Marcy Wheeler

Marcy Wheeler is an American blogger, online moniker "emptywheel", who previously wrote for The Next Hurrah. Since December 2007, she posts primarily in Jane Hamsher's FireDogLake (FDL), and occasionally in Markos Moulitsas Zúniga's aggregated blog Daily Kos, in Arianna Huffington's aggregrated news site and blog The Huffington Post, in Michigan Liberal, and in other online sites. During United States v. Libby, the trial of I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, along with other regular press-accredited bloggers on Jane Hamsher's blog Firedoglake (FDL), Wheeler reported on the testimony live from the courtroom. In her accounts, she was careful to describe her entries as "not a transcript." Nevertheless, such bloggers' eye-witness accounts served as sources of reliable information about the trial for their readers. During the trial, she appeared on camera in video reports posted online on PoliticsTV.com, along with other accredited Libby trial blogger-correspondents such as TalkLeft creator Jeralyn Merritt and FDL creator Jane Hamsher and FDL principal blogger Christy Hardin Smith.

She is currently a contributor to the Comment Is Free section of the Manchester Guardian Online.

Personal background

Marcy Wheeler lives and works in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and is married. She campaigned for Democratic presidential candidate Howard Dean in 2004, and is a former vice chairwoman of the Washtenaw County Democratic Party.

Education

Wheeler moved to Ann Arbor from her native New York for graduate school in 1995. She earned a Ph.D. from the University of Michigan, in Ann Arbor, Michigan, writing her dissertation on the feuilleton, a literary-journalistic essay form that is often self-published. In her online "Prologue" to Anatomy of Deceit, she observes that the feuilleton essay is an important medium for expressing opinions which might ordinarily be censored due to government displeasure, citing recent examples such as former Czechoslavakian dissident and former Czech President Václav Havel:

... a literary-journalistic form called the feuilleton [is] a kind of conversational essay that appears in a newspaper in its own section. Feuilletons ﬁrst appeared in response to Napoleonic censorship, and in the two hundred years since, they have often become important at moments when political polarization or government censorship has degraded traditional news reporting into nothing more than the parroting of ideological talking points. At such times, the feuilleton has served as a place where writers, using ordinary language, could tell of important events in a more meaningful way.

In Communist Czechoslovakia in the 1970s, a group of citizens started writing feuilletons [samizdat], telling an unofﬁcial version of events. They shared them among friends, copying them over and passing them on in a form of self-publishing. These citizens would go on to lead a revolution, the peaceful Velvet Revolution. One of these citizens [(Václav Havel)] would even become president.

Anatomy of Deceit

Wheeler's reputation as a blogger stems from her analysis of the outing of the covert CIA identity of Valerie E. Wilson, also known as Valerie Plame, and the Bush administration's justification for 2003 invasion of Iraq and the Iraq War. Several of her posts led to follow-up stories in the mainstream media. As their first book publication by FDL Books, "in order to have Marcy [Wheeler]’s work seen by a larger audience," FireDogLake and Daily Kos jointly published her book on the CIA leak scandal (2003), entitled Anatomy of Deceit: How the Bush Administration Used the Media to Sell the Iraq War and Out a Spy, on 28 January 2007. The book is cited in articles about the scandal and has been praised by former Ambassador Joseph C. Wilson, the husband of Valerie E. Wilson (Valerie Plame). The book has a website devoted to it, with an associated blog, in which Wheeler has posted her "Prologue".

The firing of the U.S. Attorneys

Many of Wheeler's 2007 blog entries at The Next Hurrah focussed on the Congressional hearings into the dismissal of eight U.S. Attorneys subsequent to the November 2006 U.S. midterm election.