How TalkingPointsMemo Beat the Big Boys on the U.S. Attorney Story

[babylonsister]

http://www.mediachannel.org/wordpress/2007/03/20/how-talkingpointsmemo-beat-the-big-boys-on-the-us-attorney-story/

How TalkingPointsMemo Beat the Big Boys on the U.S. Attorney Story
By Paul McLeary.

It’s almost too perfect. A mainstream reporter mocks a story a blogger has been working to break, asserting that “it all makes perfect conspiratorial sense!”, and that the blogger is “seeing broad partisan conspiracies where none likely exist,” only to backtrack a few weeks later when the story explodes across the front pages of the major dailies.

If you wanted to force the issue — and we would be surprised if some MSM-hating critic doesn’t — the episode illustrates perfectly how the Washington press corps ignores the blogosphere at its own peril. But the story, and its implications, are actually far more complicated — and for journalism, heartening — than that.

Still, the image is great. While the mocking reporter, Time magazine’s Washington bureau chief Jay Carney, was busy dumping, via Times Swampland blog, on the story of U.S. Attorneys being fired across the country, Josh Marshall of TalkingPointsMemo, and two of his reporters at his offshoot site, TPMuckracker.com, Paul Kiel and Justin Rood, were busy reporting, using a variety of sources that had been largely untapped by the mainstream press.

To be fair, Carney wasn’t dismissing the story out of hand, but his snark hardly masked his belief that Marshall & Co. were out on a partisan limb, hyping a story that just wasn’t there.

As we now know, there is most definitely some “there, there,” and the press has been all over the story for more than a week, discovering that the paper trail that led to the firings leads, on some level, to the White House. Many (including two Republican members of Congress) have called for Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez to step down, and the Democratic controlled Congress is licking its chops to hold hearings and issue subpoenas.

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[tanyev]

1. It's not hard to beat them when they aren't even trying.

[Jacobin]

2. I have a slightly different take on it

The corporate media is paid to enable Bushco, ignore or ridicule any suggestion that Bush is not a great president doing good things, and is otherwise utterly and totally irrelevant and useless

[sicksicksick_N_tired]

3. Which proves just how important and valuable an independent media,....

,...really is to a democratic nation.

I am sick to death of a media that focuses upon "what sells", the "bottom line" and "politically expedient" notions of their lot in our country. They DESERVE the hits they are getting because they fail to behave as the media was intended to behave, ESPECIALLY during times when an executive acts in a dictatorial manner.