Right-wing Internet bloggers dogged Dan Rather in "Memogate" so effectively that it might have cost him his anchor chair at CBS News.
Left-wing bloggers discredited Ed Klein's book, The Truth About Hillary, so fiercely that even Clinton haters called the book a hatchet job.
There are plenty of other examples of how bloggers on both sides of the political aisle, when aroused, have sunk their teeth into an issue or person in the news.
Goddamned right. Somebody has to step up and speak their minds, and it's pretty obvious that the corporate media have been irretrievably co-opted and cowed by the current circumstances. Access is their currency in Washington, so they let Scott McClellan and the rest of the Visigoths push them around, and rocking the boat and actually investigating something useful that would probably get squashed anyway is no way to grease your way up the corporate ladder.
Let's face it: without bloggers, you would never have known that a gay male prostitute was being used as a softball-lobber/knob-polisher for White House press conferences -- without real credentials, for a fake news organization owned by a GOP lobbyist, under a fake name, and even accessed the White House during off hours at times.
Not that it mattered in the end, because the American public got distracted by something shiny (as they inevitably do), but at least bloggers gave enough of a shit to try. The only way the media would have latched on to Jeff Gannon™ on their own is if he was suspected of abducting a white woman.
No matter whom President Bush nominates to replace Justice Sandra Day O'Connor on the Supreme Court or whether Bush must replace her and ailing Chief Justice William Rehnquist, who says he has no plans to step down, nominees are going to be fair game for bloggers.
This is a first; the Internet was in its infancy and bloggers weren't around the last time there was an opening on the high court. That was in 1994, when Stephen Breyer was nominated by President Clinton and later confirmed to the court.
Gone are the days when it would usually take disparaging information from an insider to derail a judge's nomination.
He's right about this, and it has been fascinating to watch the entire dynamic of news-gathering and dissemination mutate before our very eyes the last few years. It's an amazing thing to observe, and in the end, it's for the better. It's just hard for a stultified careerist to see that, which is understandable. They seem to think it's a bad thing, when there are good and bad elements to it, but it ultimately goes toward the good.
More information is generally better; people who work in the field of gathering information ought to know this. Yes, there are also rumors and innuendo and slanderous malicious gossip, but by definition, a properly functioning media apparatus sifts through all this in due time -- unless, of course, there's a hurricane for them to stand out in the middle of, like the goddamned fools they are.
Just a few years ago, partisan bloggers "were Internet-based virtual nomads lacking standing or credibility until the Republicans and Democrats gave them standing and legitimacy with accreditation at their national conventions, so they reap what they sowed," says Tom McPhail, a communications professor at the University of Missouri-St. Louis.
He says that "given bloggers' track record of being negative, this gives a clear structural advantage to court nominees that have already survived federal hearings or media scrutiny, like current or former Cabinet members or senators."
"No fact checkers, no editors, no professional rules of the road will make the nominee a high-profile blogger catch — unless they were a hermit for their careers, which is highly unlikely or they would not even make the short list."
Tom Rosenstiel of the Project for Excellence in Journalism says that it will be up to "traditional media with the largest resources to knock down bad stuff that the bloggers put out" about whomever Bush nominates.
"The media world is almost unrecognizable from what it was 11 years ago. All the rules of the road are different. We were driving 1950s Chevys compared to what governs the road now."
Actually, it seems that Bush's supposed pick as of this morning is largely unknown. No doubt that's the way he likes it. But these professors and media analysts seem to think that because bloggers are not professionally-credentialed that they aren't as qualified to analyze facts and information as someone who spends all their free time sucking up to Sally Quinn supposedly would be.
Well, that's bullshit, and that is borne out by the comparative quality of the work. Most big-name bloggers hold their own quite well, factually speaking, against the big-name reporters -- and certainly against the TV network news-readers. Moreover, bloggers link and source and acknowledge each other, where the media meat puppets all simultaneously regurgitate the same tired shit under the pretense that each of them weas there first.
As court stenogrpher Judith Miller sits and sucks up prison air, and as every network media tool knows goddamned well that her investigative probity was for shit in the first place, that she was nothing more than a severely co-opted functionary of the reckless propaganda arm of this administration, they have no right to call foul on the blogosphere. We're not the ones sucking up to our corporate masters so we can live the dream of moving next door to Tim-meh Russert and Tweety Matthews, asshole. Even an overtly biased blogger is not necessarily worse than a jaded reporter who cynically downplays relevant facts for the purely political purpose of appearing "even-handed".
Eventually, the learning curve will even out a little better for the SCLM, and they will learn there's a lot more to the blogosphere than giving Hew Hughitt a cable network soapbox to spout from, like a whore utilizing every available orifice.
Get with the program. Nobody cares about the shit you report on anymore, or how do you it, and that's why people turn to blogs.
Back to you, Wolf.
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