"The blogs are percolating into mass media..."

The Eason Jordan affair, just as Hugh Hewitt predicted, is gushing into mainstream media like water through cracks in a busted dike. The fractures keep flexing and there's not enough patching compound in the world to keep the blackout intact.



Senator Chris Dodd (D-CT) reappeared on the Imus program this morning. He stated, in no uncertain terms, that Jordan needed to call for the release of the tape from the Davos people . Interestingly, the Jordan discussion was the first meaty item on the plate, even coming before discussion of John Kerry's bizarre assertions on Meet the Press and, later, on the Imus program.



Glen Garvin of the Miami Herald is the latest to discuss Jordangate and, while adding little additional information, has some wonderful nuggets (hat tip: Powerline):

...more than 400 other blogs have taken up the cry. They located the first corroborating witnesses, pressed the World Economic Forum to release its videotape of the panel (Forum officials initially agreed, but changed their minds earlier this week and said the panel's ground rules prohibited any direct quotations) and taunted mainstream news organizations into covering the story. That finally happened this week with stories in the Washington Post, the Boston Globe and other papers, as well as on CNN's rival cable news networks... This marks the second time in a few months that blogs have surfaced a major controversy over television news. Blogs were the first to accuse CBS' 60 Minutes of using forged documents in a story last year on President Bush's Vietnam-era National Guard service. Their claims eventually forced CBS to retract the story and launch an internal investigation that cost Dan Rather his anchor job and resulted in the dismissal of five other CBS staffers. Abovitz, for one, is impressed. He plans to start writing his own regular blog. ''The blog swarm is now percolating into mass media,'' he said. "This is a new era where you can't just make statements anymore. There are too many eyes. The blogs are like a million little cameras and tape recorders.'

Miami Herald: Jordangate and the Blogs