Who says conservative bloggers don’t do reporting?
Before we fully launch into the action-packed first week of 2009, I want to provide you with a year-end wrap-up of original blog reporting on this site and across the conservative blogosphere. Why? Well, over the weekend, a few bloggers on both the left and right perpetuated an ill-informed and self-serving myth that demands debunking. The myth is that conservative bloggers don’t do reporting.
Michael Goldfarb at the Weekly Standard complained on Friday that there aren’t enough conservatives engaged in “online partisan reporting” and holds up left-wing blogger Greg Sargent (formerly of TPM, now headed to the Washington Post) as a model Internet journalist for constantly bombarding the McCain camp with phone calls.
Matthew Yglesias of Think Progress piled on with this smug assertion: “What the right lacks are people with the skill to do the job.”
Bullcrap.
For various reasons, the incredible amount of investigative online reporting published on conservative blogs in just the last year alone has gone largely uncredited. Let’s fix that here and now:
Patterico’s Pontifications, run by L.A. County prosecutor Patrick Frey, racked up several scoops in 2008 and published a wide and deep variety of original news reports — ranging from an exclusive on William Jefferson’s bribery charges to several posts investigating the 9th Circuit Justice Alex Kozinski online obscenity controversy (see here here here and here) to extensive investigations of the questionable ethical conduct of L.A. Times writer Chuck Philips (see here and here). Frey and his guest bloggers are not backed by any deep pockets and have no journalistic “training,” but they have consistently broken stories, dug up documents, and pursued leads on legal, crime, journalistic malpractice, and entertainment stories the rest of the MSM has ignored.
Brian Maloney at the Radio Equalizer continues to do ahead-of-the-curve investigative work on his solo blog. You’ll recall that we teamed up to report on Air America’s financial shenanigans in 2005 — reporting that was resurrected in the Coleman/Franken race this fall. This year, Maloney broke several radio/media industry stories, many of which were picked up by Drudge or the rest of the MSM without attribution or hat tips. A sample: Maloney’s story on KGO nut Charles Karel Bouley threatening Joe The Plumber; financial turmoil at Citadel Radio; exclusives on Sean Hannity and Alan Colmes; reports on the unhinged rants of Randi Rhodes and Roseanne Barr; and a whistle-blowing post on Democrat Sen. Jeff Bingaman’s Fairness Doctrine push.
Speaking of Franken, conservative blogger Michael Brodkorb of Minnesota Democrats Exposed scooped the national media on the comedian’s tax troubles so many times (examples here and here) that even the NYTimes had to acknowledge him.
Ditto Jane Novak of Armies of Liberation and the Jawa Report, who was profiled by the fishwrap of record for her investigative work on human rights violations in Yemen.
Bob Owens at Confederate Yankee/Pajamas Media published several original reports and scoops — including the op-ed the NYTimes refused to run and an interview with FBI informant/Weather Underground insider Larry Grathwohl, and early in the year, the results of a massive FOIA request related to the Beauchamp controversy.
Robert Stacy McCain, a two-decade newspaper reporter/editor-turned-blogger, provided campaign reporting on the road from Hillary in Harrisburg, Pa., and in Shepherdstown, W.Va., to the Libertarian convention in Denver, to John McCain in Pennsylvania, back to Denver for the DNC, and in Ohio and Pennsylvania for Sarah Palin.
Internet journalist/blogger and Little Green Footballs regular Zombie (not “conservative” per se, but rather anti-sharia/anti-jihad/anti-anti-American/anti-extremist Left) did extraordinary work digging up documents related to Barack Obama and left-wing terrorist Bill Ayer’s relationship — most notably, unearthing the Weather Underground manifesto Prairie Fire and Obama’s review of Ayer’s book on the juvenile court system. Zombie’s comprehensive rally coverage in the Bay Area included:
Obama Visits Billionaires Row — San Francisco, April 6, 2008
McCain in San Francisco: Fundraiser Rally — San Francisco, July 28, 2008
Kennedy Campaigns for Obama — Oakland, February 2, 2008
Operation First Casualty anti-war protest — San Francisco, November 28, 2008
Berkeley Tree-Sit Finally Ends — Berkeley, September 9, 2008
Up Your Alley Fair — San Francisco, July 27, 2008
Marines Recruiting Office Protest and Counter-Protest — Berkeley, June 21, 2008
Israel in the Gardens 2008 — San Francisco, June 1, 2008
Nakba-60 Palestinian Festival — San Francisco, May 10, 2008
Palestinian Checkpoint on the U.C. Berkeley Campus — Berkeley, May 7, 2008
Olympic Torch Relay — San Francisco, April 9, 2008
Pro-Troops Rally at Marines Recruiting Office — Berkeley, March 22, 2008
Iraq War Fifth Anniversary Protest — San Francisco, March 19, 2008
Iraq: 5 Years Too Many — San Francisco, March 16, 2008
Berkeley Marines Protest — Berkeley, February 12, 2008
Berkeley’s Marine Corps Recruiting Center Controversy — Berkeley, February 2, 2008
Just visit Zombie’s site and you’ll see a mountain of original reporting too extensive to link individually here.
