{"id":1860,"date":"2004-03-06T09:19:51","date_gmt":"2004-03-06T16:19:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/mossback.org\/archives\/2004\/03\/covering-blumenthals-tracks\/"},"modified":"2004-03-06T09:19:51","modified_gmt":"2004-03-06T16:19:51","slug":"covering-blumenthals-tracks","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bennett.com\/blog\/2004\/03\/06\/covering-blumenthals-tracks\/","title":{"rendered":"Covering Blumenthal’s tracks"},"content":{"rendered":"

\t\t\t\tBefore 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:<\/a><\/p>\n

\n

Leave it to Harvard’s Kennedy School to produce a 25-page paper <\/a>on the role of bloggers in the Trent Lott affair that ignores the key part played by Sidney Blumenthal’s e-mails.<\/a> <\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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. <\/p>\n

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.\t\t<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 … Continue reading “Covering Blumenthal’s tracks”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[16],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1860","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pbifyw-u0","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bennett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1860","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bennett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bennett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bennett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bennett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1860"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bennett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1860\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bennett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1860"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bennett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1860"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bennett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1860"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}