The WaPo, Then: Two Crack Reporters Could Bring Down Nixon

Now? As Ace paraphrases, “Washington Post: Hey, Liberal Readers! Hey, Liberal Bloggers! Help Us Dig Through The Palin Email Release Dump To Find Negative Information Requiring ‘Further Investigation’!”

Well isn’t that special.

Howard Kurtz is delegating his thinking to a Daily Kos Diarist, and the Washington Post is subcontracting to the Huffington Post’s Reality-Based Community.

More than 24,000 e-mail messages sent to and from Sarah Palin during her tenure as Alaska’s governor will be released Friday. Join The Post in digging through them. We are looking for 100 organized and diligent readers who will work alongside Post reporters to analyze, contextualize, and research the e-mails. Think of it as spending some time in our newsroom.

Oh yeah, nothing at all remarkable here! Nothing at all.

The funny thing is, in 2008, an enterprising journalist/Obama booster working for the WaPo had no problem assembling a list of 400 organized and diligent readers to coordinate their efforts alongside both Post reporters and the Obama campaign. Seems to me they’d be a good go-to choice to help on this campaign as well.

Ace writes that one of his readers, “points out this Washington Post liberal-blogger crowdsource effort dovetails with my earlier points about the fact there is apparently no longer any wall at all between the left-wing fever swamps and the inaccurately-termed ‘mainstream media.'”

“They’re now just operating openly together. Hand-in-glove, cheek-by-jowl,” Ace adds.

Of course, they’ll still play the “hey, we get lots of angry letters from both sides of the aisle so that must make us objective” ruse when need be, but at this point, is anybody remaining who still buys that act?

And as Allahpundit adds, “crowdsourcing’s a smart, sleek information-gathering technique. Thanks to the Times and WaPo for legitimizing it for conservative media like Fox News, which will now happily put it to good use doing oppo research on the left.”

(And yes, I know that Woodward & Bernstein didn’t single-handedly bring down President Nixon, but that’s the myth that the WaPo and Hollywood would like you to believe.)

(H/T: 5’F)

Update: “It would be loads of fun if Palin showed up at the NYT or WaPo and volunteered her time to help sort through her own emails. The folks who also volunteered might get a chuckle out of it, and some liberal heads might explode. It’s win-win…”