Newsjacking Goes Mainstream

Glenn Reynolds has a good TCS column about the Fall of the Establishment Liberal Media.

The article is a bit triumphal, but I'm not sure that overstates it at this point. The media did everything in its power to suppress/conceal the SwiftVets story, but they failed. Abysmally, in fact, and at some cost to their already-diminished credibility.

The monopoly has been challenged, and the monopolists are behaving in predictable ways to that challenge. The alternative media/internet/radio etc. are nowhere close to replacing the Establishment Liberal Media, of course, but it's a major success when an upstart merely begins scoring the occasional victory over a monopolist.

Way back when, I wrote an article stating that the conservative blogosphere had yet to play a significant role in pushing any story into the mainstream. I think it's done so twice now, first regarding that Northwestern flight with the oddly behaving Syrian musicians, and now with the Swifties. True, the Swifties were very compelling on their own, and true, a non-blogger (Drudge) did almost all the heavy internet lifting when he blared this story for 24 hours, but the conservative blogosphere did seem to help push the story into the forefront of the public consciousness.

Not bad. And, as regards the Establishment Liberal Media, it's only getting worse.

Linked by "Shadowy Connections:" Larry Sabato, Brit Hume, and Rather Biased note that CBS sanitized its coverage of the NY protestors, featuring veterans and little old ladies rather than the stinky, profanity-screaming perpetual college-student anarchists which made up 80% of the crowds.