A Lamont victory tonight is a nice milestone for political organizing by internet. But it's also worth marking another milestone, in the way that we're seeing primary day covered.
If you go to nytimes.com now, there is a link on the front page that takes you directly to entries in the New York Times' blog on the CT primary. Got that? The New York Times has a front-page blog. That didn't happen because they thought it was a good idea. It happened because they realized they're competing directly with sites like dKos for readers. We are the news media now. And reading the comments there shows how we've overtaken them in reporting.
A single click from their front page takes you to a diary
like this one where readers can comment directly. We are approaching a point where we can respond as directly, and as visibly, to a NYTimes front-page article as we can to a dKos diary.
And that's what we're doing. Within 45 minutes of their piece going up covering Lieberman's web site outage, a comment was posted debunking the "denial of service attack" theory, copied from myDD. Within another 45 minutes, the fact that Lieberman had been spending only about $15 per month on his web hosting (news I may have broken in this comment just an hour earlier) was added to the comments. (Hat tip to Holmes Wilson, whoever you are, for being quick on the draw in the Times' comments.)
And what becomes immediately apparent in the comments are the three things that make bloggers better reporters than New York Times journalists are.
1. Skepticism From the story about Lieberman pulling up his ground game to the outlandish and baseless claims about hackers sabotaging his website, bloggers have refused to swallow the baloney that our brothers and sisters in the mainstream media have been gorging on. You would hope that after the Iraq war, they would have learned to distrust statements made in the speaker's self-interest. We have.
2. Expertise Bloggers encompass all walks of life -- at any moment there are IT experts, legal experts, scientists, people who have lived in every part of the country, who have been involved in every fight personally, talking and writing and ready to respond. Journalists don't have that. The best they can do is call up an expert and ask for an opinion -- an opinion they are completely unequipped to critically evaluate.
3. Research For some reason, bloggers are willing to actually go make some calls, use google, and look into a story. Journalists, as they have shown today, are no longer willing to do that. Maybe it's a cultural mindset, something that comes from bloggers constantly challenging each other's sources. Maybe it's just that when you need to get your makeup on and your hair done, there is no time left in a world of 24-hour talk for a CNN or MSNBC reporter to actually make phone calls. Whatever the reason, today was a model example of how journalists just amplify political spin, while bloggers dig for facts.
The existence of the NYTimes blog shows that they know we are competing directly as news outlets. Their blog's content shows why we are winning.
Update, 5:53 pm. Excellent arguments refuting some of my points are made below by cardinal, rserven, and Meteor Blades, who point out in different ways that while a few bloggers get it right some days, many bloggers get it wrong many days -- and the ones who get it right often do so by following classic journalism practice. The way we got the Lieberman website story right today -- and the very fact that folks like them corrected and refined my points here so quickly -- shows exactly what the traditional media is up against.