Blackhawk Down

The reporting we saw on TV and on the Internet that day was the work not of journalists, but of political hit men. The snippets about Sotomayor had been circulating on conservative Web sites and shown on some TV channels for weeks. They were new only to the vast majority of us who have better things to do than vet the record of every person on Obama’s list. But this is precisely what activists and bloggers on both sides of the political spectrum do, and what a conservative organization like the Judicial Confirmation Network exists to promote. The JCN had gathered an attack dossier on each of the prospective Supreme Court nominees, and had fed them all to the networks in advance. (Emphasis mine)

Mark Bowden, author of, investigated the strange coincidence of all the TV networks having Sonya Sotomayor’s “wise Latina” speech cued up the instant her nomination was announced, finding that

Bowden focuses on the rise of web-based partisan journalism and the MSM’s new habit of stovepiping propaganda, but what I find interesting is his identification of the 24-7 news cycle as “post journalistic. It sees democracy, by definition, as perpetual political battle.” He’s talking about the permanent campaign: