December 10, 2004

More so than the drier-than-two-week-old-wheat-bread book We, the Media by Dan Gillmor, an article I read yesterday in New York Magazine made me realize the true impact blogs have had over the past few years on traditional journalism.

The article, titled "The Education of Alexandra Polier", was written by the title subject herself, a young, budding journalist with "blonde hair and long legs" who by mistake had gotten caught up in a fake political scandal, accusing her of an affair with the at-the-time presidential hopeful, Senator John Kerry.

While the article gives an absorbing glimpse at the tangled web of political intrigue and how easily an innocent can be caught up and nearly strangled in it, it more so shows how in our time of overwhelming media coverage even serious journalists grasp at and cling to blog-generated internet rumours in search of that ever-elusive "big story".

As Alexandra Polier writes: "It was becoming clearer: No single person had to have engineered this. First came a rumor about Kerry, then a small-time blogger wrote about it, and his posting was read by journalists. They started looking into it, a detail that was picked up by Drudge - who, post-Monica, is taken seriously by other sites like Wonkette, which no political reporter can ignore. I was getting a better education in 21st-century reporting than I had gotten at Columbia J-school."

Link via my old friend Cameron Barrett, who has been falsely implicated in fueling the online rumor machine via one of the blogs he helped create (but was not associted with anymore at the time the story broke), the political Watchblog. Cam explains himself in this blog entry.