'11 Times They Spiked the Story'

At the Right Online Conference in Las Vegas this weekend, Sarah Palin flashes back to the rise of Matt Drudge, and the breaking of the old media firewall — or as Palin dubs it, “The Democrat-Media Complex.”

Almost as much as Palin would be herself a decade later, for his efforts, Drudge was of course, crucified by the news media he had left in the dust. That was a topic I explored back on July 4th, 2005, in a lengthy post titled, “Cat Food Eating Pajama Wearing Extreme Bloggers In Boardroom Bathrooms” (actually, I left out a few of the epithets early bloggers received).

And Newsweek, the magazine that Palin was referring to in the above video that refused to print a damaging story against Bill Clinton, thus paving the way for the rise of Drudge and the Blogosphere, was finally offloaded in the summer of 2010 by its then equally-flailing parent corporation, the Washington Post, for the vastly inflated sum of a buck. (It now serves as a makework project to keep former New Yorker editor Tina Brown occupied and out of the public eye.)

But even so, the hits from the dinosaur media keep on coming — just as James O’Keefe, Hannah Giles, and Andrew Breitbart were pilloried for using the very tactics that 60 Minutes pioneered decades ago against ACORN, a heretofore MSM-protected liberal rent-seeking shibboleth, Neil Munro of the Daily Caller is demonized for shouting a question at the president by Sam Donaldson (!). Fortunately, Sam makes his argument self-rebutting by — what else? — playing the race card.