I must admit that Glenn has pictured the situation with Firedoglake's superb coverage of the Libby trial to a Tee.

I must admit that, in addition to 'Unclaimed Territory', 'Firedoglake' is a several times daily stop for me in my search for 'news you can use.'

Glenn makes a rather good point in this article, namely:

"There is a strain of thought -- for which there is ample support -- that the severe flaws in our national media institutions are far too entrenched and systemic to reform in any meaningful way, and that it therefore makes more sense to devote resources towards developing alternative means for disseminating news and analysis (as opposed to pressuring the press to change its ways). That analysis only takes one so far, since --as indicated -- large-scale news organizations will continue to be indispensable for investigation and information-gathering. But FDL's Libby coverage certainly provides encouragement, as well as an excellent model, for partially supplanting, or at least supplementing, our dysfunctional national media and for developing independent means of reporting on and analyzing key political events."

This is more than true; the MSM have become part of the problem. As I mentioned elsewhere, the MSM act now more as a megaphone for the Establishment rather than a vigilant watchdog of Establishment wrongdoing. However, it should be noted that there are journalists out there, premier among them Robert Parry of Consortiumnews.com, who have been passionately importuning the progressive community to take a page from the reich wing freaks and establish and fund a parallel news media which is frank, honest and perhaps leans toward the progressive.

We should strongly consider this as a worthwhile project; shift our money from subscriptions to the MSM-Establishment scribes (Judy Miller springs instantly to mind along with the me-toos and enablers exposed in the Libby trial) and redirect at least a portion of those funds to the Firedoglakes, Hullabaloos, Consortiumnews and, of course, Salon to enable our side, the progressive side, of the argument to be heard more widely.

Still no retraction on the Gaffney use of the fake Lincoln quote. The just can't figure out these internets.

Casual observer wrote:

I hope that bloggers will understand and accept the importance of their work, and I hope they will also appreciate the need for permanent preservation of their site records. By this, I don't mean that blog archives should remain accessable through the life of a given blog. That is not an historical archive. What I am referring to is a functional archive that will safely preserve blog records for posterity-- permanently. I hope that bloggers of all stripes will give this issue some thought, and will take steps to permanently preserve these unique records of public discourse for future generations.

Bloggers have begun to supplant mainstream journalisms in America. Because of this, bloggers have become key participants in the creation of the public record, ie, the body of information and ideas from which we all draw when we make decisions about the future of the country. But who is documenting and preserving that record?

When I was in journalism school in the 1990s, the end-all be-all database of record was Lexis-Nexis. If you wanted to do an exhaustive background check of everything that had ever been written, said or otherwise published about a public figure, Lexis-Nexis was THE primary source.

But Lexis-Nexis's orientation to MSM coverage is near total. So when David Sirota interviews Barack Obama or Jonathan Singer over at MYDD interviews all the Democratic primary candidates, it's not there. Sure you can do a Google search, but that's like looking for a needle in a haystack. And if bloggers are not maintaining a permanent record of what they have reported, then we lose part of the history that informs what we are all about now, and we lose the ability to sit down together and review the same information and make common decisions.

Casual observer, as I'm sure you know, the preservation of the rivers, lakes and seas of digital information is a huge issue, and has been for some time. I spent more than half my life in an academic library, and I can tell you from my own experience that this was being chewed over in the seventies, long before Google or the Web existed.

Storage and more particularly preservation is complicated not only by the cost of the technology, but also by its rapid obsolescence -- the tales of 50 year-old programs compiled for processors which no longer exist and stored on punched paper tape, or on 8-inch floppy diskettes, or U-matic tape cassetes which can no longer be read have long been bandied about. Unfortunately, they're all true. It's also true that all digital data is volatile; no digital storage medium is reliable for more than a fraction of archival paper's 300+ years.

Some very smart people have been working on this, and there's some hope that solutions will eventually be discovered, standardized, and funded.

What I dn't think has even begun to be addressed directly, however, is falsification. Everyone knows that John Kerry never really embraced Jane Fonda at an anti-war rally, and even the right wing has folks looking at the location and size of smoke-cluds in Beirut, but believe me, that's only the tip of the iceberg. It's kind of hard to falisify a book if every major library in the world has a copy, and the same principle may work for digital data. The question, though, once one copy has been altered, is which copy is authentic, and how can you determine which it is? Right now, we have no reliable way to judge.

People -- very smart people, as I said -- have been thinking about this, and working on it for some time, but we're still a very long way from solutions whihc are cheap, reliable and standard. Meanwhile the flood continues.

I received a very nice email from the Times saying they will be correcting their story regarding FDL's receiving of accreditation to cover the Libby trial on its own...