Bury Me Broken

The Downing Street Memos and the Revenge of the Bloggers

When Michael Smith of the London Times wrote about a further leaked British cabinet document on decision-making about the Iraq war in July 2003, he did not simply report the revelations in the document.

Most commentators on the Smith story have missed his open acknowledgment of the role of the blogging world in turning the Downing Street Memo and other leaked British documents from a provincial Whitehall story into a world (and American) phenomenon. Smith writes,

"The briefing paper is certain to add to the pressure, particularly on the American president, because of the damaging revelation that Bush and Blair agreed on regime change in April 2002 and then looked for a way to justify it.

There has been a growing storm of protest in America, created by last month’s publication of the minutes in The Sunday Times. A host of citizens, including many internet bloggers, have demanded to know why the Downing Street memo (often shortened to “the DSM” on websites) has been largely ignored by the US mainstream media." [Emphasis added.]

If this story had broken in the 1970s, it probably would just have been buried by the mainstream US press and remained an oddity of UK's Fleet Street. But here you have the Times of London actually acknowledging the wind under its sails from the blogging world!

Smith continues:

"Frustrated at the refusal by the White House to respond to their letter, the congressmen [led by John Conyers] have set up a website — www.downingstreetmemo.com — to collect signatures on a petition demanding the same answers.

Conyers promised to deliver it to Bush once it reached 250,000 signatures. By Friday morning it already had more than 500,000 with as many as 1m expected to have been obtained when he delivers it to the White House on Thursday.

AfterDowningStreet.org, another website set up as a result of the memo, is calling for a congressional committee to consider whether Bush’s actions as depicted in the memo constitute grounds for impeachment.

So Smith not only acknowledges the pressure put on the US corporate media by the bloggers, but he also points to a virtual social movement around the DSM, with emails and petitions circulating in the hundreds of thousands and giving the Democrats in Congress their first high-profile investigatory opportunity of the Bush presidency.

The seeping of blogistan into the pages of the Times of London with regard to its own scoops seems to me a bellwether of the kinds of changes that are being produced in our information environment by the blogging phenomenon. The gatekeepers at the New York Times and the Washington Post can no longer decide whether a leak is a story or a non-story. The public decides what a story is.

The magnitude of the change is clear in the coverage at the Washington Post. The post, like the New York Times, Newsday, and others, ignored the original Downing Street Memo, published in the London Times on May 1.The first Washington Post story on the Downing Street Memo was not published until May 13, nearly two weeks after the leak. Walter Pincus, despite doing an excellent job in explaining the significance of the Memo, was however relegated by the editors to page 18.

This post goes on to talk about not being able to verify sources and with the Dan Rather episode, the reluctance of editors to releas an unverifiable story but also says that the story could have been covered as an editorial the way Paul Krugman did and that the Wash Post's Pincus has covered it after some verification. This entire is worthy of reading twice.

posted by niteskolar @ 8:38 PM