RISPECK, YO!

A few weeks ago, I wrote a piece angrily pointing out what I saw as a willingness on the part of NPR's "All Things Considered" to freely and gleefully scrape the bottom of the NeoCons' intellectual barrel in selecting guests for political commentary.  Witless wonders like Jonah Goldberg, Dinesh D'Souza, and Rich Lowry have been given prime spots in the show's line-up to spew all manner of ideological pollution with no attempts to explain to the audience that people like D'Souza are bargain-basement GOP flacks with long, impeccable résumés of failure.  The pathetic dunderheads who haunt NRO's The Corner and the back halls of shady Right Wing publishing houses are the truck stop prostitutes of the information superhighway and should only be allowed to speak in public with a warning label:

WARNING: This person's ideas have no basis in fact and have been cynically manipulated around a fixed ideological point.  For entertainment purposes only.  Harmful or fatal if swallowed.  Basing policy on these concepts can result in serious injury and death.

So, imagine my surprise on Thursday when "All Things Considered" kicked off with a refreshingly unbiased, downright laudatory story about the role Josh Marshall and Talking Points Memo have played in the unravelling of the Abu Gonzales justice department.  Most of us know the story of how Marshall and his readers have been on this case for months now and the tale of the now-fabled 3000 page document dump and subsequent all-night data mining expedition. TPM staff and people all across the blogosphere joined forces to drill through the stacks of PDF's in record time, neatly sabotaging the administration's stall-tactic.

Oh, how I wish I could have been a fly on the wall in Karl Rove's little crisis command center when they came in the next morning and announced that a bunch of liberal bloggers had read every single document in less that 24 hours and wanted to know what the hell happened to the crucial missing 18 days of emails around the actual firings.  They thought they had bought themselves some time, heh, and it woulda worked to, if it hadn't been for us meddling kids.

Yay.

But anyway, if you haven't listened to the ATC piece, you should.  For once, liberal bloggers are being portrayed in Big Media without an anti-blog agenda, and it's amazing how good we come off when someone besides Bill O'Reilly is talking about us.  Never once does reporter Robert Smith describe the bloggers involved as amoral, obsessive, and deranged, or even as partisan extremists.  He accurately conveys what has been a reporting coup for bloggers, the kind of fair hearing we have long been denied by mainstream reporters.  The piece hits its money note, though, when they bring in our friend Jay Rosen:

But the site has gotten people's attention. New York University journalism professor Jay Rosen says that this is the direction some blogs are pushing in: original reporting fueled by the talents and efforts of their readership. How do you trust readers to do a reporters job? Rosen says you wait and see.

"If it holds up over time, we trust it. If other people looking at the same material get the same results, well, that suggests we can trust it," Rosen says. "If mistakes are made and are caught quickly and corrected by the same people who are making them, that says maybe this system can be trusted."

Well, in our case that's true.  In the case of Michelle "Wrong-Way" Malkin, and her cabal of fact-free, evidence-denying toadies, you get no correction.  It's just rank speculation bouncing off willful obtuseness, ricocheting around a chamber of distortion, what I call the physics of a fart in a bottle.  ("Hot Air", indeed.)  Apparently no one has bothered to explain to them that in order to effectively report on a story, you can't just make something up because you want it to be true and then try to find the facts that back you up.  That's actually about 180 degrees away from the correct approach, but it's that legacy we've been saddled with since the field was largely pioneered by people like Instapundit and the Little Green Footballs guy.

We'll be seeing more of this sort of thing, I suspect, instances where bloggers are actually leading the news rather than just following it around like the old days.  Jay Rosen said this about FDL's coverage of the Libby trial, but I think it applies equally to TPM's coverage of the US Attorney firings:

I’m just advising Newsroom Joe and Jill: make room for FDL in your own ideas about what’s coming on, news-wise. Don’t let your own formula (blog=opinion) fake you out. A conspiracy of the like minded to find out what happened when the national news media isn’t inclined to tell us might be way more practical than you think.

If I understand your church, there’s nothing more sacred in it than good old fashioned shoe leather reporting— being there, asking questions and taking notes, scrambling to get down what happened. And yet here are these sinners—Atrios calls them the Dirty F__king Hippies—who walk off the jetways and do just that, the basic reporting, better than the people to whom it is religion. Wild month for the church, right?

Dave Winer said it the other day, and Doc Searls picked up on it: We are the sources, going direct. I’m in that church, if any. And if it wasn’t for NewAssignment.Net, I would have asked for space in FDL’s rotation myself. I could tell they were having a blast. Winer wrote, “Blogging allows us to go direct with our knowledge, experience and insights, without waiting for a reporter to ask us what we think.”

You can write to NPR to thank them for their non-hit-piece blogger story by going to NPR.org and hitting 'Contact'.  It would be the polite thing to do.

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