The political pundit class is regularly pilloried by the leading lights of the progressive blogosphere. Maureen Dowd, for example, is rightly ridiculed for her penchant to dwell on inanities rather than issues. David Broder, the "Dean" of the Beltway pundits, is mocked for his myopic, inside-the-Beltway vision of politics.
And the press, in general, is torn to shreds by top progressive bloggers for a variety of sins: getting facts wrong; focusing on side issues; failing to cover serious gaffes of a Republican frontrunner while giving overblown coverage to the smallest Democratic candidate misstep.
The performances of ABC's George Stephanopoulos and Charles Gibson in the last debate were horrendous, and progressive blog honchos (except for a few ardent Clinton backers) chastised the pair for their shallow, trivial circus act.
So one would think that top progressive bloggers, many of whom have been arguing that they are, indeed, journalists, would try and do better than the very media elites they so often criticize.
Oh, if only it were so...
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Back in December, just as Barack Obama was about to start his three-state whirlwind tour with Oprah Winfrey, an item appeared off-handedly in a post by digby claiming that Oprah Winfrey was anti-union and that her production company ran a non-union shop.
The story was untrue and an obvious smear in advance of the tour, but this "fact" gained a life of its own and spread rapidly to Clinton-friendly blogs like Taylor Marsh, NoQuarter and MyDD.
I wrote a long piece tracing the smear and published it on Daily Kos on December 12:
Anatomy of a smear: Winfrey gets attacked with lies
My purpose wasn't to indict specific bloggers, but, rather, to call attention to how easy it is to become the very thing that respected progressive bloggers so often criticize.
I was even more disappointed in how digby started her response to my piece:
First of all, this kind of thing happens all the time in blogging. We link to articles as a matter of course, and sometimes they are wrong. The way we normally deal with it is to write a note to the blogger and ask them to correct the error rather than write a DKos diary calling him or her a lazy smear artist based upon a four word error and a link to an article.
I never called digby a "lazy smear artist," nor did I imply that she was anything of the sort. My point with the "Anatomy" post was that our progressive blog leadership undermines its ability to criticize media kingpins when it makes the same, lazy mistakes. Would it have been that difficult to check and see if Winfrey really was "anti-union" before posting the claim that she was -- a claim that quickly circulated among other so-called progressive blogs?
And of late, we've witnessed some of the progressive blogosphere's "leading lights" sound more like Maureen Dowd or George Stephanopoulos than astute observers of the political scene.
Reading Markos ("Clinton is not a Democrat"), Jerome Armstrong (citing Clinton's FactHub as a reputable source in a front page post), or Jeralyn Merritt at Talk Left (using Larry Johnson and susanhu's vicious, racist posts as source material), leads me to believe that all of these "leading" bloggers have diminished themselves during the course of this primary race. Far worse than they did in 2004.
While Big Tent Democrat (aka Armando) at Talk Left has been, in my opinion, somewhat accurate in his calling out of his fellow progressive bloggers this primary season, his refusal to call out his blog partner's citing as source the material the bigoted (and often false) trash emanating from NoQuarter and Taylor Marsh leaves a gaping hole in his credibility.
When we have leading bloggers doing nothing more than logrolling (citing each other's posts in an endless circle jerk), then these bloggers have become the very thing they despise.
So next time you read a front-pager at a leading liberal blog take on the media, ask yourself if this "leader" is any better than the pundit or reporter s/he is criticizing.
It's been a disappointing primary season for the progressive blogosphere. The goal should be to do better than those who are so often, rightly, criticized.
(Cross-posted at MyDD.)