Hardship duty

Trunk has already linked to the New York Times story, in which I was quoted, about the efforts of left-wing bloggers to market their stories, ravings, and fantasies to the MSM through conference calls. The story seems fair and balanced, and the author, Jonathan Glater, quoted me accurately. More importantly, he quoted Kristinn Taylor of Free Republic, who captured the left’s problem more succinctly than I did, stating that, in order to break through, left-wing bloggers might have to outgrow the conspiracy-theory stage of blogging to produce reports that are credible and relevant to a wider audience.
My biggest regret about the story is that Glater quoted my assertion that the MSM does not feed out of the hands of conservative blogs, but did not include my stated basis for this claim (I assume this was due to space limitations). As I explained to Glater, the Rather story was initiated by CBS and, under these circumstances, the network’s use of fraudulent documents could not go unreported. However, in two other important cases, the Swiftvet and Eason Jordan stories, conservative blogs faced great resistance from the MSM. In the first case, the story received little or no MSM attention until Kerry broke his silence, signaling that this story was hurting him and had to be addressed. In the second case, the story received virtually no attention until Jordan was on his way out the door.
I also regret that Glater did not use what was probably my best line of the interview — that newspapers should pay someone to read political blogs, just as they pay people to watch bad movies.