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Quote:

Some in the American mainstream media, or MSM as bloggers call it, dispute the Downing Street memo offers anything new that would change public understanding of the decision to go to war in Iraq.

"The memos add not a single fact to what was previously known about the administration's prewar deliberations," declared the editorial page of The Washington Post last week. " Hearsay ," said the Rocky Mountain News. And radio talk show host Rush Limbaugh has suggested, without evidence, the documents may be forged. (In fact, The British government has not challenged the authenticity of any of the documents cited in recent news reports.)

But an increasing number of news editors are recognizing the newsworthiness of the DSM story. Newsday , the New York tabloid, picked up the AP story. The Houston Chronicle published DSM excerpts this week. So did the San Francisco Chronicle. The editors of the Detroit Free Press say the DSM story is "too significant to be dismissed as simply old news -- as the White House would like -- or left to historians."

These aren't the big-name national news organizations that bloggers call the MSM. But nor are they partisan liberal organs inclined to buy into fact-free theories. The interest of such regional media mainstays demonstrates how the Internet has transformed the news business.

Thousands of bloggers now do the sort of sifting and weighing and disseminating of information that was formerly the exclusive province of a relatively small group of media professionals concentrated in the East Coast. The growing DSM coverage, said the BBC this week, is a "bloggers' victory."

News editors can read the DSM documents and the original Times of London stories themselves. They might be persuaded by the reporting of The Post's Dana Milbank who portrayed Rep. John Conyers's DSM hearings on Capitol Hill last week as an excursion into the "land of make-believe". But with a click of the mouse they can go to the coverage of the same event in the Guardian of London and see the DSM story described as "tantamount to the first word of tapes in the Nixon White House during the Watergate scandal."

The point is not that either account has a monopoly on truth, but now there is another force that can help put a story on the news agenda.

Thanks to the global reach of the Internet, the two-month-old scoop of a London daily continues to live in the American political debate and diverse areas of the media landscape.

Mary Specht provided research for this column.


"The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa." - George W. Bush State of the Union speech Jan 28, 2003 "mission accomplished" - George W. Bush May 2, 2003 It does not require a majority to prevail but rather an irate, tireless minority keen to set brushfires in peoples minds". Samuel Adams said that. Pretty deep for a guy that makes beer for a living - The Boondocks "A conservative is one who admires radicals centuries after they're dead" - Leo C. Rosten