Republican bloggers have egg on their faces.

Weeks ago, mainstream media outlets reported on a memo distributed on Capitol Hill that labeled the Schiavo case "a great political issue" for Republicans. Aghast that the media would accuse Republicans of attempting to politicize the Schiavo issue, bloggers cried foul and charged that the memo was a hoax constructed by the Democrats to smear Republicans. Alas, the memo was all too true, penned by a staffer for Republican Senator Mel Martinez of Florida (Full disclosure: I'm an acquaintance of the controversial memo's author Brian Darling, running into him every few years).

"It looks more and more like the memo was part of a dirty tricks campaign as opposed to a concerned activist trying to be helpful," read a featured post on Red State. Conjuring up images of Rathergate, Fishkite humorously asked: "Any chance these talking points came via a fax machine from somebody named 'B.B.' at a Kinkos in Texas?" Rathergate's Kevin Craver referred to "the fishy GOP 'talking points memo' that has, for all purposes and intents, been laughed off as a fake." In case anyone didn't get the hint, Craver wrote: "I don’t believe the memo is real." Joshua Clayborn at In the Agora reported that Democratic operatives created the memo to discredit the GOP, later admitting that in attempting to disprove a hoax he got hoaxed himself. Powerline, which did a phenomenal job unraveling the Rathergate mess, fell for (and perpetrated) this falsehood. Powerline's John Hinderaker claimed, "there is no reason whatsoever to believe that the memo originated with the Republicans." He added, "it seems extremely likely that it was produced by Democrats as a political dirty trick."

Bloggers were right to take issue with the inflated importance the media ascribed to this one anonymous memo, but they erred when they suggested that it was not only a fraud, but that it was a fraud concocted by the Democrats to smear Republicans. In our imaginations, our enemies are always capable of the most diabolical trickery and deceit.

The memo's real author did what political operatives always do: he wondered how a political issue might be turned to his party's advantage. The bloggers did what good writers never do: let partisanship rather than facts guide them. The latter is more troublesome than the former.

The conservative blogosphere is at its best when it acts as watchdog to the mainstream media. It's at its worst when it imitates them. The same partisan zeal that drove CBS to Rathergate drove bloggers to overreach on this story.

I don't find them directly parallel. First, in the memo scandal, CBS trusted their sources over all other evidence to the contrary. And represented something as factual that was not.

Also even if the rightwing blogsphere got this wrong, they still exposed enough baseless conclusions made by the MSM about this memo. Regardles of where this orignated, the press has not been able to back up "Republican leadership" or "only to Republicans" or even that it was a "talking points" memo.

So I think the blogsphere's role in this is similar to as it was in the TANG story. They poked holes in what the media represented as the truth.

Also, bloggers fit no official role in reporting, thus they are allowed and expected some amount of editorializing in their work. If Red State wants to say "It looks more and more like..." at least they are not saying that they have it on good authority that it is a hoax. This is the difference between what the media has done and what the blogsphere has done.

And Hindraker's "there is no reason" comment is rather true, I think. Once Darling emerged as the writer, there is a reason. Before that, it is only the sayso of the media who got the whole distribution and character of the memo wrong.

Much more troubling I think is MSM's case that they can do a better job than the blogs. In light of the fact that as in the case of the Rather memos, they represented something as fact that was not fact. And not only was it not fact, it was too easily accepted from a partisan source.

This is being blown way out of proportion, and I agree with Sea King. My response is here.

I guess Seak King's defense of the bloggers here is that since they are not reporters they don't have to live up to the reporting standards they hold MSM to. Fair point. This ist he mirror image of MSM's point against bloggers: these bloggers don't have to be responsible the way journalists have to be, because they are anonymous, unaccountable rumor-mongers.

When the bloggers behave irresponsibly(this is an instance), Main Stream Media's case against them get's stronger. Perhaps bloggers should learn this lesson: being really careful would be the best way to deprive MSM of ammunition against them.

Short,
Very insightful.

But MSM's case cannot get any stronger, if we strip away the self-flaggelation for a second and realize that the bloggers still didn't seem to get it as wrong as the mainstream media who represented it as a "talking points" memo from "Republican leadership" circulated "only to Repulicans".

MSM's case is not just about the flaws of bloggers, its about the MSM doing a better job, and frankly--however overblown bloggers' coverage was--I haven't read a blogger on this that has said that they have evidence that it was a smear from Democrats, or represented the case as clearly Democratic dirty trickes.

The rise of the blog comes from the failure of MSM. But the blogsphere is comprised mainly of people doing what they want on their spare time, putting our expectations on what they do in their free time, is a little presumptive, IMO. That we may need to put up with news interspersed with commentary serves as a reminder on how badly network news has failed us.

But again to compare the two: while the Washington Post was still finding ways not to admit that they had made a mistake on the story or denying that they printed what they printed, most of the blogs that I have read on the subject have already printed retractions to the extent that they've needed them.

In order for MSM to win the argument with this case in point, it would need to show that professional journalism has acted better than the blogs. Not that the blogs mishandled this issue.

Good post. Yes some GOP bloggers have egg on their faces, others were more moderate in their tone. I think Powerline did an excellent job trying to uncover the source of the memo. Did they jump to a conclusion based on limited information. Yes. Did they correct their mistake promptly. Again I say yes. This is in stark contrast to CBS/Rather when the evidence was against them. Reporters and bloggers (Left and Right) make mistakes. If they self correct as is the case with Powerline, I'm willing to move on. The point's been made, they've been chastised, hopefully they've learned from the mistake.

B/c I pay no attention to MSM at all I had only a vague idea that there was some memo circulating about the Schiavo situation. I really only picked up on there being an issue when I saw a Drudge headline that an aide to Sen. Martinez was found to be responsible for drafting something on the political advantages of the Schiavo case for Republicans.

So I come at this ignorant and totally uninterested in the controversy, but just want to make one simple point. "Playing politics" is what political parties do. And more fundamental, "playing politics" is what citizens of a democratic republic (representative government elected by universal suffrage) do. All. The. Time. Aristotle called them "regime arguments," but playing politics is how one engages in social discourse in a so-called free society.

So why is it that the MSM and the GOP and Dems are taken the least bit seriously when they whine about someone or another "playing politics" on an issue? Apparently the Blogosphere also accepts that there is something untoward about "playing politics" when they go out of their way to defend the GOP against that accusation.

This memo seems to me to never have been a legitimate news item of interest to begin with and probably should have been responded to with a "so?" followed by a resounding yawn.

Although it really was never important news to me, I watched the conservative bloggers trying to disprove it from the beggining. I wondered why this seemed to be so important and to the lengths they wasted their energies on it. I personally stayed away from the subject on my blog. There was no way to prove or disprove it, so why comment?

I felt the republican party was comitting political suicide over the whole Terri Shiavo debacle. This was the story to me. I sat and watched in horror as the congress ran back from recess to pass legislation for one women, whose case had been decided in the courts over a period of 12 years. While they had previously not been able to pass on substantive piece of legislation.

Uncooperative:

I watched the conservative bloggers trying to disprove it from the beggining.

Powerline, in particular, was suspicious about it from the beginning because it didn't look like any "talking points" memo. Plus the writer clearly indicates that he called around for any inside information about it, precisely for this reason.

Two good reasons to doubt it from the onset, IMO. Besides, little of what MSM reported on the memo itself still stands, only that it did have a Republican source, but it was passed to a Democrat by the senator whose office drafted it.

The liberal/Rockefeller Republicans have once again given the MSM a mace to bludgeon all Republicans with. Last month’s star-crossed attempt by liberal Republicans to expand the role of government will hurt all Republicans. Mel is an imbecile. It is starting to look like ’06 will be a rerun of ’92 when Reagan Democrats left the Republican Party in a vain attempt to find a truly conservative party. Again liberal Republicans give the MSM the weapons to drive all Republicans out of office.

Your post was on-target, but I would like to clear up a misconception and state something for the record.

First off, Rathergate.com is not a "Republican blog." My issue is, and always will be, media bias. In recent weeks, I have come to the defense of a liberal blog that was threatened for linking to a Bill O'Reilly column, and I have repeatedly hammered conservative columnists for taking government money.

I can understand appearances, but appearances can be deceiving. Seeing as how liberals outnumber conservatives five to one in newsrooms -- 89 percent of Washington journalists voted for Clinton in 1992 -- a similar percentage of my focus deals with the liberal bias such environments create.

As for the focus of my coverage of the talking points memo, yes, I labeled it as a fake on more than one occasion. I have more than corrected the record. But Rathergate.com's focus has been the bad journalism behind the Post's coverage. It took reporter Mike Allen three weeks to get something right, i.e. the memo's authenticity. The Post reported that GOP leaders wrote it and distributed it to GOP senators. To this day, Allen has been unable to prove either.

On a deeper level, if one aide writes a memo that no one asked for and one GOP senator passes it to one Democratic senator, why is this front-page news? How was this a policy memo if one person saw it? In short, it's despicable, but what's the big deal?

And while many blogs were irresponsible in this regard, allow me to close with this: Six months after CBS perpetrated the biggest journalism fraud in 25 years, the WaPo and ABC News present the public with a one-page memo with no markings, filled with spelling and factual errors, and whose provenance was confirmed to the WaPo by a trusted anonymous source. Sound familiar? How the heck did the MSM think people were going to react?

In the end, the remainder of my arguments ring true. Allen's trusted source was dead wrong about who wrote the memo and who received it. And the Post has yet to correct the record.