More Memory Lane

BriVT goes into the wayback machine and gives a brief history of the left blogosphere, right up to today's battle with Chris Matthews and the Washington Post. Here's his point:

Oh, sure, the WaPo shut down comments and will tread much more carefully in any future attempts to solicit reader feed-back. But the damage is done. They opened the gates of the castle for just an instant and caught sight of the angry  mob outside with torches and pitchforks. Closing the gate won't rid them of the knowledge that we're out here, angry and connected.

And that's a very big step. A lot of the problems of the establishment media really boil down to a lack of perspective. "News judgement" is an amorphous thing, and it mostly comes down to what the people in the editor's experience would think are important. For years, the right-wing in DC has twisted that perception, giving the impression to news folks that impeachment of Clinton is a valid story, but impeachment of Bush is not. Or that treating claims of Democratic ties to Abramoff as valid can be considered good news judgement.

But those days are ending. The Internet community of the reality-based community has grown stronger and stronger. Our voices are being heard, practically in real time. There is still a long way to go; that Hiatt editorial is still a break from the usual narrative on those pages. But we are changing the narrative in demonstrable ways. We're finally breaking through.

Just to see the layout within his post of the old dailykos was pretty amazing. What a different time! I stumbled over into the blog world from This Modern World. Almost every day Tom Tomorrow was linking to Kos or Atrios or some other blogger and saying "this is a must-read," and finally I ended up going to the sources.

I remember watching hearings on C-SPAN about exactly how and where we're going to attack Iraq, months before the invasion, months before the IWR even, and thinking "Has everybody gone crazy? Are we really doing this?"

And then I found this refuge online where people were actually investigating the WH spin and finding it full of holes. I lurked for a long long time before mustering up the gumption to participate. And the "and then you win moment" has really been coming for some time, like when we singlehandedly dipped Sinclair Broadcasting stock, or got Jeff Gannon out of the WH press room.

Fighting back will inevitably balance the see-saw of the traditional media. The question is, however, will that make them better or worse? Already they're reduced to stenography for the sake of balance: will they now abdicate any attempt to investigate for fear of offending either side? Will they run screaming from real news and into nonpartisan stories of scandal and missing white women? It's an interesting question to ponder. If the traditional media manages to get more irrelevant, we'll all be worse for the experience. The other side loves truthiness. We need the truth.