Shooting the Messengers: The blogs are the new Fourth Estate

[babylonsister]

http://www.smirkingchimp.com/thread/8658

Shooting the Messengers: The blogs are the new Fourth Estate
by Alan Bisbort | Jul 12 2007 - 9:27am


George W. Bush and Dick Cheney are the lunatic fringe now. The only people who will still stand in the same room with them are Sen. Joe Lieberman, whose reelection in 2006 was the worst mistake Connecticut voters have ever made, and the Beltway pundits. This latter group is, like Lieberman, comprised of brain-dead panty-waists (David Broder, Joe Klein, Cokie Roberts, George Will, Sally Quinn, Robert Novak, Larry King), all of whom grovel at the feet of power because they've been around it for far too long and are, thus, incapable of separating politics from friendships.

The most recent proof of the corrupting influence of power can be found by scanning the list of people who wrote letters to Judge Reggie Walton to spare the convicted felon I. Lewis Libby prison time: everyone from James Carville to Richard Perle, Henry Kissinger to Sen. Alan Simpson. For the full 373-page printout of the "Scooter Libby Love Letters," go to www.thesmokinggun.com. This sobering litany offers one letter after another from lobbyist, ex-elected official, corporate CEO, Beltway consultant and, like Carville, "pundits," all singing the same tune about what a great guy "Scooter" is. This group is so ghoulishly reminiscent of the cliques in high school as to be nauseating. Apparently, it sickened Judge Walton — a true American hero — and he sentenced Libby to 36 months in the slammer.

Bush's approval rating now stands at 26 percent (and, seriously, you have to wonder about the sanity of this true-believing "core"), members of his own benighted party are abandoning him, GOP 2008 presidential candidates dare not mention his name on the campaign trail, even the Fourth of July celebrations seemed curiously muted, all because of Bush and his dirty little war.

But, even without the commutation of Libby's sentence, it had already dawned on 75 percent of Americans that Bush must be stopped. The pardon will only harden this view. Because the Beltway pundits — most of whom regularly shared cocktail wienies with Scooter — dictate the overarching "theme" of the mainstream media, where would the American people have gotten such an idea if not from the usual outlets? That is, where did they find the truth?

Blogs.

Just look at the political stories that have dominated the past two years. During that time, print and broadcast journalists got their asses kicked by the new voice of the people — vox bloguli. The two biggest national news stories — the Plame case/Libby trial and the mass firings at the U.S. Attorneys' office — were both driven by the doggedness of blogs. The late, lamented Steve Gilliard was so dead-on accurate in his forecasts about Iraq that you wonder how so-called "experts" could be so consistently wrong if some guy in a small room in Harlem with a modem and a clip file could be so damn right.

Members of the media based in the Nation's Capital have themselves to blame. Now, not only are their jobs at stake, their very profession is in tatters. Why? They suck.

Firedoglake owned the Libby trial coverage and now owns the Libby pardon fallout story. Talking Points Memo (www.talkingpointsmemo.com) owned the prosecutor purge story, which the mainstream media dismissed as a partisan fishing expedition (because that's what David Broder & Co. told them it was). Only TPM's Joshua Micah Marshall tenaciousness kept the story alive long enough for the mainstream press to get off its collective barstool, stagger over to their laptops and do a Google search or two.

Bottom line: support your favorite blogger. They are the Sons and Daughters of Liberty.

[unhappycamper]

1. I love bloggers, especially freeway bloggers

http://freewayblogger.blogspot.com/

This pic taken back in July 2005

[NinetySix]

2. The medium IS the messenger

Bottom line: support your favorite blogger. They are the Sons and Daughters of Liberty.

The recent undermining of net neutrality is analogous to imagining a situation in which King George III had shut down all colonial printing presses during the mid-1760s. If he had, the colonists' voices could not have been as widely disseminated, political discourse would likely not have been as rational and enlightened, and the Enlightenment principles that created our Republic would probably have had less influence. Revolution might have been staved off by a few additional years, but it would have been just as inevitable, and would almost certainly have devolved into irremediable chaos like the French Revolution that followed.

If, however, the King had only heeded the meaning and importance of the political discourse of the 1770s, the ends of the Revolution might have been achieved in the Colonies without the need to resort to violence or even independence; history might have been quite different.

Support for your favorite blogger, while certainly necessary, may not be sufficient without the open access to the "series of tubes" that deliver the independent voices of our modern political discourse. But the failure to heed the voice of the people on the part of those in power, particularly if those voices become fainter, could be extremely destructive.

If we can restore and maintain the principle of net neutrality, we will almost certainly win; that's exactly how the discourse operates. But if that chorus of voices is silenced, all bets are off.

It'll be touch and go from here.

[ixion]

3. kicked and recommended....

for the true patriots! :patriot: