Blogs

Across The Media Universe: Defeating The News Dump Edition

By Brian Montopoli

March 21, 2007 / 11:35 AM EDT / CBS News

(AP)

Dump This: Writes Josh Gerstein: "A time-honored Washington practice of trying to extinguish, pre-empt, or redirect news coverage by dumping stacks of previously secret government documents on the press may be in for some changes after a headlong collision with hundreds of liberal Web loggers in the wee hours of yesterday morning." Two nights ago, the Justice Department delivered over 3,000 pages of records to Congress related to the US attorneys firings. News organizations couldn't quickly go through the files in full, but an army of bloggers, lead by tpmmuckracker.com, could – and did. As attorney Mark Fabiani told the Sun: "It could really change the way things get done."

"An Earthquake": That pro-Obama anti-Hillary viral video attack ad has now been viewed more than a million times on YouTube – much more than any of the candidates' official videos. (Explains the Washington Post: "It's a 'mash-up' of Ridley Scott's 1984 Super Bowl commercial that portrayed IBM as an Orwellian Big Brother and introduced Apple's Macintosh as the bright new vanguard of computing. But now it's Big Sister, [Hillary] Clinton, vs. the upstart, Sen. Barack Obama.") Writes CBS News' Harry Smith: "Anyone with a Mac and a mouse and a good idea can create and deliver political propaganda — and...if the message is interesting enough, it will be viewed by the masses. Blogs have changed the political landscape, but this is an earthquake."

Oops: On Monday, gossip columnists Rush & Molloy wrote an item about CBS News that did not meet the highest of journalistic standards. Brian Stelter over at TVNewser laid it all out:

NY Daily News: "Hartman's No. 2, Paul Friedman, is vulnerable, sources say."
Fact: Paul Friedman isn't Hartman's #2 -- he's the second-in-command of the entire news division. His bio could have you told you that.
NY Daily News: "Kaplan may cut Steve Friedman."
Fact: Kaplan, an EP, doesn't have the ability to cut VP Steve Friedman. Their bios could have told you that.
NY Daily News: Steve Friedman is "the executive producer of CBS This Morning."
Fact: CBS renamed This Morning SEVEN YEARS AGO. It's been called The Early Show since 1999. Wikipedia could have told you that.

Wrote Stelter in a follow-up post headlined "Waiting For A NY Daily News Correction...": "Yesterday, I said the paper should hire a fact-checkers. But maybe they need more than that -- how about a crash course in journalism 101?"