Before the Lott affair, we used to admire Josh Marshal’s blog even though we don’t agree with his politics, not understanding that he’s a puppet of Sidney Blumenthal, the man credited by Kaus as initiator of the Get Lott campaign:
Leave it to Harvard’s Kennedy School to produce a 25-page paper on the role of bloggers in the Trent Lott affair that ignores the key part played by Sidney Blumenthal’s e-mails.
Those who’ve crowed the loudest about the Lott Affair’s showing the power of blogs to influence politics have ignored Blumenthal’s role, but any sensible person can see that the more powerful the tool the greater the incentive to manipulate it. Since blogs rely more on e-mail from dubious sources than conventional media, it stands to reason that they’d be easier to influence, and that’s the way we see the lesson of Lott. I’m glad we’ve got Frist running the Senate instead of Lott now, but I’m not at all thrilled by how the transition came about.
Josh Marshall is an insider, and he knew exactly what he was doing and why when he jumped on Lott; the semi-cons like Reynolds who jumped aboard Marshall’s bandwagon were much less aware of what Kaus calls the “dark matter”, and were simply trying to do the right thing and get a few hits in the process.
Many of the high-traffic blogs covering politics extensively are written by political outsiders who don’t actually appreciate the dynamics of political drama, and this makes them super-attractive to spin doctors who make their living, after all, manipulating those who know they’re being manipulated. If “citizen journalism” is going to become a constructive force in our politics, the citizens doing the journalism are going to need some lessons in the day-to-day practical realities of the political system.
I’m puzzled. Are you defending Lott? That is the impression conveyed by this entry without background material. As someone who sent material about the neo-Confederate movement to Josh and Atrios, I can assure you that both were interested in truth telling in that instance. Lott would have been exposed with or without Sidney Blumenthal. In fact, efforts had been made in that direction before.
I was aware that Blumenthal and some others wante to take Lott down – it was, in fact, obvious, that the Left was going to have its lynching regardless – but was nevertheless only too happy to do my tiny, insignificant part in blogging him down, as it were, for purely pragmatic reasons. I thought he was a lousy ML the first time around and should never have gotten the job back once the voters corrected Jeffords’ shift of Senate control for which they voted. As far as I’m concerned, Josh Marshall gets way too much credit, anyway. If those of us, Prof. Reynolds included, to the *right* hadn’t wanted Lott gone, he would probably have survived. The loss of support from his own base, however, was his fatal.