Value-added blogging - The Downing Street Minutes

I don't buy into the triumphalist rhetoric insisting that blogs will soon displace the traditional news media. If anything, news outlets will adopt and adapt the method of blogging to add value to their product. This process is already well underway, in fact.

That having been said, one cannot help but thank God for the bloggers who, slaving over their smoking keyboards, have kept the story of the Downing Street Minutes from drifting away like so much morning fog.

Eric Boehlert's piece today in Salon explores the story's failure to get much traction so far in the American media. Reading the comments of some news professionals and media observers, it is clear that but for the very existence of blogging as a medium, it is likely that we would know nothing about this epic story of moral and political corruption.

The fact that it took five weeks for more than a handful of Washington reporters to focus on the memo highlights a striking disconnect between some news consumers and mainstream news producers. The memo story epitomizes a mainstream press corps that is genuinely afraid to ask tough questions and write tough stories about the Bush administration. Worse, in the case of the Downing Street memo, it simply refuses to report on the existence of a plainly newsworthy document.

"This is where all the work conservatives and the administration have done in terms of bullying the press, making it less willing to write confrontational pieces -- this is where it's paid off," says David Brock, CEO of Media Matters for America, a liberal media advocacy group. "It's a glaring example of omission."

"I think it exacerbates the sense among some [of our] listeners that NPR is not taking on the Bush administration," notes Jeffrey Dvorkin, ombudsman for National Public Radio, who continues to receive listener complaints about the missing memo story. As of Tuesday, NPR had aired just two references to the Downing Street memo, and both occurred in passing conversation, without giving listeners the full context or the details of the memo. Asked about the network's slim coverage, Dvorkin says, "I was surprised. It's a bigger story than we've given it. It deserves more attention."

It is encouraging that the ombudsman of NPR understands this, but it would be better if the editors of NPR, The Washington Post, ABC News, etc., took it to heart. The Downing Street Minutes story is a definite case in which the citizen journalists of the blogosphere have served the public better than have the card-carrying members of the fourth estate.