Are Conservative Blogs Losing Our Edge?

There was a time just a few years ago when the mainstream media couldn’t get a faked photo out of the war in Lebanon without conservative blogs pouncing and investigating the life out of it. By the time we were done with it, photogs were getting fired and media outlets were backtracking.

There was also a time not too long ago when when Dan Rather tried pushing faked documents against a sitting Republican president, and the conservative blogosphere ended up proving the docs false, the story bogus, and sent Rather into a kind of early retirement.

But just this week, we’ve been beaten to the punch twice. The Miami Herald did the hard work of defending Marco Rubio from the Washington Post‘s scurrilous character attack on him. And that’s after the Herald had previously outed Univision’s attempt to blackmail Rubio. And it’s been up to Mediaite’s Dan Abrams to get ahead of most conservative bloggers on who is actually responsible for keeping the birther story alive — not Rick Perry or Donald Trump, but the mainstream media itself. They’re the ones who keep bringing it up. We could go a step further and note that it was Hillary Clinton, not any Republican, who first raised the birther issue, whenever the issue gets raised in the future. But most conservative blogs don’t even bother to note that. Most also didn’t note that the New York Times perpetrated some malpractice in the way they edited the transcript of Perry’s interview with CNBC.

Don’t get me wrong here. Blogs like Verum Serum, Jammie Wearing Fool and our own Zombie have done stellar work exposing the Occupy movement for the leftist swamp that it is. And bloggers here and elsewhere have kept Fast and Furious alive, much to the obvious chagrin of the MSM. That’s vital work and the mainstream media clearly won’t do it. But along with strikers, we need a few defenders and goalies making sure the MSM doesn’t sneak a score while we’re pushing forward on these other stories. I’m not sure that work is being done as well now as it was done a few years back.