GQ has named Josh Marshal of Talking Points Memo one of it's "MOTY" or Man of the Year. He is listed with several others including Bill Clinton, Mike Bloomberg, and Daniel Craig. And it couldn't have happened to a more well deserved recipient. Excerpts from the article are below"
The Header:
MOTY: Give This Man a Pulitzer
With Talking Points Memo, Josh Marshall—along with his obsessive band of political reporters—is building the prototype of what an Internet-based news-gathering organization might one day look like. Don’t believe us? Just ask Alberto Gonzales.
We are all familiar on DKOS with Josh Marshall and his relentless digging on stories like Blackwater, Ted Stevens, and the MOTHER of all investigations, the US Attorney Scandal, which eventually led to the resignation of Alberto Gonzalez.
No journalists in America have a better institutional knowledge of the former AG’s pathologies than Marshall and his staff. Their published work on the firing of nine United States Attorneys alone—a scandal virtually unmentioned by other journalists for months after TPM started covering it—could fill a book. Indeed, when Gonzales finally got around to quitting in September, TPM’s dominance in chronicling him had long been both an accepted fact—its work was repeatedly cited by newspapers—and a journalistic curiosity in itself. The thing is, Josh Marshall is a blogger. The reporters and editors who work for TPM are also bloggers, a term that deserves italics because it is now so broad as to be meaningless. It is, however, inherently diminutive, even when it’s being used kindly, which it usually is in relation to TPM.
By "bloggers" no less. More of this please! And the article doesn't disappoint. I have bolded a REALLY amusing sentence below:
For instance: When the rest of the press was catching up to what a weasel Gonzales was, the Minneapolis Star Tribune called Marshall THE BLOGGER WHO MIGHT BRING DOWN GONZALES, and the Los Angeles Times punned, in regard to TPM and Gonzales, BLOGS CAN TOP THE PRESSES, as if they’d discovered a new and exotic form of reporter in the digital wilderness.Columbia Journalism Review weighed in with a slightly more sober HOW TALKING POINTS MEMO BEAT THE BIG BOYS ON THE U.S. ATTORNEY STORY.
The rest of the media is slowly catching on to the fact that YES, bloggers can do the job of journalists, and in some cases a MUCH better job. The MSM journalists operate within the constraints of the corporations that own the media. Bloggers don't. And therefore they can spend more time researching and digging, relentlessly in some cases, until the true facts come out. It's time to give them the respect they deserve. Paul Krugman and Jay Carney from Time have some good things to say too.
TPM is something new under the sun—it’s in part an opinion blog, but it’s also an investigative-reporting shop," says New York Times columnist Paul Krugman. "And it’s having a big influence. Josh and crew did more than anyone to break the U. S. attorneys story, they’ve played a big role in uncovering the Blackwater scandal, and more. At this point, it’s hard to see how we ever lived without something like TPM. I rely on them a lot."
"You’re making a mistake if you’re not checking in," says Time Washington bureau chief Jay Carney. "That’s not ideological at all: They’re good at what they do. They’re the best of a breed."
Please give big shout out and congratulations to Josh and gang over at TPM!