Some believe political blogs reached the “big time” in December when blog writers such as Josh Marshall and Glenn Reynolds sunk their teeth into the Trent Lott/Strom Thurmond affair. While traditional media outlets — print, radio, TV — missed the story initially, blogs went wild, kept the story alive until the rest of the press caught up, and Lott was eventually stripped of his position as Senate Majority Leader.
Howard Kurtz, the Post’s media columnist, praised blogs’ work on the Lott story. The New York Post’s John Podhoretz called the Lott matter “The Internet’s First Scalp.” Wired magazine said, “It’s safe to assume that, before he flushed his reputation down the toilet, Trent Lott had absolutely no idea what a blog was. He may have a clue now.” Wired added that blogs “kept focusing on Lott’s hateful past — until the national press corps finally had to take notice.”
I have no idea what’s going to happen with the Plame Game scandal, but I think this is another perfect example of how blogs are again helping to shape political journalism.
Slate’s Jack Shafer wrote on Monday that the front-page, above-the-fold story on this scandal caught most of the political world flat-footed. Shafer said the article sent “the rest of the press corps to the blogosphere…to catch up” with what’s happened so far.
Think about that for a minute. DC political reporters, who are supposed to be covering stories like these, had no idea what was going on so they had to start searching blogs. As Billmon said yesterday, “So the professional press, which gets paid to write about this sort of stuff, which has the sources and the resources to investigate government wrongdoing, and expensive lawyers to tell them what they can and cannot get away with saying, has to come running here, to the blogosphere, to ‘catch up’ with a major breaking political scandal?”
I did a little digging last night to see just how negligent the nation’s major newspapers were on this story. The results weren’t encouraging.
The relevant time period is July 14 to September 26 — the 10 weeks between the original publication of Bob Novak’s now-infamous column to the day MSNBC first reported that the CIA has asked the Justice Department for a formal investigation of the illegal leaks.
In that time, the New York Times, the nation’s paper of record, published just two stories about the leaks. One of the stories was a column from Paul Krugman, so we’re really only talking about one news article. It ran on page A8 on August 8.
The Washington Post, meanwhile, ran just one item during those 10 weeks. It was a July 25 article hidden deep in the paper on page A20. In fact, it wasn’t even an article about the leak; it was about former CIA director John Deutch’s concerns about the failure to find WMD in Iraq. At the very end of that article, the Post included five paragraphs on Plame, noting that Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) has asked the FBI to investigate “whether Bush administration officials identified the wife of former ambassador Joseph C. Wilson as a clandestine CIA officer.” Five paragraphs on page A20. That’s it.
Then I went back to look at the coverage this story received from some of my favorite blogs during those same 10 weeks. (Every person with a blog has multiple posts about this after Sept. 26. I only looked at those with posts before the story broke big.)
Josh Marshall and Matthew Yglesias each had five separate posts about the Plame controversy, as did UCLA professor Mark A.R. Kleiman. Kevin Drum at Calpundit had nine posts about the matter, not including references he made in the comments section of his blog. Not to brag, but The Carpetbagger Report had seven items during those 10 weeks, some of the posts lamenting the fact that the media was dropping the ball on a great story. Many other blogs — too many to mention here — offered equally thorough coverage.
Of course, I want to give credit where credit is due. Newsday, for example, did excellent reporting early on, with three very informative articles on the leaks the week of July 21. Just as importantly, The Nation’s David Corn was among the first to highlight the seriousness of the illegal leaks on July 16 — just two days after Novak’s column ran.
The rest of the media missed the boat entirely. The Washington Post has done phenomenal work over the last five days, some of which will probably earn the paper multiple awards. The NY Times has been playing catch-up since Saturday and the LA Times is just repackaging the Post’s stories a day later.
But when all is said and done, it was the political blogs who saw this story as a scandal before the mainstream media even lifted an eyebrow.