is shrewd. Gingrich mistakenly thought he could govern the country from the speaker's chair and disastrously overreached as a consequence. Nancy Pelosi's only early overreaching will be exhausting all of her party's popular, largely symbolic measures in a matter of days. What will Democrats do to fill the countless other hours before their term is done?

"Some of the Democrats' internal reforms are worthy, especially curtailing privately funded travel and enhancing the transparency of earmarks. It is telling that the late GOP congressional majority couldn't manage even these relatively tepid reforms, since some members of its leadership would have been practically immobile without a corporate jet. But all rules have their loopholes and the ultimate ethics measure is rigorous self-policing. Watch Pelosi ally Rep. John Murtha. If his friends continue to fatten themselves on federal money steered their way by Murtha and return the favor with campaign contributions, nothing will have changed in Congress except the party affiliation of the self-interested barons running the place. Prediction: They will.

"The Democratic substance is vanishingly thin. They will raise the minimum wage, but 29 states already have a minimum wage that's higher than the federal rate. The effect of the hike basically will be to give a small boost to the wage of teenagers working summers or after school. FDR would yawn."

Of course, 29 states acted because the Republican Congress sat on its hands for nine years.

Salon Editor Joan Walsh declares that the Democrats "are wrong if they don't take leadership in the one area where voters gave them a bigger mandate than the Contract With America ever had: ending the war in Iraq. That's why the Democrats' early timidity on opposing the president's war plans has been discouraging. At a time when only 12 percent of Americans believe we should send more troops to Iraq, far too many Democrats seem ready to acquiesce in what should be called an escalation not a surge. In December, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid said he was open to backing the president's plan for a troop increase under certain conditions; on Wednesday, Senate Armed Services Committee chairman Carl Levin said the same thing. On the House side, Majority Leader Steny Hoyer told MSNBC Thursday that he'd back a push for 20,000 new troops, though he added, 'We need to find out specifically what he wants to do with those troops.'

"Pelosi skirted specifics in her jubilant speech after being elected speaker . . .

"Pelosi is right -- it is the president's mess -- but she's wrong if she concludes the Democrats don't have to help clean it up."

She must be doing something right, though: "According to the results of a Rasmussen Reports national phone survey of 800 likely voters, released Friday, Pelosi's approval rating has jumped to 43 percent -- up 19 points from November."

When did the Huffington Post turn into a bulletin board for Democratic members of Congress? The day after the takeover, Arianna posted pieces by Ted Kennedy, Chuck Schumer, Jack Murtha, Jane Harman and Tom Harkin, among others. I guess that's why her conservative contributors have mostly vanished.

Arianna dishes on her D.C. party-going, and Norah O'Donnell's pregnancy.

London's Sunday Times has a piece headlined "Revealed: Israel Plans Nuclear Strike on Iran." But Israeli blogger Allison Kaplan Sommer, writing for Pajamas Media, does some debunking:

"Anyone reading the Sunday Times story and is waiting for the nukes to start dropping any moment can take a deep breath and relax. There are several reasons to doubt that such an attack is truly imminent or even imaginable.

First and foremost - one must consider the source of this story. The Sunday Times journalist in question Uzi Mahnaimi, is a controversial figure, who co-authored a book with Bassam Abu Sharif, former senior adviser to Yasser Arafat and PLO press officer.

"While some may believe he has actual military sources in Israel who use him to leak stories that won't make it past censors, others think he is used by foreign agents to push stories that embarrass Israel...

"One thing is clear: Mahnaimi makes a regular habit of reporting that Israel is about to attack Iran. If his reporting was accurate, Iranian nuclear facilities would already be a smoking ruin -- not once, but multiple times."