Oh, That Liberal Media(Welcome Polipundit Readers! Please feel free to look around and check some of the other posts here. If you like what you see, consider bookmarking
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This story's a pretty
good eye-opener.
Even as online pundits criticize traditional news organizations as slow, biased and technologically challenged, a group of bloggers is trying to use old-fashioned telephone conference calls to share their ideas with newspaper and television journalists.
The bloggers, who describe themselves as liberal or progressive, say the conference calls are intended to counter what they regard as the much stronger influence of conservative pundits online. Bob Fertik, president of Democrats.com, the host of the two calls so far, views them as a step toward getting their reports out to mainstream news organizations.
While there is no way to know precisely who dialed in, reporters from news organizations including CBS, The Washington Post, Newsweek, MSNBC and The National Journal asked for a call-in number, according to one participant.Get this bit:
Mr. Fertik maintains that the blurring of boundaries has benefited left-wing bloggers less than their adversaries on the right, saying that reports posted on conservative blogs more easily make the jump to the main news media. "The way we perceive it," he said, "is that right-wing bloggers are able to invent stories, get them out on Drudge, get them on Rush Limbaugh, get them on Fox, and pretty soon that spills over into the mainstream media. We, the progressives, we don't have that kind of network to work with."Oh, yeah, left-wing bloggers have such a hard time pushing their stories up the line. Jeff Gannon was in all the newspapers almost immediately; Eason Jordan's story was such a surprise that the NY Times got caught with its pants down, announcing the story after Jordan had resigned under fire. Christmas in Cambodia simmered on the blogs, as did Kerry's involvement in a meeting of the VVAW where the assassination of US Senators was discussed.
And Fertik is moronic on how conservative blogs handle a story. We can't "invent" stories and get them on Drudge, Rush & then Fox. Buckhead, Power Line and Little Green Footballs didn't "invent" Ra
thergate, they discovered it through old-fashioned hard work. About the only major story covered by conservative blogs last year that turned out not to be true was the Alexandra Polier/John Kerry affair, which
started at Drudge.
The good news is that the lefty bloggers are the original gang that couldn't shoot straight, and if the media gets in bed with them, they'll get stung over and over again. The big story the lefty blogs have sprung in the last two years is Jeff Gannon. That's pretty small beer (sorry, Jeff!).
