Bloggasm

In the wake of Dave Weigel’s resignation from the Washington Post after a number of his emails were leaked to online news outlets, dozens of bloggers and journalists penned posts honoring and defending Weigel’s journalistic integrity. One such defense was written by Julian Sanchez for The Atlantic’s website and is notable not because it’s different from all the other posts but because of its similarity. Like many of his colleagues, Sanchez began with a disclosure that he knew Weigel personally. “Like [Atlantic writer Megan McArdle] and most of my fellow guestbloggers, I’m fortunate to count Dave Weigel–until this morning a blogger covering the conservative movement for the Washington Post–as a friend,” he wrote. Sanchez, like Weigel, is relatively young at 31. As with many of the other writers who covered the debacle, the Atlantic blogger noted that Weigel is a new manifestation of journalist who melds traditional reporting practices with opinion, arguing that “there was something sterile and counterproductive in a set of professional norms that conflated fairness and objectivity with the sort of personal paucity of opinions that could never be expected of any engaged observer with a functioning brainstem.” But what I found to be most interesting is the fact that both Sanchez and Weigel are alums of Reason Magazine, a libertarian publication with writers based in California and DC. Sanchez, who previously wrote about tech public policy for Ars Technica, is currently a research fellow at the libertarian Cato Institute and Weigel has consistently admitted to having libertarian leanings both before and after his hiring at the Post.

Perhaps I’m grasping at straws here but in the weeks leading up to Weigel’s resignation and afterward I’ve noticed a growing cadre of these libertarian journalists in DC who graduated from places like Reason or Cato, write for right-leaning publications that don’t exactly fit their social ideology, or report for traditional DC publications like The Hill or National Journal. The one time I met Weigel personally (only a few days before his emails were leaked, coincidentally) it was through a libertarian journalist friend and many of the public blog posts and private emails I’ve had with other reporters reflect this trend. Without devolving into vast conspiracy theories about libertarian plots to infiltrate our media, I couldn’t help but wonder if there is a rising force of young libertarian journalists in DC, a trend that would be interesting considering recent polls on Americans’ views on the word “libertarian.”

When I spoke to Sanchez, he wasn’t exactly convinced that my idea had any merit. Before I even had a chance to call he wrote that he wasn’t “sure there’s a real there there” in an email. “What you’re actually mapping here is not so much a specifically libertarian thing, it’s that all these people — Ezra [Klein], [Reason editor Matt Welch], me, and Dave — I think it’s almost secondary to the fact that we’re all friends and in that sense ideology is almost irrelevant,” he told me in a phone interview.

For Sanchez, the trend in DC journalism circles is less a story of political ideology and more about the meteoric rise of young reporters who are building their own personal brands. “It used to be you had to put someone through the paces, and you had to cover dog shows and town council meetings,” he said. “You figure out who through this laborious vetting process should be writing for the Post or whatever. And what you’ve got now are a bunch of people who were able to start writing and it turned out they could build a huge audience just writing stuff. You didn’t have to go through this whole rigmarole to figure out who was going to be able to build that audience. They just did it.”

Still, he thought that perhaps the growing number of public figures who identify as libertarian is rooted in a “generational divide” that represents a maturation in the ideology. “I think anyone who self identifies as a libertarian who came up in the Reagan era has a residual sense of identification with the right while young 30 something libertarians whose political thoughts were formed under Bush don’t have an iota of that feeling,” Sanchez explained. “If you look at libertarian columnists from the 80s and 90s, it’s all kind of libertarianism 101. The focus is on having an elaborately consistent set of views, and there’s a kind of siege mentality. The mission was to be conscious of what it was. Now there’s a sense that we can just talk about it as recognized members of the conversation. There’s a kind of engagement with a mainstream political dialog in a way that there wasn’t in the 80s. Back then libertarians were sort of sniping from the outside.”

Timothy Lee also felt that there wasn’t much to my libertarian dot connecting. Lee is a former writer for Cato who went on to freelance for different news outlets before embarking on a grad degree at Princeton. Unsurprisingly, he joined the chorus of Weigel supporters after the resignation and included the obligatory friendship disclosure with his blog post.

“I think what’s happening is that they’re part of a broader movement of young journalists,” he said in a phone interview. “They’re just part of that community that includes people of different ideological persuasions. Their personal relationships lead to linking and reading each other’s works and cause them to drive the conversation among a certain part of the blogosphere.”

But if Weigel leaned libertarian, an ideology that is sometimes more closely aligned to the right than the left (at least on non-social issues), why was his hiring to the Post met with so much suspicion from the right? After his hiring, the conservative media watchdog blog Newsbusters published a piece questioning Weigel’s conservative credentials and many conservative blogs danced on his grave when he announced his resignation.

My friend Eric Pfeiffer, a libertarian who has had staff writing positions everywhere from the National Review to the Washington Times, said this distrust stems from an oversensitivity of conservatives to how the media covers them. “Weigel copped to that in the Big Government piece” — a kind of mea culpa post published after his resignation — “saying he was guilty of trying to play strategist often times when he was doing those interviews,” Pfeiffer told me. “In fairness to him, that’s to some degree what I had to do when I would talk to people because the best way to get a source to cooperate is to kind of bond with them, to make them think you’re sympathetic, or at least understanding of their cause. I don’t know how true it is on the left because I’ve covered them a lot less, but it’s so true on the right, because they — and you can quote me on this — when you cover the right, your role is just as much playing the role of therapist as reporter. They want you to like them. They want you to understand them. And it really gets old fast. I think that probably caused a lot of his frustration. It’s not what all reporters think when they signed up. I think Capitol Hill Republicans are more savvy, but movement conservatives I dealt with basically wanted to be held and coddled more than they wanted to be actually challenged or pressed.”

But in the end, it was Weigel’s political malleability that helped his career, even if it led to his departure from the Post.

“I think part of what hurt Dave is that he’s more ideologically flexible, whereas if he was more rigid he wouldn’t be looking for a job right now,” Pfeiffer said. “But then again he wouldn’t have really risen to the prominence he has and gotten the job in the first place without that flexibility. I think his ability to criticize the same people he’s covering should be seen as an asset, not as a liability. But that’s not what the DC media establishment wants.”

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“I’m not a cop hater.”

Carlos Miller felt the need to tell this to me after we’d spent nearly 20 minutes talking about his blog’s role as an internet refuge for those who have been blighted by the law and have the video evidence to prove it. Naturally, as someone who has become semi-famous for exonerating American citizens from bogus charges — charges often brought about through deliberate abuse perpetrated by law enforcement officers — Miller gets regularly peppered with hundreds of emails from all walks of life: A person from Nevada who thinks he didn’t deserve a speeding ticket; Someone whose family member is in prison and supposedly innocent; A gossipy item about an officer engaging in some kind of illegal activity. But unless there’s video or photographic evidence attached, Miller likely won’t touch it. He just simply doesn’t have the time. “I can’t do anything without some kind of evidence. You have to have some kind of video evidence that disputes what the cops are saying so it’s up there for the world to see.”

But despite his assertion that he’s not a cop hater, there’s little doubt that his very existence makes many police officers bristle. After several high profile cases — often sparked by Miller — of police abuse being exposed, law enforcement agencies in multiple states are stepping up pressure to make it illegal to record an on-duty officer. As reported by Gizmodo earlier this month, they’re attempting to use existing “wiretapping” laws to go after those who post YouTube videos and Facebook photos that embarrass or even incriminate their fellow brethren. In fact, it was this very legal maneuvering that led to Miller launching his blog, Photography is Not a Crime, in the first place.

In February 2007, he had been photographing a group of Miami officers as a journalist when they suddenly noticed him. After repeatedly ordering him to stop taking pictures to no avail, they tackled and arrested him for several misdemeanors, one of which claimed he had been obstructing traffic. He created the blog as an attempt to document his trial, but as he waited for his day in court Miller expanded into more First Amendment issues. By the time he managed to get the last of the charges dropped, he was hooked.

“I decided that if I was going to write for free, I’m going to do it for my own blog,” he told me. “I made the decision in January 2008 — it was my resolution — to take this blog to another level. It took about a year … and by January 2009 it was getting more than 100,000 page views a month.”

Much of that early traffic came from front page links on Digg and Reddit, but the blogger eventually amassed his own audience. He publishes at least five posts a week and most of them receive dozens of comments each. Unsurprisingly, these comment sections have attracted a certain breed of people who do not have a generally favorable view of police officers. “Police can basically lie all they want,” wrote one recently. “Look at this roid-rage jerk,” opined another. “Went and slaughtered some people overseas for money, comes home to put on the pig suit.”

But if the blog has become an easy venue for people to vent their negative feelings on cops, it has also demonstrably helped in saving those who otherwise would have been found guilty of untrue charges. For instance, Miller was one of the only ones to initially report on an absurd case in which a photographer was arrested for taking photographs of Amtrak trains — for an Amtrak photograph contest. As one can probably guess, many of Miller’s blog posts are based on similarly bizarre Kafkaesque situations. After he highlighted the story, the photographer in question appeared on the Colbert Report and the charges were swiftly dropped.

Newspaper editors have repeatedly claimed that the loss of editorial jobs will lead to a less watchful press, one in which government institutions will be able to get away with more unscrupulous activities with little independent oversight. But Miller arguably highlights more police abuse than a single reporter would have even in the heyday of newspapers. “I’m writing about cases that the mainstream media, for the most part, they ignored,” he said, noting that traditional journalists will eventually pick up a story once it has gained traction in the blogosphere. “Unless you’re actually a journalist for the newspaper [who's getting abused by the law], they don’t care because they just think it’s some yahoo with a camera who deserves to be arrested.”

So how often do cops get caught committing embarrassing acts on camera, really? More often than you’d think. With the proliferation of cell phone and digital cameras, it’s hard to do much of anything without a recording device within eyesight. “Twenty years ago a guy with a camera was a photographer,” Miller said. “He was either a pro or a serious amateur, and I’m sure this kind of abuse happened 20 years ago but it wasn’t photographed nearly as much as it is now.”

Since his rise to popularity, Miller has been approached to speak in front of classes and on panels, including one where he sat next to the then-police chief for Miami, a potentially awkward situation. It’s not uncommon for officers to show up on his blog and comment on his posts, though he said some have left out of frustration. But the blogger has some simple advice for all those cops who get flustered when he humiliates their colleagues.

“Now that video can go on the internet, they know they can be embarrassed, but they end up embarrassing themselves more and going after the photographer and acting like a total ass. Just ignore the guy and do your job.”

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If Rupert Murdoch’s announcement that he plans to withdraw his news content from Google’s index is any indication, the value of the link is still a topic of debate. Proponents of the “economy of the link” who consider the hyperlink to be the ultimate form of flattery — from which revenue will flow — argue that the aggregators, search engines, and blogs send firehoses of traffic that can then be funneled toward some monetizable end. But any website owner who obsessively monitors his Google Analytics, Sitemeter, search engine, and back links data knows that the value from a link is much more nuanced. Early last year, A-list blogger Jason Kottke made a little-noticed comment, saying that one of the “dirty little secrets of the blogosphere” is that “the big blogs that extensively summarize/excerpt don’t drive that much traffic.” While a link prominently displayed on the front page of the Huffington Post sent me 30,000 hits in a single day, links buried within (or, even worse, at the bottom) of posts from supposedly widely-read blogs can often direct a mere sprinkle of pageviews. And given the proliferation of search engine optimization, Google has continuously devalued the ranking power of links, employing the use of dozens of other factors in order to battle the promiscuity of self-linking, “link exchanges,” and any number of other tactics practiced by those unable to create naturally-linkable content.

But still, the link maintains its value as a contextual device, one that allows the reader to navigate his way through labyrinthine topics, chasing them down the rabbit hole of sources to some modicum of understanding not afforded by less “evolved” mediums. Theoretically, with the links I’ve provided thus far in this article you won’t have to take any of my arguments at face value but instead can examine the source material and reach your own conclusion. This article is merely a guidepost from which a thesis begins but doesn’t necessarily end.

Or, if you’re Nicholas Carr, you think that any contextual benefits I’ve provided above are outweighed by the cognitive burden I’ve placed upon your brain, a brain that has been limping through this article under the weight of links that have crippled your reading comprehension.

In a widely-linked (some people find this ironic) post titled “experiments in delinkification,” he drew from his soon-to-be-released book, The Shallows, which argues that the Internet is rewiring our brains. Citing research that found reading comprehension drops with the inclusion of links, Carr suggested that perhaps we should return to the era of footnotes and cordon off our contextual links at the bottom of a post, a format used to some extent on Wikipedia (though on-site inner linking is allowed within wiki articles). “Links are wonderful conveniences, as we all know (from clicking on them compulsively day in and day out),” he wrote. “But they’re also distractions. Sometimes, they’re big distractions – we click on a link, then another, then another, and pretty soon we’ve forgotten what we’d started out to do or to read.” True to form, he displayed his citations of works mentioned in the post at the bottom and urged his readers to “try it yourself. You may be surprised.”

To many — even those who may agree with his central thesis — the suggestion seemed anachronistic. While the value of links to the content creator has always been debatable, few would dismiss the value extracted by the reader. How could too much context be a bad thing?

“I feel like the benefits far outweigh any disadvantages,” Matthew Ingram told me in a phone interview. Ingram, a former communities editor for The Globe and Mail who now writes for Gigaom, was one of the first to criticize Carr’s missive. “That includes any disadvantages in terms of cognitive overload or comprehension. There’s a whole host of things that can interfere with you and your reading — flashing banner ads, something in the sidebar, or an ad inserted in the post. Compared to those things, links are rather innocuous, provided they’re styled the right way.”

But Carr told me that most of his critics had misread him. His problem isn’t necessarily with the hyperlink, but with the very web itself. “Obviously the web exists,” he said in a phone interview. “The central structure of the web as a medium is the link. It’s a hyperlinking system, it’s a hypertext system, it’s a hyper media system. So it would be silly to argue that links aren’t compelling and don’t give huge benefits and aren’t an effective way of highlighting related works … I think it’s interesting to think about where links appear and where we link because it gives us insights into how we read and how we think. But I’m not naive about people suddenly not including links in their online writing.”

Despite his suggestion that links should be relegated to the bottom of essays and blog posts or done away with all together, one of Carr’s main complaints is what he called the “debasement of the link.” It’s not the existence of links that bother him, but that websites are too promiscuous in using them. “In the beginning it was assumed that a link was a sincere citation, that you were highlighting something that you thought was important or worth reading,” he said. “In fact, the entire Google search engine as first envisioned by Larry Page was entirely a reflection of the fact that links were sincere tokens of value. They were a true currency of the importance of different things. One of the unintentional byproducts of the Google system becoming so popular is that it has been debased as a currency. What we see today is all sorts of gaming of links, all sorts of elaborate self linking, all sorts of automatic linking, where people don’t think about where to link to. They’ll link either back to their own site or into Wikipedia without going out and assessing what they’re linking to. I think the entire — what’s been called the link economy — is much less valuable than it used to be. That’s the process that we have to judge the effectiveness and the value and the quality of the entire web system today. It’s a big problem.”

But Ingram provided a different reason for Carr’s worry, one that didn’t stem from his concern for the web user but for his own authority. Echoing criticisms launched at newspaper curmudgeons who say that the internet is a wild wild west that doesn’t reward credibility, Ingram argued that Carr is giving voice to a “very powerful subconscious, or in some cases conscious” reaction to linking. “And that is you send people away from what you’ve written. That is a fundamental thing about the link, is that you’re effectively saying, ‘hey go to this other place.’ I think the fear is that people might like what they see there better or might not come back, or that you are somehow saying what other people have to say is equally important to what you have to say. I think particularly for academics and authors like Nick, that’s an uncomfortable admission, that other people have things that are equally valuable to say. So they’d rather have people stick with you for 800 to 1,000 words and not have any links at all.”

And for Ingram, including links at the bottom of the posts isn’t adequate. Without links in the text, he said, it would be difficult to extract any context from the content in the post or essay, which in his mind creates a kind of irony. “Nick’s talking about the comprehension and cognitive overload, but you have to do a lot of work by the time you get to the bottom of the post to figure out what the heck those links refer to. So you have to go to back to the text and say, ‘oh I guess this is what he was talking about with this link.’ So even if you get to the bottom you still have to do a lot of work.”

Perhaps another irony is that the footnote — the old-school citation on which Carr models his own delinked posts — is perhaps one of the biggest reading distractions of them all. How many times have you paused in your reading to scroll your eyes down to a tiny textual nugget of arcane knowledge before trying to resume the main narrative of a book? The world is full of distractions, the link is just one of many. And some distractions, I would argue, are welcome.

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It’s been more than two years since CNN’s Paula Zahn Now showed “Beliefs Under Attack,” a segment featuring a Mississippi couple who had been ostracized from their community because of their disbelief in God. Following the segment, Zahn hosted a panel that included two Christians and Jewish conservative columnist Debbie Schlussel but no actual atheists. “What does an atheist believe?” one of the panelists asked. “Nothing. I think this is such a ridiculous story. Are we not going to take ‘In God We Trust’ off of our dollars? Are we going to not say ‘one nation under God’ When does it end? We took prayer out of schools. What more do they want? … I think they need to shut up and let people do what they do. No, I think they need to shut up about it.” Schlussel followed with an equally anti-atheist diatribe: “I think that the real discrimination is atheists against Americans who are religious. Listen, we are a Christian nation. I’m not a Christian. I’m Jewish, but I recognize we’re a Christian country and freedom of religion doesn’t mean freedom from religion.”

After the clips were posted to YouTube the subsequent outrage from atheist bloggers and communities — which caused a flood of angry emails to CNN — led to a follow-up panel several days later that included an actual atheist. After the panel Zahn interviewed the outspoken atheist Richard Dawkins. “It strikes me that the atheist message is particularly threatening to some Christians because they believe in some way you’re trying to compromise their ability to have this stuff out there on the public stage,” she told him during the interview.

I was reminded of this exchange when I saw the announcement recently that CNN would be launching a “Belief” blog, described in its press release as “[fostering] a global conversation about the role of religion and faith in the news – and in users’ lives.” It’s common criticism among atheists to accuse religion columnists and newspaper sections of asserting a “pro religion” perspective that’s absent of the traditional skepticism that is needed in an objective newsroom. Would this new Belief blog give voice to not only criticisms of specific religions, but to the very notion of God’s existence?

I spoke on the phone to Dan Gilgoff, the co-editor of Belief who previously wrote columns for both U.S. News & World Report and beliefnet and the book The Jesus Machine: How James Dobson, Focus on the Family, and Evangelical America are Winning the Culture War. “We’re not being pro religion, we’re not being anti religion,” he said. “We’re acknowledging that faith plays a huge part of the news and a lot of news organizations don’t have the will power or the man power to do this.”

Gilgoff pointed to posts by Greg Epstein, described in his bio as an “ordained Humanist rabbi,” as early evidence that the blog will lend exposure to atheists. Interestingly, Epstein’s CNN writing has already been criticized by one of the most popular atheist bloggers, PZ Meyers. After Epstein wrote a post criticizing Draw Mohammed Day — created to fight back at extremists who launch death threats at cartoonists — Meyers seemed to dismiss his post as religious pandering.

“Epstein completely misses the boat on this one,” he blogged. “No, it isn’t like those crazy campus preachers who shout hellfire at passing students; it’s more like the students who are amused at the bombast and use it as an opportunity to point and laugh, which is an entertaining and productive response. Would Mr Epstein have been irked at the students who mocked and made fun, shushing them and telling them their reaction to being told they’re degenerates who are going to hell was totally inappropriate, and that they should simply listen quietly and respectfully?”

The reaction from atheists to the Belief blog has not escaped Gilgoff. He said that atheists had questioned CNN’s decision to launch the blog and claimed that it was promoting the Religious Right’s notion that religion should be promoted by the government, “which is not something we’re doing whatsoever.”

“What kind of struck me about the experience this week is that the sacred ground I think folks said we were invading or offending, that [backlash] was created by atheists, and that was something we weren’t anticipating,” he said.

I asked Gilgoff if he agreed with the thesis put forth by Richard Dawkins and others that religion is protected in a special shield not afforded to other belief systems, from Capitalism to Marxism to everything in between. “I do think that we have to be respectful, and I think when you see writings in certain parts of the world that are perceived offensive, we have to be responsible in how we cover religion for that reason,” he replied.

Obviously CNN is an American-based news organization and Gilgoff is an American journalist. Given that America is overwhelmingly Christian, many editors have been torn by the desire to have a “balanced” approach to all religions while also recognizing that the dominant religion has a disproportionate influence on local news events. But Gilgoff said that CNN’s larger-than-average news staff helps solve this problem. “I used to live in Atlanta, and the Atlanta Journal Constitution’s entire religion section has just disappeared,” he said. “I think CNN is in a different situation where we have an international news gathering team, and that allows us to cover world religions in a way that other news organizations can’t. So this week we have posts coming in from our Jerusalem bureau. We have a handful of posts on the Muslim world … So I think some of these unusual perspectives, these perspectives from non Christians, are something we’re going to be able to do very well. Because frankly we’re going to have a lot of people in the Muslim world and the Buddhist world, and various people in the Christian world stationed all over the planet, and we’re not going to stick to just one religion and we’re not going to just be examining Christianity.”

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The Harvard law professor told me he misspoke when he said in a Bloggingheads video that “the White House is encouraging me to talk about the Kagan nomination.”

A few weeks ago I interviewed Salon’s Glenn Greenwald after HuffPo reported that the White House had dispatched allies to respond to Greenwald’s criticisms of Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan. Though there were several prominent legal scholars who had replied to Greenwald in places like HuffPo and Slate, most of them ignored my requests for comment. Nobody would go on the record and say the Administration had asked them to opine.

So I was surprised when I watched a recent Bloggingheads exchange between Greenwald and Harvard law professor Lawrence Lessig the other day. Lessig, a widely-read legal voice in the blogosphere, wrote a post praising Kagan on May 11 and then appeared in a Rachel Maddow segment after Greenwald to counter the Salon blogger’s earlier comments. After the appearance, he penned a response to another Greenwald post that attempted to refute Lessig’s claims on Maddow’s show. This back-and-forth eventually led to the Bloggingheads episode between the two, which lasted for nearly an hour. Listening to the piece, I was surprised when Lessig made an offhand remark in which he seemingly admitted that the White House had asked him to publicly support Kagan.

The brief snippet comes at about the 39 minute mark. After listing off a number of grievances Lessig has had with the Obama Administration capitulating to the influence of special interests — the watered-down health care reform, his support of off-shore drilling — he says, “I’m not saying that’s stupid strategy, it’s just the kind of strategy that he said he would change and he hasn’t done that so I have been very critical of him. One of the reasons the White House is encouraging me to talk about the Kagan nomination is because I’m also talking about the failure of the Obama administration in this particular respect.”

I spoke to Lessig this morning about his statement and he disagreed with my interpretation of it. He stated unequivocally that he had not been contacted by the Administration. “Though I was a strong supporter of Obama, I’ve been very critical,” he told me. “I would expect that they are not keen at all that I’d be a spokesman in this context, because when I speak about it I also speak about my criticism of the Administration.”

I asked Lessig to explain what seemed like a discrepancy with what he was saying now and what he had said on Bloggingheads. “I think you dropped a ‘not’ there, or I simply misspoke,” he replied. “They would not be asking me about Kagan because I’m critical of the Administration.” I told him that I had interpreted what he had said as this: because he had accused the Administration of catering to the right, then he would have been the perfect person to alleviate those same fears that Obama’s nomination of Kagan was also catering to the right. He responded with humbleness: “I’m not that big,” indicating (at least this is how I took it) that the White House wouldn’t consider him prominent enough to push this message.

Watch the Bloggingheads exchange below:

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In February I interviewed several LGBT bloggers who had banded together to create a “blog swam” that pressured human rights groups into taking a more firm position on repealing the military’s Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell policy. The idea, I gathered, was that by speaking as a unified voice the group could exert more influence than any individual blogger. From initial press reports, the joint letter released yesterday by 15 military bloggers (or “milbloggers,” as they’re affectionately called) seemed to aim for this same organizational heft. “Milbloggers call for end to ‘Don’t Ask’” Ben Smith at POLITICO wrote. Similarly, Huffington Post characterized it as, “Milbloggers Urge Repeal Of ‘Don’t Ask Don’t Tell’” But after reading the joint letter, a short four paragraphs, I wasn’t so sure this was the case. An email from Andrew Lubin, one of the co-signers of the letter, confirmed these suspicions. “Simon: please read our statement more carefully,” he wrote. “We’re not calling for the repeal of DADT, but rather are calling its repeal inevitable – we’re calling for Congress to wait until the military study is completed and support its recommendations – and not to act precipitously. This is an important difference than your statement that we’re calling for its repeal.”

Was it? I spoke on the phone and via email to a few of the bloggers who had signed onto the letter, and all seemed to agree that the repeal of DADT was inevitable, and the report referenced in Lubin’s email — due out in December — would likely reach the same conclusion. So why be so careful in their wording?

The first draft of the letter, Lubin told me, was sent around a little over a week ago and went through a few edits before everyone signed on. Though nobody mentioned any disagreements between the 15 bloggers — at least pertaining to this letter — Mark Seavy, another co-signer, said that milbloggers have different views on how DADT should be implemented. “There are some among the coalition that feel that Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell should come down almost immediately,” he told me. “There are others that feel that we should give the military its chance to finish the study and then figure out what they’re going to do.”

Both Lubin and Seavy offered several reasons for the measured approach. “If Congress turns around and changes the law tomorrow, you have to change it from something to something else,” Lubin said. “The military understands that the law is going to change, and they have to come up with something different than they have now. We understand it’s going to change, but if we’re going to change this in the middle of two wars, you have to change it so you don’t hurt unit cohesion. This isn’t something you do overnight.” Seavy elaborated: “For instance, if a chaplain were to give some kind of sermon that touched on Leviticus, would that be grounds for removing the chaplain? And what’s going to happen with military members who have a same sex marriage and they happen to be in the same unit? There’s a lot of nuance to the policy that needs to be worked out. I haven’t thought out all the possible permutations that may happen. That’s why we really want to see what the report is before Congress goes ahead and finally pushes in there.”

Either way, there’s no doubt that these bloggers have organizational heft with higher-ups in the military. Several are regularly quoted in the media and Seavy told me about memos — leaked to Wired — that were prepared for top Army brass discussing some of the issues in the blogosphere. Many of the milbloggers were referenced dozens of times. “How much effect we have on the Congressional side” — which will ultimately determine how the issued is addressed — “it’s really hard to tell. We know there are members of Congress, or at least their staff, that read us fairly regularly. We can tell from the incoming IP addresses.”

I asked Seavy whether there had been any backlash against their letter, but he said that most blogs — conservative ones included — seemed to be supportive, aside from a few commenters in comment sections. But today, we saw a letter signed by several milbloggers that unequivocally called for the rejection of any efforts to repeal DADT. Ironically, one of the bloggers who signed onto the original letter also signed onto this one. Given this, it shouldn’t be a surprise that the first letter took on such a nuanced approach.

Overall, however, milbloggers are recognizing where this issue is inevitably headed.

“Eventually, this is going to happen whether they want it to or not,” said Seavy. “And I don’t think anyone wants to stand in the way of history knowing that it’s going to happen. I don’t think there’s anyone who disputes that within the next five years, Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell will be going away.”

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Les Otten is no stranger to plagiarism charges. Not long after the former American Skiing Company CEO entered the race for Maine governor last summer, his campaign was accused of ripping off Obama’s iconic “O” logo and website, a situation only made worse when he responded with the untrue claim that Obama had borrowed his own logo from a Pepsi campaign (the Pepsi logo, in fact, came after Obama’s). But the allegations that Matt Gagnon began launching this past Friday were much more serious. Gagnon, a former colleague of mine, runs the Maine-centric blog, Pine Tree Politics, and last week he was reading the written answers from the gubernatorial candidates to a questionnaire sent out by a fellow blogger. The blog, Augusta Insider, had posted the responses to his questions (which were mostly focused on education issues) last Tuesday, and there was something about Otten’s answer that Gagnon found familiar.

“We both did a little digging on our own here and linked it to testimony given by Stephen Bowen from [the Maine Heritage Policy Center],” he told me in a phone interview. “It was public testimony he had given to the State House.”

That testimony had been copied nearly word-for-word (with some bullet points thrown in to mask the plagiarism) and sent off to the Augusta Insider, presented as Otten’s own original response. Gagnon published his initial post exposing the similarities on Friday, a piece he said was quickly circulated among Republicans. But despite widespread online distribution, the traditional press outlets didn’t immediately touch the story. The blogger would go on to write several more posts exposing much more extensive plagiarism before reporters would finally begin catching up on Sunday.

“I ended up doing more digging and found his ‘Jobs for Maine’ plan, which is one of his central points of his campaign,” he said. “It’s prominently featured on his website, it’s like a pop-up feature. I went in there and looked at a bunch of passages and started literally doing a Google search of paragraphs. Take one paragraph, throw it into Google and spit it out, and I ended up finding additional instances of direct copies of more Heritage Foundation stuff in his jobs section. So we’re going down the list and we’re finding more and more instances of him copying directly from this one policy think tank on multiple occasions and we continued to break these stories as they go on.”

Eventually, Otten’s campaign responded with a press release in which he claimed that he had met with the Heritage Foundation folks and had simply forgotten to include the citations, essentially implying that he had received the think tank’s permission to copy and paste its work. This prompted a quick response from Heritage’s Stephen Bowen (whose work had been copied without attribution) accusing the campaign of plagiarism and casting doubt on the claims in the press release. This action, Magnon predicted, is what caused the mainstream press to get engaged in the story, and it quickly began trying to catch up.

“We started seeing stuff from the Press Herald, from Maine public broadcasting, we saw stuff from Bangor Daily News,” he said. “The snowball started to build up at that point and then this morning the Bangor Daily News wrote a pretty big article on the whole thing that had a lot of details and essentially prompted the campaign to say, ‘OK, this is getting to be such a big story that someone has to go,’ so they ended up firing a staffer who they say was responsible for this.’”

That staffer, Will Gardiner, was a consultant who worked for a firm owned by Otten’s own campaign manager. The campaign provided the standard plagiarism defense that notes had been copied to the website and the attribution had been lost in the shuffle, but Gardiner nonetheless had to go because he had become a “distraction” to the campaign.

Interestingly enough, this isn’t the first major campaign story that Gagnon has broken. Just a week before he had contributed to the reporting on a campaign scandal from a Democratic candidate for governor, one that led to his exit from the race. Given the lament of editors everywhere that the lay-offs at newspapers would lead to the demise of government watch-dogs, I asked if these anecdotal instances showed that bloggers at least have the ability to replace some mainstream reporters. After all, Gagnon doesn’t even live in the state of Maine (though Pine Tree Politics is a Maine-centric blog, he lives several hundred miles away in the DC area).

“I hate the word ‘replace’ because what I do and what other blogs do is often times very similar but in a lot of ways not similar,” he replied. “I mean it has a lot of the same functions in breaking news like this, but it’s not really what I’m for. I prefer not to break news, I’d rather digest it and analyze it. But nonetheless you make a good point that at this point since the mainstream media is being so lax and the reporters they do have are essentially note takers, not doing the investigative journalism that they used to, it’s basically falling onto the people who are volunteering, who want to do this, who have an interest and are willing to volunteer their time and energy.”

I found it curious that he said he didn’t enjoy breaking news. Isn’t that what drives the most exposure and traffic?

“I’m a volunteer from 800 miles away, and to break news takes a lot of effort,” he said. “I’ve been on the phone a hell of a lot in the past two weeks. Personally, just for my own pace I enjoy finding the news that’s been happening and doing the analysis and finding the story about why it’s important and what to expect, my own opinion on my own steam on my own time. But if I’m chasing breaking stories I’m going to be devoting a lot of time to it that I don’t necessarily want to spend.”

Of course, Gagnon wouldn’t be able to pass on a good story if it were to fall in his lap. And the next time this happens, perhaps mainstream reporters will think twice before dismissing the story before it gets too large for even their news editors to ignore. Otherwise they’ll find themselves playing yet another game of catch-up.

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