Sunday Discussion Group

March 18, 2007

I’ve been thinking a lot this week about whether we’re in the midst of a sea-change when it comes to the role of blogs in driving the political discourse.

Granted, it’s been happening slowly for a while. The Plame scandal has always struck me as the first turning point. Between July 14, 2003 and September 26, 2003 — 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 criminal investigation, blogs were the only sources of information about the controversy. In that time, the NYT ran just one news item on the story (on page A8). The WaPo ran five paragraphs on the story at the end of an unrelated article, which was published on A20. Over those same 10 weeks, progressive bloggers immediately realized the story’s significance and offered near-blanket coverage. Marshall, Yglesias, and Kleiman ran five posts each, Drum did nine, I wrote seven, etc.

When the story finally hit the front pages after the DoJ investigation started, Slate’s Jack Shafer wrote that reporters were caught flat-footed. An above-the-fold piece in the Post, Shafer said, sent “the rest of the press corps to the blogosphere…to catch up” on the details.

Shafer’s piece was lost in the shuffle, but that sentence struck me as quite an admission. Professional political reporters in DC, who are supposed to be covering stories like these, had no idea what was going on — so they had to rely on blogs. The major traditional news outlets had ignored the story; we didn’t. Bloggers frequently rely on traditional outlets for news coverage, but in this case, the tables were turned.

It was the start of a trend. Most notably, when it comes to the prosecutor purge scandal, it was Josh Marshall who connected the dots.

In December, Josh Marshall, who owns and runs TPM, posted a short item linking to a news report in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette about the firing of the U.S. attorney for that state. Marshall later followed up, adding that several U.S. attorneys were apparently being replaced and asked his 100,000 or so daily readers to write in if they knew anything about U.S. attorneys being fired in their areas.

For the two months that followed, Talking Points Memo and one of its sister sites, TPM Muckraker, accumulated evidence from around the country on who the axed prosecutors were, and why politics might be behind the firings. The cause was taken up among Democrats in Congress. One senior Justice Department official has resigned, and Atty. Gen. Alberto R. Gonzales is now in the media crosshairs.

How significant is this shift?

Time’s Jay Carney acknowledged this week that he and his colleagues simply didn’t appreciate what the blogs thought was obvious.

Josh Marshall at TalkingPointsMemo and everyone else out there whose instincts told them there was something deeply wrong and even sinister about the firings, and who dug around and kept writing about them while Iglesias decided whether to talk to the press or go quietly on to his next job, deserve tremendous credit.

When this story first surfaced, I thought the Bush White House and Justice Department were guilty of poorly executed acts of crass political patronage. I called some Democrats on the Hill; they were “concerned”, but this was not a priority. The blogosphere was the engine on this story, pulling the Hill and the MSM along.

But traditional media skepticism about “blog stories” has hardly disappeared. Digby noted the other day, after watching Hardball, that a there’s still a little “beltway reflexive dismissiveness of anything ‘the left’ finds important.” After noting new revelations that Bush may have blocked a Justice Department investigation on the NSA wiretap program in order to protect Gonzales, Digby wrote:

This is all part of a very large mosaic of government secrecy, political backstabbing and abuse of power. Those of us who were screaming about this until we are hoarse were dismissed out of hand when we argued that no administration should be allowed to seize such unchecked power and the assumption among the establishment was that it was just more of our “unhinged” hysteria.

It wasn’t. This stuff happened and it’s likely only the tip of the iceberg. If the press can get past their loathing of the dirty hippies for five minutes they will see that not only have we been right, we have been flogging some amazingly good stories for the past six years that had they bothered to report them would have been journalistic coups. We really aren’t that nuts — and the Bush administration really is that bad.

Are traditional media outlets beginning to agree? FireDogLake’s coverage of the Libby trial was must-read content for reporters covering the case. TPM has made the purge scandal what it is today. It’s getting increasingly difficult to dismiss the blogosphere’s “dirty hippies” as wrong and irrelevant.

Isn’t it?

Juan Cole with his Informed Comment blog about the war in Iraq is another fine example of a bloger being way out in front of the regular news channels.

  • It’s all about credibility. It’s not surprising that, early on, the blogs were dismissed because they had not yet proven to be credible. Bloggers were seen as “amateurs” who presumed to criticize and correct the “professionals”. Blogs at first they were ignored, then dismissed, then scorned. Now that many of the more mainstream (ahem) political blogs are gaining credibility, they’re being taken more seriously. MSM journalists are learning that many in the blogosphere are actually highly educated serious individuals who write very well. This is a paradigm shift in the purely Kuhnian sense. The old paradigm always pushes back at first.

  • You’re right.

    The MSM journos can’t stand the blogs because they are no longer the guardians of the newz and tell us what we think and what we believe. They know that the blogs are now a threat to their 6-7 figure salaries and their “power.” I suspect that they will hate the blogs forever and a day for that reason alone.

    Judging by the bullshit from the Plame affair, it appears that many of the Washington MSM eeelight are a bunch of self important assholes who would rather kiss ass to get a story than actually break a sweat (Woodward) or careerists who don’t give a shit about the accuracy of a story as long as it gets the front pages (Miller.)

    The usefulness of blogs is that the readers are now part of the news gathering process. It is taking the strength of the National Inquirer, the ability to use their readership to gather its news, and taking it to a much more useful arena instead of mere trivia. If this were the 70s, 80s or 90s that doubt that a small outfit like TPM would have been able to piece things together without the help of their readers as it would mean a lot of phone calls and expensive flights. Instead all it took was an email and those readers with the background and local knowledge took over.

    We readers come from a wide variety of backgrounds and experiences. This diversity means that information that might be dismissed as trivial or overlooked by many might be noticed by those who know better thus fewer stories fall thru the cracks.

  • However, it must be noted that the MSM, while ignoring progressive blogs, did pay attention to conservative blogs. Any crap Drudge puts out seems to get in the MSM very quickly. And when CBS 60 Minutes did its piece on W’s National Guard service (rather non-service), the MSM was quick to print all the allegations of the conservative blogs. Yet another example of “liberal bias” in the MSM, in this case regarding blogs.

    It may be that progressive blogs had to earn their credibility before the MSM would pay attention, but the conservative blogs were given almost immediate credibility, and still are, though so much of there material gets debunked.

  • There will always be wingnut blogs to balance it out in the land of “he said she said” – or even made up blogs like Howie Kurtz spotlighted a few weeks ago. The blogs are a huge threat to the for profit corporate controlled media model (and its precisely because they don’t follow that model that they can do what they do) — and as such, any recognition of their usefulness will be slow and grudging.

  • It is the best thing to happen to democracy, as a whole, since 1789. Even if the big blogs sell out(I know, it could never happen), new ones will always arise. It’s enough to give a person hope.

  • Viewing blogs and MSM as adversaries is something I think we need to get past. No one can type enough keystrokes to stop what I think is the inevitable blurring of both Internet and traditional media. No one can say where it’ll lead but we do have some clues.

    Using the Internet to facilitate collaborative reporting and investigation as recently demonstrated by Josh Marshall and TPMuckraker presents something new in the field of journalism. As other sites adopt similar models, one can imagine a potentially unlimited number of networks with ad hoc affiliates or stringers circling the globe. One can also imagine knowledgeable sources gathering around specific issues of interest and expertise. So, the professionalism, fact-checking and network direction roles of sites like TPMuckraker are going to become increasingly critical in establishing and maintaining credibility among potential audiences.

    In the near-term, collaborative investigation by blogs will continue to explore issues that eventually percolate up to MSM for larger distribution, and MSM will come to rely on these ad hoc networks just as many blogs now rely on MSM for content.

    In time, MSM will probably adopt the ad hoc network model for itself. Along the way, we’ll probably see the importance of MSM as we now know diminish, and new, solely Internet based players emerge.

    So yes, we’re in the early stages of what will be a dramatic change.

  • I would add the Downing Street Memo to the list of ‘blog triumphs’. I might even put it at the top of the list. Even though that story never got the MSM attention it merited, it did somehow get lodged in the public’s conscience. It marked a turning point in both the Bush regime’s popularity, and mainstream awareness of blogs.
    Blogs also played a huge role in amplifying stories like Sy Hersh’s Abu Grhaib expose. Yes, MSM dutifully covered that story, but the steady drumbeat from the lefty blogs gave it more traction than it seemed to be getting on it’s own.

    At the root of this is a systematic dysfunction in how media handles political stories. Reporters have to ‘play nice’ to maintain access, while media ownership have a vested interest in how DC political stories shape eventual policy. GE has a bottom line. And while that may not be a day to day concern in the NBC newsrooms, it’s still part of a background corporate culture that influences editorial decision making.

    Into this void stepped some very talented writers. People like our Carpetbagger and Digby, as well as skilled journalists like Josh Marshall and his crew. The easy access of the internet, with the almost instant ability to fact check via Google, have certainly changed how talking points are manipulated. Complete bullsh*t doesn’t fly nearly as far as it once did.

    And therein lies the success of the blogs. I doubt many of the bloggers would pour the same energy into their projects if no one found them interesting or useful. Blogs have a growing following because a growing number of people sense the bullsh*t/information ratio from MSM is tilted heavily toward bullsh*t. If there’s an area where blogs have led MSM, or held their feet to fire, it’s in culling actual information from the bullsh*t. The DC elite may resent getting called on that now, but in the long run and if they pay attention, the blogs may be just the thing that saves them.

  • what i regard as completely telling in this matter is that so few journalists practice journalism anymore that they’ve lost the ability to actually dig in and investigate anything. source-driven journalism (always a misreading of woodward and bernstein anyhow) has never been an adequate substitute for finding the facts, but a lot of people in journalism found it good enough.

  • The excellent comments already cover my thoughts.

    One thing I’ve noticed is the blogosphere’s ‘liberation of lawyers’. So much of the happenings and point-connecting really benefit from the technical expertise of lawyer bloggers like Glenn Greenwald etc. It’s pro-bono work of the best kind.

    Another point is that the blogosphere covers national news in a more significant way than any particular newspaper and in a more in-depth way than AP or Reuters. Stories have a longer life span with specific posts over days and weeks punctuated with CB-style roundups and summaries.

    I criticize the MSM, but when they’re good, they’re very very good.

  • This isn’t quite what you asked, but I used to be an avid newspaper reader, especially of the editorial pages and letters to the editor. I still rely on NPR, and I still subscribe to a newspaper, but I’m getting more news from blogs and helpful diverse viewpoints from blog comments, and I’m paying almost no attention to national MSM commentators, except in so far as unless they get discussed in blogs. For me, some blogs (like CB) already have more credibility than MSM pundits. If and when good blogs institute a vetted two-tier comment system, editorially separating comments into “valuable” (or at least “interesting”) and “other” threads, I think they’ll take over the role that broadsheets used to have in promoting citizen involvement and civic (rather than civil) debate.

    Similarly, I’m finding that I’d rather learn about most scientific discoveries by starting with blogs that report on the journals ‘Nature ‘and ‘Science’, and then go to the journals and the actual articles themselves.

  • Bloggers and traditional journalists both use networks of contacts.

    For bloggers, the networks are large, but not of the absolute top tier…which is to say that a blogger’s network usually doesn’t have a lot of active insiders. Bloggers do, however, draw upon a community with many knowledgeable outsiders (professors, researchers, former office holders) plus the general public, whose quantity often compensates for lack of top quality.

    For traditional journalists, the networks are very small but almost entirely made up of insiders. This means that journalists can occasionally get absolute top quality info that simply isn’t available to outsiders, no matter how knowledgeable. On the other hand, a small network is much more vulnerable to random and deliberate interference. One person telling lies can skew the sample space and throw everything off, not to mention the famous “echo chamber” effect, where a small self-contained network can be completely out of touch with the larger world.

    In general, bloggers’ quantity of expertise is a powerful match for journalists’ occasional triumphs of quality. But both use networks to gather and sift information; in the long run, it’s not as big a paradigm shift as some have claimed.

  • Television news some time ago made significant cuts in their research departments, realizing that people really didn’t stop tuning in, just because the “news” was no longer accurate or balanced.

    Bloggers do the research, so corporate news departments don’t have to.

    I think more television news will realize that they can save money by simply surfing the internet for news and then reporting it. And that’s what they’ll do.

  • In media, sports, and love .. to be a professional means to play the game for money. Why are we surprised when well paid actors sitting behind news desk sets follow the scripts written by their entertainment driven corporations?

  • One thing that seems remarkable to me in comparing blogs to MSM is the massive disparity in resources available, which then ends up not mattering because of the way they are used.

    Compare, say, the network descriptions of the Libby trial as it went on to the PoliticsTV summations by the Plame House gang. The networks had pretty graphics, finely tuned copy, and a slick and immaculately coifed spokesperson to deliver it. The PoliticsTV summations were shoestring affairs shot wherever with a tiny camera featuring regular schlubs with no makeup department. Yet there was absolutely no comparison when it came to actually conveying the story. The network take was simplistic, incomplete and generally unenlightening, while the Plame House gang provided detail, context and nuance, along with a lot of opinion (smart opinion, but opinion).

    It was amazing to me to see such a small crew just clean the clock of the big guys. Makes me think there may be some hope after all.

  • A couple elements I find in blogs that I see missing in the MSM are diversity and skepticism.

    It seems like the MSM channels tend toward reporting the same few stories, whereas the various blogs seem happy to do some and let others take theirs. Overall, there is a broader AND deeper coverage, when FDL is all over the Plame story, Josh is doing Attorney-gate (or Social Security posturing), Juan Cole is doing Iraq, Scout Prime is keeping me in touch with Katrina aftermath, etc. Meanwhile, my hometown newspapers have the same stories top-of-the-fold more often than not, and TV news variety is about which order the same three stories go in.

    Second, the MSM seems completely unwilling to ‘trust, but verify’, much less ‘distrust, and figure out what’s really going on.’ I never see the sort of regular ‘hypothesis testing’ that goes on in the blogosphere, asking ‘Does that make sense? What does the data show? Do they have a motive for saying that? Who benefits if I believe that?’ You know, journalism.

  • …progressive bloggers immediately realized the story’s significance and offered near-blanket coverage. Marshall, Yglesias, and Kleiman ran five posts each, Drum did nine, I wrote seven, etc.

    Lest we forget, it was David Corn who read the Novak column and immediately wondered if a crime was committed. Credit where it’s due.

  • Biggerbox said the blogs provide “broader AND deeper coverage.” I would add, by in large, more accurate. A good friend of mine who worked at the highest levels of the federal government said he never saw a news story that got the information more than 90% right. I would add, based on my experience, it is often much worse than that. I would suspect that the better blogs (such as CB and TPM) do substantially better than that – and are perfectly willing to make corrections in nearly real time when those occur. I suspect this happens because many progressive bloggers are actually, as several noted above, noth really well educated and have professional level knowledge specific to the subject areas they discuss. Most journalists are outsiders looking in who generally do not have in depth understanding of the subject they are writing about. It also happens because every good progressive blog has an army of knowledgeable fact-checkers and the will to use them to improve their content.

    I keep saying progressive blogs, because the RW blogs are generally the opposite. They are sycophantic enablers who have no special knowledge, only the will to promote a specific viewpoint in the face of overwhelming information to the contrary.

    My hope is that the msm, at least those who care, realize what an amazing resource our blogs are to make them better at what they do. It is clear to me that that is what the readers of CB want – accurate news. It seems like Joe Klein is starting to get that. Can you imagine if great reporters would begin using a select army of outside fact checkers to vet beta versions of their stories? That what happens on every progressive blog, and its one reason why the content is so good.

  • The PoliticsTV summations were shoestring affairs shot wherever with a tiny camera featuring regular schlubs with no makeup department–jimBOB .

    Is that anyway to talk about Christy, Jane, and Marcy? Tsk,tsk, tsk,….

  • The MSM is the frog in the pot that was brought to a boil slowly, so the frog never realized it was being boiled to death. As of now, they are officially useless – if you want to get a reaction from a reporter, let them know you’re a blogger, their attitude changes immediately now when you talk to them (as I discovered with the LA Times recently).

    That the MSM gives the conservative blogs any sort of respect is amazing, since the fact is that everything they post is found to be a lie by Media Matters; Rush Limbaugh being demonstrably a liar with everything he says; Drudge with his lies – yet the MSM believes them. It’s called The Big Lie. Tell a lie that’s big enough, often enough, and people will believe it because they don’t want their friends (who believe it) to think there’s “something wrong” with them – everyone wants to be on the winning side. Over the on the Right, they all have The Post of the Day, the Talking Point of the Day, and they repeat it and repeat it and repeat it.

    Over on our side, there’s one blogger point out this, another pointing out that, etc., so there’s no great chorus, no “Mighty Wurlitzer”, and we don’t have a Faux News, CNN, MSNBC, picking up and repeating everything we put out, as the Right does.

    About the best hope we have is to shame individual members of the MSM into getting them to do their job the way they’re supposed to. On that point, having a guy like Jay Carney make the admission he did, having the LA Times do that piece on TPM yesterday, etc., will now give Josh the “credibility” that the crowd will come listen to him. That’s progress.

    Like they said on SG-1: “Saving the universe, one episode at a time.”

  • It’s getting increasingly difficult to dismiss the blogosphere’s “dirty hippies” as wrong and irrelevant.

    Isn’t it?

    One would like to think so. But keep in mind these are the same people to who dismissed the President of the United States — one who had actually won two elections — as “irrelevant.”

  • The blogosphere is the engine on these stories but the reporters and news agencies provide the fuel. One dishes out the dots, the other connects them. Without the dots there is no story.

    Basically the relationship is symbiotic, rather than competitive. Each needs and supports the other. Without journalists gathering the information, the bloggers would not have the material to chew on. Correspondingly, without bloggers smelling rats journalists wouldn’t know where to ferret.

    One thing that has changed dramatically, by way of the Internet, is the speed with which data moves around the world, to be shared and examined instantly by an unprecedentedly huge number of minds. It is this convergence of attention focused with such enormous interactive intensity on the smallest items of news that has left no hiding place for political deceit.

    So, yes: this is indubitably a sea-change. The way that Josh Marshall at TMP, and others, have exploited their resources of daily readers to garner otherwise virtually unattainably detailed support information around the country, is further confirmation of the power of this paradigm shift. “The usefulness of blogs is that the readers are now part of the news gathering process.” as Former Dan #3 states it. As such, they are entering the investigative domain, the erstwhile preserve of traditional media. Thus, slowly, it is becoming increasingly difficult for the MSM to get away with lies, distortion, noise and red herrings. “Complete bullsh*t doesn’t fly nearly as far as it once did.” (JoeW #8).

    As an evolutionary biologist I see the invention of the computer and the subsequent emergence of cyberspace as an extraordinary step in the development of the human species on Earth. The little proto-mammals are emerging from between the toes of the dinosaurs.

  • First of all, it’s a mistake to lump together traditional print journalists and TeeVee types. From Colonial times on, anyone with a printing press could pass his opinions around to readers. This led to considerable diversity of opinion (at one time eight competing Boston newspapers had to find some new nasty thing to say about Ted Williams). TeeVee requires vastly more investment, so for a long time there were only three major and one public network competing for a national audience. TeeVee has long since been taken over by corporations which had little or no interest in news, just revenue. They have turned to bubble heads with toothy smiles. The “news” now consists of murders and fires and storms a continent away from the viewer.

    It was into this news vacuum that the bloggers stepped. Like the old print journalists, many of them were and are “dirty” (in several senses of the word). Like the old print journalists, many of them were skeptical and smart (unlike print journalists they don’t allow editors to hide their light under a bushel basket). Like the old print journalists they were and are extremely underpaid, if paid at all; their object is the news, perhaps fame and recognition, certainly not wealth (compare with the annual salaries of the any of the toothy bubbleheads). As a result they have no investment in “the system” and are free to investigate it. And like the old print journalists they recognize each other as brethren rather than fellow celebrities trying desperately to grab the spotlight. Like the old print journalists, bloggers have a strong interest in the uses and abuses of language and expression; H.L. Mencken and Steve Benen would recognize each other in an instant, whereas Steve Benen and Katie Curic share … what?

    I am, of course, not referring to those, notably on the right, who maintain what they call blogs but which are in reality little more than “gotcha” party-line attack machines, talking-point-dictated ritual worship-the-right and smear-the left-rags. Such people don’t dig into a story to unearth the underlying truth so much as they comb their thesauruses for more colorful slams (focus group tested, of course) until one sticks, like a turd to one’s shoe. You don’t learn anything from them except how to express bigotry and hatred (think Ann Coulter) and even the expression is usually little more than a cheap shot. This being dumbed down America, where NASCAR and wrasslin’ rule, there is of course a market for “gotcha” blogging, just as there is TeeVee “news”. But that’s a wholly different genre and discussion topic.

    Can the MSM ever catch up with blogging, now that they’ve discovered the emerging technology? I don’t think so. As long as it/they remain corporate- and profit-dominated, I can’t see them competing with the bloggers. There’s literally no profit in it. Asking people to submit evidence of wrong-doing by the Department of Justice is a hell of a lot different from ordering your underlings to do so or ordering them not to do so in order to cover it up on behalf of the stockholders. Voluntary prying and news gathering and sharing is as old as gossip, and as fresh and fascinating and sometime funny, too. Watching corporate monkeys show of their hairdos while spewing the corporate line/lie can’t begin to compare to it. Except for comics like Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert!, the MSM is all but dead. Like flowers plunked in a vase, they just don’t know it yet.

  • Rege

    I love Christy, Jane and Marcy as much as anyone, but no one would mistake them for one of the networks’ blond newsreader-bimbettes. Which is entirely in their favor, as far as I’m concerned.

  • George Will personifies the animosity the MSM has had for blogs. Deriding bloggers as amateurs and the blogosphere as just a bunch of nobodys spouting their opinions, Will and the rest of the cynical old guard are dealing with an outmoded definition of blogs as being people’s personal diaries about whatever strikes their fancy. They don’t get that the blogosphere is the world’s biggest publishing house where an enormous array of very talented and knowledgable people can publish very legitimate news, commentary and analysis. Will and the others have built their prestige on living in the exclusive gated community of the MSM and smugly thinking the rest of the world all desired to know what they knew. If they looked outside their gates, they’d realize there is a whole world of intelligent people that gets by just fine without them.

    Blogs have created a revolution. CNN may have started the 24 hour news cycle, but blogging makes that irrelevant with the 60-second news cycle. Now you can find out what you want to know in about 60 seconds. A whole world of news when you want it and not on someone else’s time schedule.

    But blogs have matured as well. Blogs are becoming more specialized. Some blogs, like this one are good at analysis, some focus on fact-checking others have very astute commentary. And now we’re seeing individual blogs bird-dogging events and investigating stories from beginning to end and picking up a great deal of expertise along the way like FDL, TPM and Juan Cole have been doing. The age of single-source news is dead and no longer do we have to rely on a newspaper or news channel of record. We can confirm news through a variety of trusted sites making all of us more astute consumers of the news.

    Additionally a synergy is developing between blogs and also through the postings of commenters. Instead of White House Press Corps groupthink, blogs have group input, group critique and group fact checking to efficiently hone stories to their truthful essence. Moreover, a single blog post can link to all the pertinent documents, video, images and audio to back up their reporting, something the traditional news outlets can’t/ won’t do.

    But a big part of this movement is trust. Bloggers, like the Carpetbagger, have developed an audience and reputation based on trust that was earned through accuracy, honesty, dilligence and truthfullness. The MSM has been betraying the trust placed in them for some time now, and flushed a good deal of it away beginning with their acquiesence to the Republican smear machine during the Clinton Administration. If Josh Marshall writes about the US Attorney scandal,it’s trustworthy. The New York Times? Not so much. If a bogger betrays the trust of the public, no one will go to that site anymore. But f a newspaper betrays the trust it will still persist because we still need something to wrap the fish in and and line the bird cages with.

  • There are a number of comments today with which I concur, and I would add the following.
    I do not know how common my experience is with other readers of CBR and other blogs, but I am a “lone wolf” among my social circle and family. I am unique among them with respect to my use of blogs as a significant source of (political) news. Many do not even know what a blog is let alone the cast of characters that many of us recognize both by blog name and by given name (some – Christy, Jane, Marcy, Josh – we need only one of the given names to know for sure). I believe that many people would, as I did, come to marvel at how far behind the blog news curve the MSM after only a short time of reading the stories that blogs report, follow, and analyse every day.

    I also see blogs as news “portals” for someone like me who has a limited amount of time to spend searching for and reading interesting and potentially significant MSM reporting. Many blog posts link to stories that have yet to rise to significance in the world of MSM (read television) editorial selection. The blogs provide context that enables me to decide whether I want to spend time following the link and learning what all the original reporting (or blogging or both) has to say. I was having a conversation last night with a friend who was expressing outrage over the infiltration of Shia death squads into the Iraqi police. He was just now becoming aware of something that to me was “old news.” It speaks to the sources from which he gets much of his news.

    That said, I truly believe that blogs are complementary to MSM news sources. Many blog posts have roots in reporting and commentary by the MSM. And, I hope those who feel that the MSM will not co-opt blogs are right. The dedication to the story rather than to gaining / maintaining membership in the secret society that seems to exist in our nation’s capitol is a critical part of the value blogs bring to our national discourse.

    Finally, I wonder if the superb work of Josh’s TPM crew would be garnering this well-deserved recognition if the voters had not given important keys to national political power to the Democrats last November. The symbiosis of a news story with Congressional oversite reveals itself yet again. While blogs undoubtedly played a role in the exposure of the corruption and ineptitude of the national Republicans (Abramoff, Tom Delay), the MSM also helped by seizing on the tragic spectacles of both Terry Schiavo and Katrina, a story that played to their tabloid news strengths.

  • I agree with petorado. I no longer trust TV news or Sunday news shows because of the conservative bias. I scan newspapers for articles that interest me, but I cannot trust newspapers that sat on stories (the NSA’s spying on Americans) and that did not investigate the administration’s false reasons for invading and occupying Iraq.

    I love blogs because they are powered by people who care about the truth and who are scooping the MSM. Blogs are the new journalism.

  • upthread someone mentioned The Downing Street Memo story………another story broken by the bloggers that the MSM all but ignored was the Jeff Gannon one.

    This by all accounts should have been a big story…..a male prostitute with no journalistic experience with access to the White House BEFORE he became a “reporter”…..now do you think if Clinton was in the White House all the puppetheads on the teevee would be having a shitfit over this? You bet Chris Matthews would be spinning his head 360 and vomiting blood ALA Linda Blair in the Exorcirst.

    I almost feel that MSM outlets ignored these stories out of spite, god forbid they give any props to the bloggers.

  • this is particuliar true in the financial press. Bloggers have been way out in front of the traditional financial press, just look at what is happening in the subprime world today is an excellent example. It may be that the internet provides a much faster forum to get information out via a blog then the typical TV media outlet which is a visual short interview format. While the blog can generate a context for the information and support documentation that is missing in MSM.

  • TPM is in a class by itself.

    Sorry CB, I read you more often and use you for general information and links, but TPM is the new wave.

    He/they are doing investigative blogging. I some ways it reminds me of the kind of investigative reporting that IF Stone used to do in his weekly.

  • Let’s just hope the leading bloggers don’t get so big that they become owned by corporations. If they do, we’d have to start the cycle all over again.

  • The shift? Hugely significant, in my view. It has been going on for quite a while now: MSM has a confused love-hate — or more accurately link-to-but-diss — attitude towards bloggers. The first time the Washington Post linked to my site I was stunned for about half a second and then had to laugh at the absurdity.

    Then, too, the other day I sent a polite email to a NYTimes reporter about what appeared to be a huge and rather Cheneyesque assumption in one of his reports. He was pleasant at first and then, upon being told that I was a blogger, disappeared in a huff into cyberspace. The dubious reference in the article was changed, though, in subsequent online editions.

    Unlike Carpetbagger, I’m a rank amateur like many relatively new bloggers. But there’s a hard-working, admirable crew out there — Josh, CarpetB, Juan Cole, Paul Kiel, Laura Rozen, John Amato and some others — to whom I’m damn grateful because they make me think democracy may survive after all.

    I may be more optimistic than others simply because of the enforced absence of TV in my household (six years and will never go back). So the worst of the worst crud isn’t polluting the air here…!

    Ron(32) is on target with “support documentation.” I don’t necessarily want to see the press go under, but I think Ed Stephan(24) is probably right. Tom Cleaver (21) may not have detected liberal blog influence on the wingnut MSM but I bet they feel it, at the very least like the princess and the pea. Also, Steve Benen is a lot better looking than Katie Couric who now (at least in still photos) has only the shock value of a grotesque.

  • Priesthoods (the “professionals”, in whatever arena) usually respond viciously when their authority is challenged.

    The priests expect to pontificate to audiences who are mere passive receivers of their wisdom.

    In the MSM, the professionals are just people with corporate jobs – in the case of TV presenters, people whose seeming motivation is a certain adolescent exhibitionism combined with an adolescent knowledge of most subjects. (I apologize to adolescents everywhere.) There are higher professional standards for cosmetologists than there are for “journalists”.

    It’s no wonder the congregation has quit sleeping through the boring, self-serving, and inaccurate sermons of the MSM and started talking back through blogs.

  • Yes, bloggers have taken over from the MSM in terms of following and explaining complicated stories and creating information hotspots for hobbyists, political junkies, gamers, etc. But the assumption that there is now a level playing field is false.

    There are important subjects that only true believers will tackle; the rest of the blogosphere deliberately looks away, in just the same way that the MSM chooses to overlook politically inconvenient stories.

    For example, how many respected bloggers report on the well-documented (and illegal) influence of an Israeli political faction on US foreign policy? Yes, Kos has recently run a dialog concerning Sibel Edmonds and her revelations about AIPAC and ATC, but that is the exception that (almost) proves the rule. See http://www.911blogger.com/node/6942

    And how much longer will so-called progressive bloggers continue to accept the official story on 9/11, despite abundant evidence that it was a false flag operation executed by US military and intelligence operatives, among others?

    In 2007 it is no longer reasonable to claim ignorance of the facts or to pretend to believe the findings of the inconsistent and incomplete government-sponsored reports, all of which have been thoroughly discredited.

    To accept the official “19 crazy Arabs with boxcutters” myth whenever it is trotted out is to apply a double standard and deliberately avoid the consequences of rational thought.

    Progressive bloggers are saints compared to the corporate-sponsored propaganda machine we politely refer to as the MSM. But they will lose their saintliness if they continue to turn a blind eye to particular uncomfortable subjects because they don’t have the balls or intellectual curiosity to educate themselves.

    See: http://www.911blogger.com/node/6882

    And, from : http://www.911truth.org/article.php?story=20070308123403926

    “One of the reasons…people reject the government’s conspiracy theory is that, if they were to accept the official account of the destruction of the World Trade Centre, they would need to affirm magical beliefs. A few examples:

    The Twin Towers came straight down, which means that each building’s 287 steel columns all had to fail simultaneously; to believe this could happen without explosives is to believe in magic.

    At the onset of each tower’s collapse, steel beams were ejected out as far as 600 feet; to believe that these horizontal ejections could be explained by gravitational energy, which is vertical, is to believe in magic.

    Virtually all of the concrete in the towers was pulverized into extremely fine dust particles; to believe that fire plus gravity could have done this is to believe in magic.

    WTC 7 and the towers came down at virtually free-fall speed, meaning that the lower floors, with all their steel and concrete, provided no resistance to the upper floors; to believe this could happen without explosives is to believe in magic.

    Pools of molten metal were found under each building. Because steel does not begin to melt until it reaches about 1,540°C and yet the fires could not have gotten over 1000°C, to accept the fire theory is to believe in magic.”

  • Imagine your a monk in a monastary in, say, southern France circa 1450, and you’ve just heard of an invention by a fellow from Mainz in the Rheinpfalz that printed words on paper without the assistance of a scribe, and his first big project is the Bible.
    You scoff in derision of so simplistic a notion of replacement for your skillfully honed proficiency of reproducing the written word.
    Then imagine that your a Catholic preacher at the same time, and it dawns on you that a mass produced bible could seriously compormise your interpretation of the word of God.
    And finally, imagine that your are a first class pundit of the empire sharing a round of cocktails with various Beltway luminaries at the Chevy Chase Club, and somebody brings of the subject of the blogosphere.
    Get my drift?

  • A lot of the comments here have summed up the issue very well.

    I’d also like to add that it part of what is changing is the lack of vitriol from isites like this one, TPM, Muckraker, Cole, et al. Sure, the occasional f-bomb doesn’t bother me, but it can get in the way for some folks. The fact CBer and others post such insightful, intelligent, and well-sourced material is key for the entire blogosphere (and I’ve said it before — what CB posts are not tirades).

    IMHO, there are several reasons why the corporate media pushes back so hard:

    1. Hubris — Journalists feel they are the only ones with the knowledge, and no one else could ever do what they do. Blogs have proven otherwise.

    2. Loss of ad revenue — This is the biggest threat, even though almost all big papers still make tons of cash, and their biggest losses are from online classifieds, like Craigslist.

    3. Failure to adapt — Like nearly all industries, the media has an unwillingness to adapt to new technology. Blogs are still “new” and many outlets are not sure how to compete or integrate them. Granted, the WaPo did a great job, but the Kansas City Star is a frickin’ joke — they are now charging people a few hundred bucks a year to read their political blog, even though they offer pretty much ZERO analysis that can’t be found elsewhere. Absolutely stupid.

    Blogs are not totally there, however, because they lack on key thing: Access.

    Once big time bloggers start getting interviews with the newsmakers as easily as CNN, Faux, and the rest, then there will be a huge shift.

    Meanwhile, local papers that once covered national news will have to go hyper local just to survive — there will be too many national outlets for them to justify dedicating the resources to national stories.

    Anyway … great topic and great comments!

  • Ditto the above thoughts, especially Re: the Downing Street Memo. That was a huge story that got blogged to death, but the MSM never did much with it, and acted like it was old news even though they ignored it and it was hugely significant.

    The failure of the MSM to ask questions during the runup to Iraq is their tombstone. The old way is DEAD.

    Their failure to call out Bush on the Iran business is why we need to keep their feet to the fire.

  • Being derided by George Will doesn’t take much. But his and other RMW derision says that blogs are having an effect. It hampers Pox News and other RWM in their attempts to control their Base, just as it hampers the MSM’s monopoly over the general public.

    Perhaps blogs are like printing the bible in the colloquial tongue. No longer is it available to the few rich or literate. No longer can it be kept even from them by an institution claiming a monopoly over its meaning (and which would love to excise from the cannon those pesky Prophets). It’s available to virtually anyone. And they can judge for themselves.

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