Talking Points Memo

I've been reading Joshua Micah Marshall's blog for many years now. It's good to see him getting the credit he deserves. I can still remember him asking his readers for money to travel to New Hampshire to cover the 2004 Democratic primaries. Now he has several full time employees.

I have one quibble with this LATimes article though. They say:

Neither side in the blog-MSM debate seems to have great appreciation for what the other brings to the party. Simply put, while mainstream media does the heavy lifting of careful, day-to-day and occasional in-depth reporting, bloggers have revivified political commentary, mainly through their exuberance.

In my experience bloggers do have a great deal of appreciation for what the mainstream media does. Almost all of the bloggers I read link to articles published online by traditional newspapers. And they completely recognize that they couldn't sit at their computers and pontificate on current events if nobody was around to report them. I think it has been almost entirely the MSM side of the debate which has lacked appreciation for what the other side does.