In easily the best article I have ever read on blogging, Garance Franke-Ruta meticulously exposes the players, and accurately differentiates between left wing and right wing blog activism, in the various blogger "scalpings" of the past several weeks. First, I was immediately taken aback by how Franke-Ruta actually displayed an accurate understanding of the main difference between left wing and right wing netroots activism: But success bred change. Along has come a new group of bloggers who aren't mere "citizens" at all. On the left side, some of these became deeply enmeshed with political parties, "527s," and campaign advocacy groups -- and are now a new generation of no-holds-barred partisans and major party fund-raisers, the liberal equivalent of George W. Bush's "Rangers" and "Pioneers." On the right, a number of these bloggers were already political operatives or worked at long-standing movement institutions before taking up residence online. They are, at best, the intellectual heirs of L. Brent Bozell of the Media Research Center and Reed Irvine, who founded the ultraconservative, media-hounding nonprofit organization Accuracy In Media (AIM) in 1969 as part of the first generation of post-Barry Goldwater right-wing institutions. At worst, they're the protégés of conservative fund-raiser Richard Viguerie and dirty-tricks master Morton Blackwell, who has tutored conservative activists since 1965, most recently mocking John Kerry at the Republican national convention by distributing Band-Aids with purple hearts on them. Yes, yes, yes! Thank God someone finally understands this. I have been trying to hammer at this point for some time now, and it is a relief to see someone else take it up. There is a very real difference in the sort of political activism left wing and right blogs engage in, and Franke-Ruta summed it up very well.

Moving along, while I doubt the almost ur-importance that blogs have been granted by the mainstream media in taking scalps, the article is especially important for revealing how many of the players in the Eason Jordan and Rather stories were not nearly the citizen bloggers they were mistaken for by the national media.

The players revealed:Which brings us back to Jordan. He was brought down not by outraged citizen-bloggers but by a mix of GOP operatives and military conservatives. Easongate.com, the blog that served as the clearinghouse for the attack on CNN, was helped along by Virginia-based Republican operative Mike Krempasky. From May 1999 through August 2003, Krempasky worked for Blackwell as the graduate development director of the Leadership Institute, an Arlington, Virginia-based school for conservative leaders founded by Blackwell in 1979. The institute is the organization that had provided "Gannon" with his sole media credential before he became a White House correspondent. It also now operates "Internet Activist Schools" designed to teach conservatives how to engage in "guerilla Internet activism." (...)

Also part of the Easongate.com team was La Shawn Barber, who writes a biweekly column for -- again, the name pops up -- GOPUSA and has written for AIM about "the Bush-bashing media." Working alongside Krempasky and Barber was another site, RedState.org, "a Republican community weblog" registered with the Federal Election Commission as a 527. Krempasky helped found that site along with Senate staffer Ben Domenech, the chief speechwriter for Bush ally and Texas Senator John Cornyn; and former U.S. Army officer Josh Trevino, a conservative blogger who used to write under the name "Tacitus." The goal of RedState.org? "[T]o unite ... voices from government, politics, activism, civil society, and journalism" in service of the "construction of a Republican majority."

Power Line, another conservative blog deeply involved in the Rather controversy, helped push the Jordan story as well. Described by Time magazine as "three amateur journalists working in a homegrown online medium [who] challenged a network news legend and won," Power Line was voted Time's "2004 Blog of the Year." In reality, its three writers are all fellows at the conservative Claremont Institute who attended Dartmouth College in the early 1970s and now work as attorneys; two of them have been writing articles as a team for conservative publications such as the National Review and The American Enterprise for more than 10 years.

As cynical as I am of the background, training, and funding of any Republican on the planet, the extent to which many conservative bloggers are plugged into the larger Republican Money Machine Matrix actually surprises me somewhat. Perhaps as a "real citizen blogger," I naively assumed that most other prominent bloggers came into politics in ways much like I did. However, the Republican Noise Machine has clearly made a smooth landing on online shores, and has created several beachheads from which they plan to expand their operation. I should have known.

Another fascinating piece of the article is that while the major figures in the lefty blogosphere who pushed the Gannon story had somewhat of a more "citizen" flavor about them, the figures who either are or were at one time political operatives all became Democrats only after switching parties:

The progressive watchdog group Media Matters for America, run by former conservative activist and American Spectator writer David Brock, jumped on the story after Rush Limbaugh boasted that he'd been the source for Gannon's claims about the Democrats.(...)

Susan Gardner, 46, a mother of four and former editor of now-defunct community paper the Sun City News in Santa Barbara, California, read about Gannon on the liberal blogosphere, including a tip that Gannon was not the Talon reporter's real name. Gardner recalled seeing the Talon News name in a story about journalists subpoenaed in the Valerie Plame case. On January 28, writing online as "SusanG," she posted a question on the "Diaries" section of DailyKos, the widely read liberal blog run by Markos Moulitsas Zuniga, now also a major Democratic fund-raiser.(...)

Brian Kelly, a 52-year-old actor in upstate New York best known for his starring role in a Kentucky Fried Chicken commercial in the '90s, became Gardner's partner, writing as "NYBri."(...)

The narrative got pushed into sexual territory by John Aravosis, a gay-rights activist who worked as a legislative aide for Republican Senator Ted Stevens from 1989 to 1994.(...)

Meanwhile, another former Republican, Karl Frisch, 26 -- better known as "Carl with a K," his Internet handle while working for the Dean campaign in '03 -- pushed the story from Capitol Hill, where he works as a spokesman for Representative Louise Slaughter on the House Rules Committee.

It is particularly enlightening that former Republicans played such a prominent role in the Gannon / Guckertt story on behalf of the lefty blogopshere. It is almost as though for Democrats to take direct action against the pseudo-journalism that is the Republican Noise Machine, we needed help from those experienced in Noise Machine tactics and organization.

One final bit of this outstanding article is worth mentioning. While there is not only a difference between the type of activism lefty and righty blogs typically engage in, Fanke-Ruta also identifies key differences in the way the two sides of the political blogosphere go about taking scalps:

The Gannon scalping is different from the Jordan and Rather controversies in two very important ways. First, whereas the conservative bloggers were out to destroy journalists with distinguished careers who'd made serious missteps, the liberal bloggers on Gannon's trail were seeking to expose an out-and-out fraud. Second, while some of the conservative bloggers going after Jordan and Rather were mistaken for regular citizens by the mainstream media, the liberal bloggers were very much out in the open. (...)

But there's another a key difference between the effort against Gannon and conservative blog firestorms: The targets of the liberal blogosphere are conservative activists; the target of the conservative blogosphere is the free and independent press itself, just as it has been for conservative activists since the '60s. For the Republican Party, pseudo-journalism Internet sites and the blogosphere are just another way to get around "the filter," as Bush has dubbed the mainstream media.(...)

But unlike traditional news outlets, right-wing blogs openly shill, fund raise, plot, and organize massive activist campaigns on behalf of partisan institutions and constituencies; they also increasingly provide cover for professional operatives to conduct traditional politics by other means -- including campaigning against the established media. And instead of taking these bloggers for the political activists they are, all too often the established press has accepted their claims of being a new form of journalism.

Indeed. When it comes to media activism, their primary mission is to carry on their old Great Backlash wars against the free press as an important institution of a democracy, while we primarily engage in our relatively new work of unraveling the connections that create their message / propaganda apparatus.

Truly fascinating. Someone who is not named Hugh Hewitt needs to write a book about this stuff.