Boots on the Ground

The more people you have on a story, people who know what they're doing (or who can learn), the faster you get the story.

This is why Internet journalism is better than what any proprietary operator (TV, cable, or paper) can deliver. This is why open source journalism is replacing the older kind.

An example is this “story” from early today that Ned Lamont bloggers hacked Joe Lieberman's Web site and took it down. MSNBC was flogging this nonsense around noon today. Chris Matthews let Lieberman's campaign manager rant-and-rant for about 20 minutes on it.

But bloggers looked into it. They used their knowledge of the Internet, and of Web hosting, and they did some digging. (All times below are Eastern Daylight.)

• By 1:23 Democratic Underground had proof the site wasn't hacked.
  By 1:41 Bob Geiger had yet more evidence the claim of a DOS attack was false.
• At 3:53 MyDD was publishing a list of idiot journalists who bought the lie without checking . By 4:15 you could add CNN to the list.
• By 4:09 Markos Moulitsas of DailyKos not only had pinged all the relevant sites but could identify the true source of the problem and offered a fix.
• By 4:39 Kos had learned the Lieberman campaign site was being hosted at a $15/month shared hosting facility whose bandwidth limits could not scale to host an election day crowd.
• By 6:30 Wonkette had the bill from Lieberman's supposed Web consultant, 2DogMedia, online
• By 7:10 Kos had not only tracked down 2Dogg, but pinged both the Lieberman main server and its e-mail server, proving that the whole claim was false showing he paid these people $1,500 for that $15/month service.

This is what's called open source journalism in action. Unaffiliated people, sharing leads (because they know one another's Web addresses), all working the story together, and getting it.

None of this was reported by any TV network until about 8:08, when Moulitsas himself appeared on Keith Olbermann's Countdown and called Lieberman's Web people incompetent.

All of these stories were publicly available from the moment they were published, and could have been used (or checked) by any media outlet, yet no TV network did, instead using the charge and (sometimes) a Lamont denial, as though the charge and denial carried equal weight.

This is why we don't trust the major media. They don't have the boots on the ground needed to check facts, and they're too damned lazy to stay on top of stories. If it doesn't walk up to their cameras and talk to them, it isn't happening.

And that's not reality. That's just TV.

So we don't believe it anymore.