Well, indirectly at least, especially since there is hyper-linkage to Kos-run or -related pages.. Today's Larry Rosen post "The Downing Street Memo and the Court of Appeal in News Judgment" at
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/theblog/featuredposts.html#a002902 sez
"About the Downing Street Memo...I have one thought to contribute.
"News stories," Joshua Marshall once said, "have a 24 hour audition on the news stage, and if they don't catch fire in that 24 hours, there's no second chance."...
But that's not the way the world works anymore....now there is a Court of Appeal in the State of Supreme News Judgment, and everyone knows the initial verdict can be reversed. Reversal on appeal came last week for the Downing Street Memo (now memos, plural) about 45 days after the first story broke.
...The way it works today, the World Wide Web is the sovereign force, and journalists live and work according to its rules.
(more below fold, including Kos-related linkage)
Now if there's something newsworthy coming out of the U.K. but neglected in America the political blogs [
Rosen links to dkosopedia] in America and other activists [
Rosen links to downingstreetmemo.com] online keep talking about it. Quickly the story's unjust obscurity will reach a political player who can change that by acting in a newsworthy way, lending fresh facts and additional reason to cover the story.
By such means the appeal of news judgment starts to take shape. This happened within a week when Conyers began circulating a letter to President Bush--signed by 88 Democrats--that demanded from Bush an explanation. The Knight-Ridder Washington bureau, increasingly a dissident voice on these matters, treated that letter as news in a May 6 report. (The signers were up to 122 by the time Conyers sent his letter.)
Players in politics, reading the blogs (or in the case of Conyers, writing for them), pick up the chatter and amplify it. Radio talk show hosts, also reading the blogs, and getting the e-mails from activists, amplify the chatter some more....They go into Supreme News Court and say: "the press denied us, but we have a case."
...
In any successful appeal, when the press digs in and ignores the story, this creates a second story, the subject of which is faulty news judgment. It's usually phrased as a question: Did the (news) judges rule in error? (Christian Science Monitor, May 17: "Why has 'Downing Street memo' story been a 'dud' in US?") Howard Kurtz finally made the case Thursday. The question, What about the Downing Street memo? had been asked so often, he wrote, it "forced the mainstream media to take a second look."
...
When the second look was taken, some key editors judged themselves at fault. USA Today's senior assignment editor for foreign news, Jim Cox said not reporting on the memo was a mistake. "I wish we'd had something in early on, and I wish we'd been able to move the memo story forward. I feel like we missed an opportunity, and that's my fault," he said to Salon's Eric Boehlert. Deborah Seward, AP's international editor, issued a statement, "There is no question AP dropped the ball in not picking up on the Downing Street memo sooner." (See this weekend's AP story.)
That's called winning on appeal.
...
I don't think the press has learned how to deal yet with "power shapes truth," or the extreme contempt for reason-giving the Bush Administration has shown on matters of war and peace. For example, in judging whether a story deserves further play the press will ask, "were the facts in it previously reported?" (a news test) rather than asking: have the facts in it been successfully denied at the top? (which is a power-shapes-truth question.) Ultimately this confusion helps explain the original judgment that the memo was not news, and the success of the appeal."
