When all else fails, blame the bloggers!

Who knew that those nice young people like Kos and Jesse and Ezra and Atrios and Josh and the others profiled in the New York Times Magazine today were to blame for the whole CBS mess?



Not only that, but bloggers are singlehandedly responsible for the ENTIRE DOWNFALL OF AMERICAN JOURNALISM.



Ah, the power. I can almost smell it.



And here I thought that everything was the fault of the Clenis(TM):



David Broder, boy dinosaur:

We don't yet know who will win the 2004 election, but we know who has lost it. The American news media have been clobbered.



In a year when war in Iraq, the threat of terrorism and looming problems with the federal budget and the nation's health care system cry out for serious debate, the news organizations on which people should be able to depend have been diverted into chasing sham events: a scurrilous and largely inaccurate attack on the Vietnam service of John Kerry and a forged document charging President Bush with disobeying an order for an Air National Guard physical.



[snip]



The common feature -- and the disturbing fact -- is that none of these damaging failures would have occurred had senior journalists not been blind to the fact that the standards in their organizations were being fatally compromised.



We need to be asking why this collapse has taken place.



[snip]



When the Internet opened the door to scores of "journalists" who had no allegiance at all to the skeptical and self-disciplined ethic of professional news gathering, the bars were already down in many old-line media organizations. That is how it happened that old pros such as Dan Rather and former New York Times editor Howell Raines got caught up in this fevered atmosphere and let their standards slip.

I'll wait till you clean the Diet Coke off your monitor.



What Mr. Broder is saying is that the reason the Swift Boat Liars' documentably false claims were reported as news, the reason why CBS News didn't vet the Killian documents thoroughly, the reason that people like Bill Hemmer and Paula Zahn and Daryn Kagan and the Bubbleheads of Fox News' morning show spend their days talking about Hurricane Frances and Scott Peterson and Kobe's semen is because of BLOGGERS?



I only wish we had that much clout.