Bloggers Versus Lott

Sometime on Monday, as it started to look at though the media was going to give Trent Lott a free pass for bemoaning the good old days of segregation, I found myself thinking how incredible it was that when Gore made his "no controlling authority" speech, the phrase was covered and mocked relentlessly -- all because it supposedly revealed something Clintonesque about Gore's handing of the controversy, in that he resorted to wonky legalese in defending his campaign calls.

But here we have the Senate Majority Leader making it clear, once again, that he thinks the civil rights movement was a big waste of time, and the lede doesn't just get buried, it never even makes it into a story. So being lawyerly gets you pilloried everywhere, but being a racist gets you a free pass.

Of course, he's no longer getting that pass, thanks almost entirely to the blogosphere (to Andrew, Joe, Virginia, Josh, Mickey, Glenn, et al.) I think the last few days have been a great example of what political blogging is capable of: not breaking new stories, but keeping stories alive that the mainstream press, for whatever reason, decides to ignore. It's like a journalistic flotation device: the blogosphere can pump air back into a story that's starting to sink, and when it bobs back up to the surface again, big media has to pay attention. If Lott actually ends up stepping down over this, it will be a watershed event for bloggers everywhere.

Update, 12/11 8:07 PM: Jeff Jarvis asks a typically astute question: "I haven't yet seen where this crossed the bloodstream: Where do we see that blogs had an influence on the press and influenced them to get back on the story? I'm not questioning that it happened; I'm just looking for the specific proof, for that makes for much stronger bragging." The Kurtz story linked to above was one crossover point, I'd say. Someone could probably do an interesting Blogdex vs. Lexis/Nexis comparison watching the story percolate up from the blogs to traditional media outlets...

Comments

[Eric Etheridge]

Here's a point where the blogs influenced the press on the Lott story: According to Josh Marshall, both AP and Dow Jones Newswires picked up Lott's amicus brief in the Bob Jones case from one of his Talking Points posts.

http://talkingpointsmemo.com/dec0202.html#121102847pm

[Patrick Nielsen Hayden]

A major weblogger subsumed into your "et al" is the pseudonymous Atrios, who has been all over this story from the start and who has consistently posted useful source material, such as this amazing 1948 Mississippi Democratic sample ballot.

Right-leaning webloggers like Reynolds, Sullivan, and Postrel deserve all due credit for getting out front on this, but the right wing of the blogetariat is rapidly concocting the folktale that they and they alone were covering the Lott story in its early days.

[Adam]

Specific proof

[Virginia Postrel]

I plead not guilty to concocting folktales, and I'd like to see citations to those who have. I don't think there's a lot of dispute on either the chronology or on the roles of Josh Marshall and Atrios (who would get more credit if he weren't anonymous and/or had a lot of DC friends like Marshall and Sullivan).

You can argue that Andrew Sullivan got to the issue late, by Internet standards and thus doesn't deserve some of the credit he's gotten. But he's a big gun with a lot of readers in the mainstream media. That he arrived a couple of days late doesn't detract from the passion and forcefulness of his postings. He drew attention to the story from people who couldn't care less what the rest of us think.

If anyone deserves to complain about written out of the story, it's NR Online, which occupies a middle position between blogdom and traditional media. They played an early and important role in making it clear just how outraged many serious conservatives were with Lott's nostalgia for Jim Crow, and their position was noticably different from the pooh-poohing of the issue by partisan spinners like Bob Novak. James Taranto at Opinion Journal played a similar, and similarly sincere, role.