They're Not in Your Club but They Are in Your League: Firedoglake at the Libby Trial

They're Not in Your Club but They Are in Your League: Firedoglake at the Libby Trial
"What happens? One blog puts more boots on the ground than any commercial news operation. The writers bring more background, savvy and commitment to the case. And they dominate in coverage of a big news event. Journalists themselves use it to keep up and get their bearings."

I wish I could have covered the Libby trial for my one-person magazine of press criticism, PressThink, which has been dark since January. But I have been consumed with a new project, NewAssignment.Net, which will be launching a Beta site and its first editorial project soon. (Like real soon.) Which means PressThink will spring back to life shortly.

As a critic who follows the fortunes of the American press, and writes about its collapse under Bush, I found it extremely painful to sit on the sidelines for this event. But as compensation I had the pleasure of watching Firedoglake, a group blog, emerge as the best site for primary, tell-me-what-happened-today coverage of the trial.

The political press supplemented FDL quite well, I thought.

If I had time, I went to Memeorandum and sampled all of it. If I didn’t have time, I read Firedoglake and the Washington Post’s team of Amy Goldstein and Carol D. Leonnig. It wasn’t a secret. Maybe 200,000 readers knew. If you wanted to keep up with the trial, and needed something approaching a live transcript, with analytical nuance, legal expertise, courthouse color, and recognizably human voices, Firedoglake was your best bet.

In Boston in 2004, I was part of the first class of bloggers admitted to cover a national political convention. I did some okay stuff. And bloggers had their coming out party before the national press. Beyond celebrating that arrival, no one suggested the bloggers had a better product, not even the bloggers.

In 2007, another first, similar in form: first class of bloggers accredited to cover a big Federal trial. They “join” the courthouse press as new members. And what happens? One blog puts more boots on the ground than any commercial news operation. The writers bring more background, savvy and commitment to the case. And they dominate the coverage of a big news event. Journalists themselves use it to keep up and get their bearings.

Granted, if what you most wanted was a concise bulletin, a few minutes a day from the Libby trial, there were better choices from among traditional suppliers. In all other categories, from hard news to analysis to informed ranting, FDL was tops.

What does that tell you, Newsroom Joe?

Firedoglake got handed a golden opportunity by the reluctance of big news organizations to spend on the information commons. At the Libby trial, there was no broadcast and no taping allowed. No posted transcript for anyone to consult. Thus the most basic kind of news there is—what was said in court today—was missing.

Converging on Washington, the team from FDL felt they represented people back home who wanted to know everything, and certainly had to have the blow-by-blow when court was in session. This was their strength: a demanding core community behind them, which couldn’t wait to discuss the newest events. Their decision was a no brainer: working in shifts, we live blog the whole thing.

“It’s a real shame no one is buying and Web-publishing the full trial transcripts,” wrote Dan Froomkin in his Jan. 24 White House Watch column. “In the absence of that, Firedoglake’s live-blogging of the trial is becoming essential reading.” Froomkin again on March 6 said that FDL “became a must-read for journalists who couldn’t attend the trial, but wanted to get a better and faster sense of what was going on than they could from their own colleagues.”

There were others getting credentials and independently blogging the biggest Federal trial in years. (Robert Cox did a good job getting seats for the Media Bloggers Association.) But none did what Jane Hamsher and crew did.

FDL had more people on the story (six contributors, all housed together). They cared more about documenting every turn. They knew more about the case because they had been writing about it for longer, and they didn’t want to disappoint their supporters.

But wait a minute: bloggers do views, not news, right? They’re like a giant op-ed page, but without decorum. Bloggers are parasitic on reporting that originates elsewhere. Bloggers have an ax to grind, so their reports aren’t going to be reliable. Besides, bloggers don’t do reporting, really. Their trade is opinion (“…and don’t get me wrong, I think that’s great.”) These ideas are “fixed” points for a lot of journalists. And the example of Firedoglake at the Libby trial disconfirms them all.

It was the most basic kind of journalism imaginable. You’re my eyes and ears, Christy. Tell me what happened today. When it came time to interpret, to get inside the heads of the key actors, they rose to that challenge too. (Here’s video of FDL’s Jane Hamsher, Christy Hardin Smith and Marcy Wheeler after closing arguments.)

The nature of the Web makes it easy to discover where the people wary of the Bush White House and intrigued with the Valerie Plame case were hanging out— at this occasionally foul-mouthed, always-busy lefty poli-blog that sprung up around the CIA leak case, Firedoglake. Skeptical of the whole case and Patrick Fitzgerald’s decison to prosecute Scooter Libby, but intrigued to the point of obsession with its spreading awfulness? There was Tom Maguire’s blog, JustOneMinute, for that.

Both distinguished themselves long before the trial, along with Marcy Wheeler of The Next Hurrah, another go-to blogger for followers of the tale that started with Joe Wilson’s trip to Niger. (Not to leave out Jeralyn Merritt.) They were joined of course by some distinguished Washington journalists: Murray Waas of National Journal, David Corn of the Nation, Michael Isikoff of Newsweek. All broke stories. Corn and Isikoff wrote a book on the case, but then so did Marcy Wheeler, who joined forces with FDL for the book and the Libby trial. Her Anatomy of Deceit was the best primer available for the trial, in my opinion.

That an online community could, of its own free will, scare up support for six correspondents at a big trial; that the correspondents would work as hard as they did informing a live public; that they did it for expenses (no pay) and the joy of informing people who depend on you, this is a small, but remarkable part of the Libby case to reflect on, if we’re still aftermathing it.
What makes it possible are the people who gather at the site, and the falling cost for those people.......

Much More of the History of this Incredible Blogosphere Coverage at.......
http://journalism.nyu.edu/pubzone/weblogs/pressthink/2007/03/09/libby_fdl.html