Sunday Discussion Group

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?