and disappointing. Leopold has said, I believe on DU, that if the indictment story doesn't happen, he'll reveal his sources. His evasiveness with you, Tim, is cause for concern in that regard.

When Ben Bradlee tells his two reporters the story of how he was hung out to dry on a story about J Edgar Hoover by LBJ. Maybe Luskin's sources are using him as a means to discredit the "nonrightwing" blogosphere. It's entirely plausible. The thing is, "high level sources" may be telling Luskin exactly what he's been reporting. That doesn't make it true, though.

My, he does seem defensive.

A lot of what Mr. Leopold has to say just does not seem to add up. I was highly skeptical when I heard it this last weekend.

What I think should distinguish us in the "reality-based" community from the people we abhor and hope to remove from power is that we should not engage in a lot of wishful thinking. One of the many things I don't like about the Bushes, Limbaughs, Malkins, Coulters (etc. ad infintum) of this world is how they are non-fact-based. When someone in our community of thinking starts dabbling in factual witchcraft, we need to be the first to make sure it is addressed, otherwise we just occupy a similarly shaped but different echo-chamber than our red-state friends.

The only way for truth to win out is for it to be truth. We can't very well base our thinking on falsehoods or we've already lost-- we are no different from the wingers. Good guys always do the right thing, and they don't change the definition of the right thing to do so. Hang them with their own words and don't get hung by your own.

Good reporting, Salon. It's why I read your magazine. Left, but accurate and fair.

My wife and I were away for the weekend and came back catching up with the news. The "Rove Indictment" came up and she found a post saying he had been indicted. My usual stops are War Room, Talking Points Memo, Kos, Next Hurrah and Liberal Oasis. If it ain't there - it ain't true or its suspect. She sent me a link to Truthout with the post in question. Didn't know the site nor the author, but boy do I now! I really appreciate War Room more than ever. I never read a post so "on" and dovetail into a conversation I was having with myself and others. Great job guys and keep on keepin' on.

Blog reporting only becomes problematic where the rest of the blogosphere immediately jumps on the story and repeats it without , for lack of a better word, peer review. It's good to see that that's not happening here...people are looking at the story (and the source) to see if it all hangs together, and drawing their own conclusions.

Frankly, the part of the whole thing that made me pause was where Leopold reported that he had given Rove time to "get his affairs in order." Doesn't sound like any federal prosecutor I've ever heard of. They're not usually that accomodating. I'm not saying it couldn't happen, but it raised a red flag.

Still, the Grand Jury meets again Wednesday...we may get our frogmarch soon.

Tim, great reporting. This is exactly the kind of context I've been looking for--the skinny on Leopold. In an age where the reliability of information is often devalued or ignored, reporting on the authenticity of a source becomes indispensable.

I usually turn to War Room for fast, snappy accounts of breaking stories I'll read more about later. But this one was: a) not fast; b) not snappy; and c) not something I need to read about later.

I suspect Leopold's story, tantalizing as it is, probably is largely unfounded in its specific facts (ie, it's crap) even though I fervently hope and pray--and believe--Rove will be indicted. Did it really merit so much screen space? About twice as much as the average story about the latest Bush adminsitration screw-up--you know, something that actually affects people's LIVES?!?

This is blogger defensiveness at its nadir. Yes, it's irritating when the mainstream media use a false story like this to discredit the blogosphere. But the fact that bloggers largely discredited it could have been summed up a lot more succinctly and a lot less petulantly. Stop the navel-gazing and defensive rants, already, and get back to the real news.

Thanks!!

For every Jason Leopold there's a Ben Domenech.

I didn't care about the furor over Domenech then and I couldn't care less about Leopold now. I'm rarely interested when the reporter becomes the story because of the story he reports. Does that make sense?

Let the right howl at the moon over this. This is the kind of stupid, self-important, intra-community debate that puts all the negatives about the blogosphere in bright neon lights.

However this "controversy" ends up, the number of people whose opinions it changes will be counted on one hand.

Enough already. And if you feel the need to update us again, please do so through links and summary. Let's keep our eyes on the real enemy.

The best way to deal with someone who continuously maintains positions that aren't true is to ignore them.

for connecting the dots for the rest of us. I don't see how anyone can be comfortable crediting Jason Leopold as a reliable source of information on any story, let alone Plamegate. The pugnacious attitude is what gives the game away to me as far as Jason is concerned. After all, if he really had confidence in the provenance of his sources, if he really thought he was sitting on the story of the decade, he'd just be a lot more accomodating. The fact that this has been pointed out to him repeatedly and he still acts like a 15-year old drunk on beer for the first time and spoiling for a fight does him no credit.

With all due respect, gradysu, I couldn't disagree more -- both on the general value of having more in-depth pieces in War Room, and on the worthiness of this particular story for such treatment.

I agree that many WR snippets are best left as snippets -- even ones that are about bigger, more important topics than Rove's possible indictment -- because in many instances, those stories either have been or will be developed in more depth by other reliable sources. We all love the fact that WR covers as much ground as it does every day, so depth usually must be sacrificed somewhat to breadth.

But Tim is way too good a writer to limit himself to 300 words on every subject, and I relish those days (not common enough, unfortunately) when he sees fit to take an idea or emerging story and run with it. This one is no exception.

I think this story -- Tim's story here, that is -- is doubly important, both because of the specific content and the wider issues it touches upon. The content is important because Leopold has been a journalistic player of some note, but of somewhat dubious credibility, in the unfolding of a saga (Plamegate) that's likely to have long-term historic reverberations. If Rove does, in fact, get indicted, that will escalate the importance of Plamegate to a whole new level. So both both those reasons, I for one appreciated him bringing his finely-tuned judgment to bear on the matter of whether or not there's any "there" there in this go-round. To do justice to that question alone -- is there merit to the scoop, and who is this Leopold character exactly -- would have made this a longer-than-usual WR segment.

But the larger implications for online journalism generally are, of course, what make this story really worth teasing out, in my opinion -- particularly when the WSJ uses it to make some partly baseless, but partly valid, observations about blogs and "scoops." And because (I assume we can mostly agree on this) War Room is among the finest practitioners of the kind of responsible, nuanced, well-sourced, equitably skeptical reporting and analysis that online (and other) political journalists ought to strive for and we ought to expect, it behooves Tim to take seriously the charge that Leopold's (possible) errors here are proof of the failure of the medium generally. Of course, that's not the case -- as TIm notes, there's no lack of skepticism about the Leopold "scoop" to be found in the more trusted corners of Left Blogostan. To the extent that the WSJ's failed to reflect that (and it surely did), that's a failure well worth dissecting.

Finally, though, I agree with gradysu on one point -- the "blogger defensiveness" that was, I think, warranted could have been balanced with a few words of scorn for those in the blogosphere who failed to treat Leopold's story with the skepticism it deserved (including many of the comments found posted in the threads discussing the story). In that sense, the Journal piece, and Jay Rosen, hit on a kernel of truth that we ought not to dismiss out of hand. As someone else noted here, the system generally works because forums like War Room take time to sort out the wheat from the chaff. Tim (and Peter Daou) are an important part of making sure the system worked in this case. But they ought not to be shy about taking all of us to task when we don't hold up our end of the bargain.