Bloggers, Jarvis, Gannon and real-time politics

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Thursday March 03, 2005 · 12:43 PM PST

2005/03/03 · 12:43

The ad was a "test," Jarvis said, to see whether "left-wing bloggers" would "focus entirely on one image and explode about it. My guess was right."

Now that Jarvis is getting his ass sued, he's blaming the bloggers?

Buzz off, responds Charlie Jarvis, the group's CEO. "They ought to be suing all the left-wing blogs for circulating this [ad]. That's who they ought to be asking for an apology," he told us.

Yes, we're going to continue focus on the picture, AmericaBlog is leading the push.

But we also released a 15 page, 97 footnote briefer on United Seniors. And the word is getting out.

And Krugman reminds us that we're going to take this all the way to the Propaganda White House:

The slime campaign has begun against AARP, which opposes Social Security privatization. There's no hard evidence that the people involved - some of them also responsible for the "Swift Boat" election smear - are taking orders from the White House. So you're free to believe that this is an independent venture. You're also free to believe in the tooth fairy.

According to CBS News, we're effective.

Political research I've done via the blogs during the 2004 campaign and for the Gannon column has convinced me of the validity of a lot of these points. There is information on the blogs that is extremely helpful to advancing a story and journalists who ignore blogs are overlooking a huge resource. Media Matters, Americablog, Kos and their contributors plucked information about Gannon, Eberle, Rove, et al, quickly and disseminated it before Talon News and GOPUSA decided to remove it from their sites. The guerilla warfare continued last week when a conservative site, The American Spectator, put up a controversial ad attacking the AARP, which was then captured and circulated on the liberal sites, eventually making it to the MSM. By the time the MSM discovered the story, the Spectator had taken down the ad.

CBS also lets us know the stakes.

To understand modern campaigns, monitoring the Web and bloggers has become a mandatory beat. Web-based organizations and blogs are being used by both Republicans and Democrats to float stories, generate buzz and put out talking points for political activists. There will be much more of that in 2006 and beyond.

Help us win, invest in blog politics.

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