Greg Sargent asks an interesting question: "Will [the] lefty web get any credit for Lou Dobbs ouster?"
The left leaning media watch-dog group, Media Matters, was one of the primary forces behind the push to oust Dobbs. To be fair, Dobbs did some excellent coverage of underreported stories, in particular on corporate corruption. But his personal views on immigration, his racist comments, and his promulgation of the birther conspiracy theory violated journalistic standards.
Media Matters and a cooalition of various groups started a campaign to oust Dobbs called Drop Dobbs.
The most important role Media Matters played in this campaign was in documenting - exhaustively - everything Dobbs said. The drip, drip, drip effect of this documentation eventually became an overwhelming wave that drowned Dobbs in his own verbiage.
But Sargent's question is indeed important. He writes:
"When right wing bloggers got Dan Rather fired from CBS, traditional news orgs widely hailed the role of right blogostan in exposing the shortcomings of Rather’s story on Bush and the National Guard and gave the right full credit for bringing him down.
Now that Lou Dobbs — also a major media figure — has quit CNN, it remains to be seen whether the online left will get anywhere near the same level of credit.
Whatever you think of Media Matters, there’s no denying that the group led a campaign against Dobbs that had to have played some kind of role in his departure. CNN president Jonathan Klein reportedly told Dobbs months ago that he wanted Dobbs to tone down his opinions. It’s hard to imagine that the constant drumbeat of attention paid by Media Matters, Think Progress, HuffPo, TPM and other sites to Dobbs’ more outlandish opinions — and the damage they were doing to CNN’s news brand — didn’t put Klein and CNN on edge."
I agree that Media Matters, Think Progress, and others deserve credit for their exposure of Dobbs and his eventual ouster. But here is why I doubt they will get the credit. Using the Rather comparison as well, the cause and effect are easy to measure because the right-wing blogs focused on a single story and the issues with that story then played out on TV. Dobbs, on the other hand, was ousted because of a pattern of questionable reporting, inappropriate statements, and so forth. So in Dobbs' case, there was no single incident around which a storm was gathered. Since the 24/7 news cycle requires the attention span of a gnat, a pattern of behavior is just simply too complex to report and the credit to those responsible for tracking that pattern difficult to measure.
In short, a single event is far easier to track than a pattern for the MSM's byte sized bites of news.
