Did Bloggers Contribute to the Downfall of Trent Lott?
Blog group host Dave Winer keeps talking about how bloggers contributed to Trent Lott’s demise after Lott made certain comments about Strom Thurmond’s political career. It seems like I was just talking to someone about this who wanted more proof, so here is some of it. (Hopefully, whomever I talked to reads my blog.)
It seems that Joshua Marshall of Talking Points Memo followed the Trent Lott issue. He first wrote about Lott’s words at Strom Thurmond’s memorial service on December 6, 2002. Several people in the news media read his blog and began using Marshall’s comments in some of their reports. In a subsequent post, Marshall types:
“In any case, I’d certainly like to think that this site played some role in keeping this story alive while the bigs were ignoring. But I’m certain that the web generally — and particularly a lot of different weblogs — kept this story in front of people and forced attention to it long enough that it became impossible to ignore.”
More Talking Points Memo posts about Trent Lott
Joshua Marshall is a panelist at BloggerCon.
Addendum 11/13/06: I updated some bad links on this post.
