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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Both the Wall Street Journal and New York Times published shocking stories this morning about a new Army report that found “remains in more than 200 graves at Arlington National Cemetery may be incorrectly identified,” and that the “U.S. Army forced out the top two officials at Arlington National Cemetery … after a seven-month investigation uncovered widespread mismanagement of the military’s most hallowed burial ground.” The report came out after hundreds of discrepancies had been found between the graves within the cemetery and the records that purported to detail what bodies lay within them.

What neither the Journal nor the Times pointed out, however, is that Mark Benjamin, the national correspondent for Salon.com, not only broke the story a year ago but is also likely the sole reason the Army launched the investigation in the first place.

In a phone conversation with Benjamin, the journalist told me he first got tipped off to the story in April 2009 by people knowledgeable with burial operations within the cemetery. “They approached me with very, very serious problems with the cemetery,” he said. “At first it seemed like their concerns were over the top. But the more I looked into them I realized they looked increasingly credible and I thought, ‘Oh my gosh this is possibly the worst case scenario,’ and it was actually true.”

Editors like to lament that the loss of newspaper jobs means that publishers will no longer invest in long-form investigative journalism given the low profitability of such investigations. But Benjamin’s methods meet every definition of classic gumshoe reporting. He first developed several prime sources who were able to provide the documents that were crucial for him to complete his work, including the burial records that turned out to be so inaccurate.

“I also spent a lot of time walking the grounds of the cemetery,” he said. “That cemetery is 684 acres, I know it like the back of my hand. To give you an example, one of the recent articles that I wrote was about the Civil War section of the cemetery, I needed to figure out how many headstones were missing. So I took all the records and counted them. There were 5,800 and something records, and I walked the cemetery and literally counted every headstone, and there were 500 missing. I’ve been out there in the freezing cold, I’ve been out there in the burning hot summer, and I’ve been out there when it’s raining. I was out there two days after a car accident while my back was hurting. So it’s taken a lot of sort of classic investigative reporting. I have to say I feel like I need to give [Salon editor] Joan Walsh a plug here, because let’s face it, she let me do this for a year, and she let me take a long long time with the pieces.”

His first piece hit the web in July 2009, and if judged solely by the response from other media outlets, it wasn’t exactly “explosive.” In fact, a more appropriate term to describe the response would be “cricket chirping silence.” Almost all the major news outlets ignored the story, except one. “I got only one TV person that showed any interest in the story, and that was Joe Scarborough. Joe Scarborough had me on a number of times months ago. I don’t know him but I’d be on the show and he’d be saying, ‘this is a big deal, what are they going to do, dig up the whole cemetery?’ And god bless him, he’s the only one.”

But despite the lack of media response, his reporting must have turned heads, otherwise the Army wouldn’t have launched the investigation that would lead to today’s Journal and Times reporting. In some ways, this makes Benjamin almost an integral part of the story, which leads me to wonder why the newspapers left him out.

“I have a couple thoughts on that,” he said when I brought it up. “In some ways it makes me sort of angry because I feel like, frankly, most of the media over the past couple days has given me pretty grudging or no credit. I also feel happy that this very, very important issue is finally seeing the light of day after I’ve been working on it for over a year. Thirdly, I think as the media fragments more and more, one of the problems is that large institutions, or government institutions, strengthen their hands because it’s easy to ignore. I’ve been reporting since last July on burial screw ups in Arlington National Cemetery. Basically everybody ignored me for a year until the Army decided to finally admit that they have a massive problem there. I think they were able to do that because I work at Salon.com, and Salon.com is wonderful, I love Salon, and the work is some of the best I’ve ever done in my life, but because it’s a website and they can ignore it, they did ignore it.”

He added that he thought part of the problem is that “the media, and this is not so much TV but definitely in print –let’s face it — there’s a very, very strong incentive to ignore other people’s work.”

Despite the lack of traction last year, Salon submitted Benjamin’s work for the “public service” category for the Pulitzer prize, which it obviously didn’t win. He sounded skeptical that the news outlet could submit it again this year, though with the revelations that came out today, I’m not so sure Salon couldn’t argue that this was an “ongoing” piece and that the Army report and subsequent firings would provide a sound argument for why the Pulitzer committee should reconsider it.

Either way, despite the media blackout over the last year, the report and today’s coverage are certainly evidence that even a smaller, web-only publication like Salon can fight through the noise, and Benjamin had to agree with me.

“Yes, there’s no question that the Army launched the investigation specifically because of my reporting and in the investigation it says everything in my reporting was absolutely right.”

At the end of the day, isn’t that the only accomplishment that reporters need? If our goal is to expose corruption and neglect, then today’s acknowledgment from the Army is the vindication that Benjamin is the kind of reporter that newspaper editors everywhere claim is a dying breed. The fact that he doesn’t work for a newspaper is just an inconvenient detail to their narrative.

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If activists want to practice journalism, shouldn’t we hold their work to a rigorous journalistic standard?

“Hey Congressman Moran? Jason Mattera, from Virgina, actually, big fan. The 12th district of Virginia.”

With that Mattera, a conservative activist heavily promoted under the umbrella of Andrew Breitbart’s media empire, was already creating his own version of reality. Emerging from a new breed of political activism, Mattera’s brand of “ambush” journalism — in which a prepared barrage of politically guided questions are tossed at an unsuspecting, quickly-flummoxed interview subject — has been gobbled up by the insatiably hungry 24-hour news cycle. Mattera was not a “big fan” of Virginia Congressman Jim Moran, nor was he likely from Virginia, much less from the non-existent “12th District.” It’s not surprising that Moran, who on any given day may deal with dozens or even hundreds of constituents with any number of questions, was forced into a posture of confused defensiveness as the activist interrupted him with a series of non-contextual questions that were never really meant to be answered. Mattera and his fellow ambushers aren’t out in search for any semblance of truth, but rather to score ever more political points — and YouTube views. In one ambush interview with Senator Al Franken, the conservative made up a provision of the health care bill out of whole cloth — that it included billions in funding for “jungle gyms” — and then tried to force the Senator to justify said made-up provision. When Franken politely asked him to cite the claim, Mattera proceeded to simply shout over an increasingly flustered Franken, at one point calling him “Stuart Smalley.”

Though ambush journalism has likely existed as long as modern media, it’s hard to pinpoint the origins of this particular beast of dishonest hackery. Many have noticed similarities to the work of filmmaker Sacha Baron Cohen, who has made a career of manipulating American politeness to lure unsuspecting victims into saying any number of horrible things (Cohen has never pretended to be a journalist). The movement was adopted under the auspices of Bill O’Reilly, who has sent an army of “producers” to wait outside the homes or workplaces of unsuspecting victims. In many cases, said victim had recently criticized O’Reilly, raising the question as to whether the host is using Fox News to enact revenge for his own bruised ego. O’Reilly employs the argument that these people have refused to appear on his show and that the only way to confront them is to go to them, which seems sound until you consider the fact that at least two of his targets have said they were never asked to go on the O’Reilly Factor before being ambushed. He’s also been accused of heavily editing the videos to make them less favorable to the interviewee, which ultimately ties back to the perception of reality that is subject to the video-maker’s political whim.

But if O’Reilly and Cohen created the market for this manipulative approach, Matt Drudge protege Andrew Breitbart has taken it and transformed it into the carnival sideshow that leads to a college undergrad donning a prostitute outfit and accompanying a right-wing activist in what may be one of the most misleading journalistic atrocities in the last year, one that swept up nearly the entire traditional media. Breitbart, whose own spittle-flecked battles with his political opponents are well-documented on YouTube, has taken almost a paternal stance in his adoption of James O’Keefe, who you probably know as the guy who “brought down ACORN” with his series of videos purporting to document how the organization is aiding and abetting prostitution rings and child sex trafficking. Breitbart, always sharp tempered and hyperbolic, has launched particularly vicious invective whenever O’Keefe has entered troubled waters. When the activist was arrested by federal authorities earlier this year after he and a group of friends entered U.S. Sen. Mary Landrieu’s office dressed as phone company employees and claimed they needed access to Landrieu’s phones, Breitbart obsessively monitored every news story on the event and pummeled outlets for retractions for the slightest mistakes, only pausing long enough to get in an on-air screaming match with David Shuster for the MSNBC anchor’s own statements regarding O’Keefe. When a Salon writer wrote a piece questioning whether O’Keefe had a “race” problem, Breitbart was apoplectic, calling for retractions and confronting Max Blumenthal, the author of the article, at this year’s CPAC event. But as the facts began to unravel on the deceptive reporting methods his young protege used in producing his ACORN videos, there was little Breitbart could do to stem the tide of growing attacks and calls for corrections by those who wanted political payback for ACORN’S fate.

You may know at least a few of the litany of examples of journalistic malfeasance in O’Keefe’s “magnum opus,” but many of the worst atrocities have not even been touched by the likes of Fox News, who gave virtual round-the-clock coverage to the videos when they initially broke. Most other major news outlets have only barely shed light on the later revelations as well, which isn’t to say they didn’t feel the sting of public embarrassment when it came out that they were essentially duped. To date, multiple attorney generals have issued reports that they’ve found no illegal acts by ACORN; instead, they found the videos to be heavily “edited,” “dubbed,” and ultimately misleading as to what O’Keefe presented in the edited video compared to what actually happened.

For instance, despite wide public belief that O’Keefe had entered the ACORN offices dressed as a blacksploitation pimp — a belief stemming from cuts of him dressed as such — he actually went in dressed conservatively as a college student. O’Keefe also never referred to himself as a pimp, but rather as his companion’s boyfriend. The only references to the word “pimp” are when the two speak of her “abusive pimp,” from whom O’Keefe is trying to save her. So was ACORN trying to aid and abet prostitution? Or were they simply trying to save Hannah Giles, the young girl who had accompanied O’Keefe, from an abusive pimp? The unedited videos make this much less clear. Yet this didn’t stop O’Keefe from appearing on an episode of Fox & Friends dressed in the pimp outfit, allowing the host to make the widely-repeated claim that he had been wearing it when entering the offices. It also didn’t stop Andrew Breitbart from penning a Washington Times editorial using the word “dressed” when describing O’Keefe’s time in the offices. Should it be a surprise that dozens of other outlets followed suit and printed the same when giving their own accounts of the videos and the ensuing controversy?

Then there is the inconvenient truth that a few ACORN offices either turned the “pimp” away or even called the police, a fact that O’Keefe seemed to leave out of the videos and his subsequent interviews. In fact, we didn’t learn of this until the revelatory attorney general reports were released. Or how about the fact that ACORN has only received a few million dollars from the federal government, rather than the “billions” O’Keefe claimed when he released the video? The videos were also edited down so it seemed that ACORN employees were speaking on one subject instead of responding to something else, meaning much of the context was removed from what they said.

So how was O’Keefe rewarded for his journalistic misdeeds? There’s the aforementioned round-the-clock Fox News coverage, in which he, Giles, and Breitbart were invited on countless shows to recount the horrors of ACORN to unskeptical hosts. Not only did the New York Times cover the controversy, but the public editor wrote a piece chastising the paper of record for waiting a whole week to jump on the media bandwagon in covering O’Keefe. By the time the truth of what really happened in those offices began to leak out, nearly every major news outlet had covered the controversy. The YouTube videos had hundreds of thousands of views and Congress had voted to cut ACORN’s funding. Not long ago, the organization announced it would shut down its national operation because of the damage the videos had caused.

At least some of the news outlets felt the burn stemming from their lack of skepticism. After dragging his feet for several weeks as bloggers pummeled him with demands for retractions, the New York Times public editor finally wrote a column diving into the misleading aspects of the videos. A few days later, the Times published official corrections. And when O’Keefe recently produced a new set of videos — this time claiming fraud from the Census — mainstream media outlets for the most part only lightly touched the story; even Fox News mostly stayed away from it. Many on the left claimed that journalists were becoming much more cautious at taking O’Keefe at his word that the “reality” he was presenting in his videos was, well, reality. Others simply pointed out that the revelations of the videos weren’t really all that shocking, so the media had less of a story with which to run.

Like Mattera, O’Keefe refers to himself as a “journalist,” a beacon of light bent on exposing organizational corruption. But whether or not one agrees that this is a kind of “journalism,” it would be silly to ignore the other obvious label for these YouTube releases: Political activism. In each case, the activist sets out with a predetermined point to make and often manufactures situations that border on entrapment. This should lead to us asking ourselves the following question: If the situation we’re viewing before us is manufactured, should we allow ourselves to be outraged by what they purport to find?

A perfect example of this would be the recent retirement of White House press corps dean Helen Thomas, who was caught in a YouTube video telling Israelis to get the “hell out of Palestine,” and that they should “go home” to Germany and Poland. Fox News, the usual water carrier for these types of activist videos, invited the creator of the video, David Nesenoff, to call into one of its shows. Nesenoff ludicrously inferred that he was just innocently approaching Thomas because she was an “icon,” and that there was no political aim in his questions. A self-described Rabbi (gee, I wonder what side of the political debate he’s on?), Nesenoff dispelled this notion of disinterest before the video even ended, displaying the text, “How can Helen possibly report unbiased?” Here, we have a prime instance of the activist distorting reality, given that Thomas ceased reporting for the wires years ago and has been an opinion columnist for Hearst for nearly a decade. A more appropriate sentence would read, “How can an opinion columnist possibly have an opinion?” Would this entirely contextual omission be because it would be inconvenient to the activist’s story?

Further revelations also dispelled any notion of innocent objectivity. After loudly suggesting Thomas was a bigot, Nesenoff felt the swing of the pendulum when it was revealed that he had produced a video espousing racial stereotypes of Hispanics. I’ll take your antisemitic accusation and raise you a racist one. Other videos showed “undercover” investigations Nesenoff had conducted, calling to mind a certain ACORN hoaxing wannabe pimp.

But what should be pointed out above all else is that Thomas did not seek out the spotlight to air these views. She did not say them during a speech before a university or include them in one of her columns. She had an activist come up and thrust a camera in her face and ask her a slew of politically loaded, vague questions. We don’t see the context of how Nesenoff introduced himself or what happened after the video cuts away. We have a completely manufactured incident that never would have happened if it weren’t for an activist’s — yes, I’ll say it — entrapment.

Do we really want to live in a world where you can get fired because some guy comes up to you unannounced, launches questions for which you haven’t prepared, forces you to say things you had no plans to say, then edits the video down into the most damning soundbite before hanging you with it?

James O’Keefe and Andrew Breitbart would say this is a world where corruption and malfeasance is uncovered, but I say it’s a world in which mainstream journalists unquestioningly carry the water of political activists who masquerade as fellow journalists. Whether you take my side or theirs depends on how well — or how badly — you believe I’m distorting my own version of reality, or, on the other hand, whether you believe that in the end reality even matters at all.

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In the Economics Unbound blog last week, Michael Mandel attempted to chart the job numbers for the journalism industry over the last two decades, finding a consistent decline in newspaper jobs and cyclical ups and downs across most other mediums, with a slight downturn in these mediums over the last few years.

The problem is that the internet has created a whole new ambiguous ecosystem of both journalism and quasi-journalism jobs, ones that are producing real (and sometimes massive) revenue but are difficult to pin to the news industry. You have the patent lawyer who has a popular law blog which in turn indirectly brings in large clients. You have your assortment of independent pro bloggers that make enough money through online advertising. You have your health care bloggers who have turned their online celebrity into consulting contracts for the industry. Also there are the part time incomes and the kickbacks gifts that tech and mommy bloggers receive regularly from brands looking for free pimpage.

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There is something particularly insidious about the political chain email compared to other forms of political propaganda. Its format makes it almost impossible to trace back to its origin, leaving its creators masked and unaccountable for any misinformation that spreads. Because it travels from inbox to inbox and there’s no permalink for it, the chain email can often remain under the radar for days, making it difficult for others to debunk it publicly. And for whatever reason these factors make most chain emails especially averse to facts, with nearly all their claims plucked seemingly from whole cloth.

Brooks Jackson, director of Factcheck.org, has dealt with these kinds of emails for years, methodically debunking viral memes during the Bush/Kerry election and continuing to do so as Obama rose to prominence. The site’s readers have sent in so many queries asking him to verify these chain emails that he eventually launched a feature called “Ask Factcheck”

“It sort of cropped up as a sideline to what is our original mission, which is looking at TV ads and statements of political figures,” Jackson told me in a phone interview.

He said that these kinds of emails can be “enormously influential,” spreading to millions of people. But when Factcheck readers began forwarding an email making a series of claims about H.R. 3200, the House health care bill, they were slow to act on it.

“In this case we didn’t exactly spring into action,” Jackson said. “There are lots of claims here and we had other stuff keeping us busy that were higher profile than this. We delayed a long time before we took this on. There were so many claims being made, and it was going to be an obvious drain on our time. But the emails just kept coming and coming and coming, and we said we need to do this thing, and if we’re going to do it, let’s not just look at some of the claims, let’s look at every damn claim in this thing. We parceled it out and in the end I think we had three of us working on it.”

The end result was an article titled, “Twenty-six Lies About H.R. 3200.” The subtitle reads, “A notorious analysis of the House health care bill contains 48 claims. Twenty-six of them are false and the rest mostly misleading. Only four are true.”

The piece methodically moves through all the claims, quoting them and measuring them up against the actual wording in the bill. The false ones range from “Mandates audits for all employers that self insure” to “A government committee will decide what treatments and benefits you get.” There are a few that are either true or partly true; for instance, the claim that “Government mandates linguistic infrastructure for services; translation: illegal aliens,”

“It’s true that page 91 says that insurance companies selling plans through the new exchange ’shall provide for culturally and linguistically appropriate communication and health services,” Factcheck says about the claim. “The author’s ‘translation,’ however, assumes that anyone speaking a foreign language or from another culture is an illegal immigrant, which is false.”

Lately, Factcheck has devoted a significant amount of coverage to fact checking the health care reform debate, and the increased interest has caused a higher-than-average level of web traffic for the site.

“We’re getting request for interviews [from journalists], traffic to the website,” Jackson said. “Whether you measure it by unique sessions or page views, it is exceeded only by the traffic we receive in a presidential election year. I’d have to go back to give you exact numbers, but it’s something like 80% of the traffic we’ll receive in the height of the 2008 campaign, and far above what we had seen in the earlier months of the Obama campaign. It’s a real spike. There’s a big increase in the number of letters to the editor, Ask Factcheck queries; instead of dozens or scores of emails a day, we’re getting hundreds, to the point that it’s a chore to keep up with. We read every one, sometimes we’re a few days behind.”

I asked Jackson whether he felt overwhelmed by all the health care reform misinformation floating around in the public sphere. Wasn’t it all just too much?

“I think we’re more exhilarated than we are frustrated,” he replied. “It’s a lot of work. It’s a lot of fun; as a journalist I couldn’t think of anything more rewarding than giving a hot foot to a politician in a public forum. That’s the sort of stuff you live for. It’s a daunting task. We try to pace ourselves. One of the nice things of working for a university-based think tank is that we’re not subjected to the kind of deadline a newspaper or an hourly news program is subjected to. Our standard is, we put something up when we’re sure it’s right, and we have something meaningful to say.”

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In this Atlantic piece, Mark Bowden can’t seem to make up his mind. He spends the first quarter of the piece bemoaning the death of investigative journalism, suggesting that well paid political operatives with an agenda are doing all the digging that leads to today’s scandals, and then after nicely tying up his introduction, decides to introduce us to one of these hitmen.

And who is it? An unpaid conservative blogger who receives around 30 readers a day.

Morgen Richmond, for one—the man who actually found the snippets used to attack Sotomayor. He is a partner in a computer-consulting business in Orange County, California, a father of two, and a native of Canada, who defines himself, in part, as a political conservative. He spends some of his time most nights in a second-floor bedroom/office in his home, after his children and wife have gone to bed, cruising the Internet looking for ideas and information for his blogging. “It’s more of a hobby than anything else,” he says. His primary outlet is a Web site called VerumSerum.com, which was co-founded by his friend John Sexton. Sexton is a Christian conservative who was working at the time for an organization called Reasons to Believe, which strives, in part, to reconcile scientific discovery and theory with the apparent whoppers told in the Bible. Sexton is, like Richmond, a young father, living in Huntington Beach. He is working toward a master’s degree at Biola University (formerly the Bible Institute of Los Angeles), and is a man of opinion. He says that even as a youth, long before the Internet, he would corner his friends and make them listen to his most recent essay. For both Sexton and Richmond, Verum Serum is a labor of love, a chance for them to flex their desire to report and comment, to add their two cents to the national debate.

Bowden gives backhanded compliments to Richmond, commending him on doing the investigative work to dig up the controversial comments from the Supreme Court nominee but not having the journalistic pressure to provide balanced context to it. But as Richmond Richmond’s co-blogger says in his blog:

Blogging is more like hell. Get it. Get it out. Get it right the best you can. Get it to your friends at other blogs if you want it to be seen. And check your own damn spelling (often not very well in my case). That’s just text. If you want to use video, well you’re the video editor too. Pull the clips. Find some music. Add the titles. Need a picture? Find it yourself. And it’s not just one story a day, but 2 or 3 if you want to keep your readers, much less grow your site. Finding the complete context of every story just isn’t possible at this level. We’re doing the best we can with limited time and no money.

Is it perfect. Not by a long shot. But like Morgen, I trust the openness of blogging. Sunlight is the best disinfectant but it’s also what makes things grow. Put the information out. If it’s wrong, you’ll hear about it. If it’s right, people will notice that too. As it’s passed along, friendly hands will add nuance and value. Opponents find the weak links or undercut the statements that just don’t hold up. It’s open source journalism. The first amendment is a beautiful thing.

Richmond, unlike most mainstream journalists who reported on the controversy, was actually able to link to the entire video, allowing his readers to follow those links and watch it in his entirety. In that sense, he provided a context that nobody else on cable news ever could. This, in effect, kills Bowden’s thesis and gives more credence to the blogosphere as an investigative arm of the media.

Good job, Richmond. You and I might not politically agree on your conclusions that you reached after your investigative work, but you deserve any recognition that comes your way.

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Politico is too.

The story is the same at Politico, which had roughly 3.6 million unique visitors in June — more than last June and as many as January, said Jim VandeHei, co-founder and executive editor. In fact, while newspapers are shedding reporters and editors, Politico’s staff size has actually grown about 10 percent since the election — and the site is still hiring.

“We had 95 employees at the beginning of the year,” VandeHei said. “We have 105 now.”

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