We matter! We really, really matter!

"First they ignore you, then they ridicule you, then they fight you,
then you win." --Mahatma Gandhi

Bloggers are finally gaining a bit of recognition from the old media. Turns out that all that harping they did about us lowering the tone was misplaced - yeah, we can be a foul-mouthed and impatient lot - but haven't you been paying attention the last seven fucking years??? Those words we've been tossing around evolved in the language for a god-damned reason, and they are appropriate at this point in time.

If you can't use profanity to describe an obscenity, when the fuck can you use it?

Well, while we were "coarsening the tone," it turns out we were raising the bar. No we are not a particularly congenial crowd. But there is a reason for that...we are fed up. A whole bunch of us who grew up with Uncle Walter have never seen one minute of the CBS Evening News with Katie Couric. I am one of them. (Here's a bit of irony for you - I actively boycott their nightly news, but they have linked my analysis and my original reporting on white papers.)

Anyway - there are a lot of us doing some serious work and research. At least once a month I write something that pulls together multiple sources on a topic - not just the media reports but the documents the media reports are based on. I frequently write posts based on GAO reports or white papers. And gee - what blog was it that waded into the Libby case and got those pre-sentencing letters supporting that traitor released?

Christy Hardin Smith at Firedoglake (the blog that, by the way, did a kick-ass job of live-blogging the Libby trial and countering the two-minutes of spin it got on the evening news) summed it up nicely:

How about going out there and doing the jobs that the Fourth Estate used to do well — digging into the substance, the facts, the original sources on speeches and actions and legislation and such and doing some down and dirty real world comparisons on actions speaking louder than words? Now THAT would be something worth paying attention to — and it would be useful for all of us, wouldn’t it?

I could not agree more!