MEDIA: Bloggers' 'Moment' Doesn't Make for a Revolution

Los Angeles Times ^ | Ben Wasserstein is a writer in New York.

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It is almost impossible to believe a smart person in a great newspaper can say what is said below. No one has proven the Swifties mistaken on their basic claim that Skerry has puffed his wartime resume and may not even have deserved some of his medals. Nor have they disproved what is clearly a public record of Skerry's treachery in blaspheming his comrades in arms. I guess the strategy has to be to declare the Swifties debunked without any empirical proof as a means to an end.

First, it's worth remembering how many other news stories — basically, er, all of them — have not been broken by the blogosphere. The obvious analogue to the suspicious memos about Bush's National Guard service was last month's spurious attacks on Kerry's military service in Vietnam. Though decried by leftie bloggers, the charges were not adequately debunked until newspapers like the Washington Post and Chicago Tribune reaped the reward from Freedom of Information Act searches of decades-old military records and published eyewitness testimonials. Old-fashioned reporting won that round.