The blog swarm Tweety Matthews never saw coming: "unmistakable victory for the liberal blogosphere"

Media Matters for America: The blog swarm Chris Matthews never saw coming
by Eric Boehlert

"I get it." -- Chris Matthews, January 17

When Chris Matthews' long-winded monologue at the opening of the January 17 Hardball program eventually touched down with an apology to Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-NY) for the way the cable talker had been treating the candidate on the air, the moment represented an unmistakable victory for the liberal blogosphere. By not only getting Matthews to apologize, but by also forcing the rest of the press -- post-New Hampshire -- to back off its, at-times, overtly sexist coverage of a prominent Democratic contender, the blogs have already had more impact on how the traditional press covers this presidential campaign than they did during the entire 2004 White House run.

Indeed, the way the netroots and the (mostly) online progressive infrastructure have grown in the last four years in terms of battling media malfeasance should give conservatives pause. It's true that liberal bloggers do not have access to the same levers of power their conservative counterparts do; the way partisan pals at Fox News or National Review or The Wall Street Journal editorial page will often parrot the latest right-wing blogger outrage, no matter how half-baked it is. But the Tweety Effect, as the Matthews controversy was dubbed online, illustrated how the Beltway press is increasingly susceptible to pressure applied by the netroots, especially when the offenses are as egregious as Matthews'. And that could have enormous impact as the general election unfolds this year.

The Matthews blog swarm -- a viral uprising from the netroots -- was hardly the first of the campaign season. In fact, it was 52 weeks ago that bloggers helped lead the charge to knock down the bogus right-wing meme that Sen. Barack Obama (D-IL) had been educated in a madrassa, while growing up in Indonesia. In that instance, CNN also played a starring role in debunking the Fox News madrassa propaganda.

But in terms of being born-and-bred online, it seems the Tweety Effect was uniquely original to the netroots (in terms of affecting presidential media coverage), and was powered almost entirely online. The blog swarm then picked up institutional support by Media Matters, which hammered the Matthews issue for a week, and was also embraced by the National Organization for Women, EMILY's List, the Feminist Majority Foundation, the Women's Media Center, and the National Women's Political Caucus, which protested outside NBC's Washington, D.C., studios: Matthews and his bosses had no choice but to back down.

"I think the reason this blog swarm hit to the extent that it did was because the blog world played the role that the media and the pundit world really is supposed to play -- to identify and articulate what's happening in the real world," says Rachel Maddow, the Air America radio host and occasional blogger....

http://mediamatters.org/columns/200801220003

Mark Matson at MyDD, another key liberal destination site, officially logged the new term into the always-evolving netroots glossary:

Tweety Effect - noun 1. where the misogyny of a talking head in the MSM so enrages a demographic that they go out and vote in a manner that will put egg on the face of the talking head.

and the outrage never stops!