Blog Storm in the Midwest

[G_j]

Blog Storm in the Midwest

By Jan Frel, Personal Democracy
Posted on March 1, 2005, Printed on March 2, 2005
http://www.alternet.org/story/21379/

"David Kranz and Randell Beck, are you listening? Why doesn't your
paper pull out all of the stops investigating this story?" - Jason
van Beek in a January, 2003 entry on his blog, South Dakota Politics.

At the end of January, newly-elected South Dakota Sen. John Thune
briefed his colleagues at a closed-door GOP retreat in West Virginia
about the importance of blogging in contemporary politics. Thune
earned his bragging rights by defeating former Senate Minority Leader
Tom Daschle this past November, in a race where conservative bloggers
played a small but important role. But the story that Thune has to
tell isn't anything like earlier political blog successes such as the
Dean for America campaign blog or DailyKos.

The blogging efforts on behalf of Thune's Senate campaign didn't
cause greater civic participation or bring in piles of small
donations. Instead nine bloggers - two of whom were paid $35,000 by
Thune's campaign - formed an alliance that constantly attacked the
election coverage of South Dakota's principal newspaper, the Sioux
Falls Argus Leader. More specifically, their postings were not
primarily aimed at dissuading the general public from trusting the
Argus' coverage. Rather, the work of these bloggers was focused on
getting into the heads of the three journalists at the Argus who were
primarily responsible for covering the Daschle/Thune race: chief
political reporter David Kranz, state editor Patrick Lalley, and
executive editor Randell Beck.

Led by law student Jason van Beek and University of South Dakota
history professor Jon Lauck, the Thune bloggers tormented and rattled
the Argus staff for the duration of the 2004 election, clearly
influencing the Argus' coverage. They also appear to have been a
highly efficient vehicle for injecting classic no-fingerprints-
attached opposition research on Daschle - most of it tidbits that
perhaps might never have made it into the old print media - directly
into the political bloodstream of South Dakota. What they did may
turn out to be a "dark side of politics" model for campaign-blogger
relations in 2005-06 - made all the more telling by the fact that the
Thune bloggers relied heavily on now-discredited Jeff Gannon/James
Guckert of Talon News for many of their stories.

..more..