I've got to disagree with Kos:
Powerline-was-completely-fucking-wrong-gate was a problem not just because their wild-ass accusations about the Schiavo-Martinez memo were completely wrong, not just because media asses like Howie Kurtz took them seriously, but because they harm the reputation of the entire blogosphere.
At a time when we are fighting for credibility, Assrocket's spectacular flameout knocked everyone down a peg. I wish we could say, "well, it exposed the wingnutosphere as the reality-challenged liars they are", but fact is, people don't make any distinctions between the left and right blogworlds.
Blogs are good for some things but not for others. They're generally quite good at calling politicans and the mainstream media and their frequent bullshit. For the most part (there are obvious exceptions), they're not good at being journalists.
It's good to have a mainstream media with real journalists. It's good to have bloggers, who write interesting, sometimes provocative, and occasionally important, things. Blogs cannot, should not, and will not replace a mainstream media.
Recently, there has been an overestimation of the ability and importance of some bloggers. A crappy site like Powerline gets recognized as the "Blog of the Year," when in fact, they're just a bunch of lying partisan hacks. It is important and necessary that blogs be recognized for what they are and that bad blogs be humiliated and ridiculed.
Indeed, if I had my druthers, there would now be a slew of mainstream media pieces about how maybe the incredible self-correcting blogosphere doesn't exist. Maybe bloggers are good for somethings and not others.
Jack Schafer has a well-reasoned piece in Slate on this subject, as his conclusion, that bloggers are generally better at opinion journalism, and the mainstream media is better at reporting, seems patently obvious to me.
Unsurprisingly, Powerline doesn't like it, because it threats them. Their criticism is revealing:
To the extent that Shafer includes Power Line in this verdict, his claim is baseless. On the evening of April 6, we learned from the Washington Post's Mike Allen that the Schiavo memo was written by a Martinez staffer. Earlier that day, I had characterized the memo as "questionable if not fake." As soon as I learned that a Martinez staffer was the author, I updated my post to state that the memo was not a Democratic dirty trick, and that it came from a Republican source.
The problem here is not that they didn't correct their factual error. The error was so blatant and widely reported that they couldn't still claim it was a Democratic dirty trick after a republican admitted that he wrote it. The problem is that their entire thought process from the beginning was flawed. They'd been saying for weeks that the mostly likely explanation was that it was a Democratic dirty trick, as they did on March 23:
The third possibility is that the memo is a Democratic dirty trick. At the moment, that looks most likely.
In fact, it wasn't the most likely. There was not a single shred of evidence to suggest it was written by a Democrat. There was evidence to suggest it was written by a republican. The memo read like it was written by a republican, and there was a high level source (turned out to be Sen. Tom Harkin) that said he got a copy from a republican senator, which he did.
So, you might not have thought it was great evidence at the time, but the assertion that the most likely explanation was of a Democratic dirty trick was as wrong then as it is now. There's a difference between questioning the memo's authenticity and asserting, with no evidence, that it's a trick from the other side.
Indeed, a person who is interested in examining evidence couldn't have come to their conclusion; that's the real point here. By defending their faulty reasoning, they inadvertantly prove Schafer's point. They were bad reporters. Their reporting was wrong, and was proven wrong. And no amount of tortured reasoning will getting around that.
Pathetic.
-- Michael
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