Internet bile backfired on Bush-haters

Chicago Sun Times ^

[Alex Marko]

Going into the 2004 election cycle, just about everyone said the Internet was going to change politics. But no one was sure how. Now we know.

The first signs of change came from the Howard Dean campaign. His campaign manager, Joe Trippi, used the Internet, and meetup.com and moveon.org to identify and bring together Bush-haters from all over the country, and raise far more money than anyone expected.

....The right blogosphere's greatest triumph came after CBS' Dan Rather reported that Bush had shirked duty in the National Guard and the network posted its 1972-dated documents on the Web.

Within four hours, a blogger on freerepublic.com pointed out that they looked as though they had were created on Microsoft Word. CBS defended the documents for 11 days, but finally confessed error and eased Rather out as anchor.

[JesseJane]

Already posted:

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1343550/posts :( sorry

[icwhatudo]

Howard Kurtz from the Washington post also did a story on blogs today mentioning victories (rather/jordan) and mistakes (O'malley)

On the Omalley rumors, he mentioned FR was spreading false rumors about O'mally yet failed to mention many were from "just registered" -one post ever- trolls and several were from the Posts own source MD4Bush who went on to question a Maryland dem senators sexual preference....some hero for the left that MD4Bush.

[CyberAnt]

People like Kurtz have their head in the sand and have no idea how freerepublic.com operates. I don't expect much from Kurtz on internet anything - he's not qualified.

[conservatism_IS_compassion]

So what hath the blogosphere wrought? The left blogosphere has moved the Democrats off to the left, and the right blogosphere has undermined the credibility of the Republicans' adversaries in Old Media. Both help Bush and the GOP.

Interesting; the ability of the right blogsphere to fact-check (leftist) Establishment journalism was quite clear - but I hadn't truly considered the thought that the left blogosphere was pulling the Democrats off to the left. Maybe that is the case; something has them thinking that John Kerry is middle of the road . . .