In Bloggers On The Bus Eric Boehlert, despite being a big fan of the netroots, doesn't pull his punches when talking about some of the sorrier episodes of the 2008 election season, including the way the Obama/Clinton primary got ugly and the rumors that flew about the blogosphere regarding Sarah Palin's last pregnancy and whether or not she faked it. The former is too big a topic for one blog post, but the latter raises some interesting questions.

The problem for liberal bloggers is that while we automatically have better ethical standards than the mainstream cable news media by virtue of not using Matt Drudge as our guiding light, we don't get the benefit of the doubt the way they do, because we're not as shiny or expensive. But a lot of bloggers, particularly smaller ones trying to make a name for themselves, feel the same pressure that the cable news networks do to scoop everyone else. The cable news can afford to take the risk of being wrong in order to get to a story first, but since establishment media and politicians are eager to discredit the bloggers, we can't afford goof-ups like promoting the false story about Palin's pregnancy.

But how can we stop such a thing? By and large, most major bloggers didn't touch the non-story, and some of us condemned it. Despite this, once the rumor touched the liberal blogs, stopping it completely was impossible, since any group of people with reason to try to compete with each for esteem is fertile ground for the worst kind of rumor-mongering. In retrospect, I agree with Eric's conclusion that big bloggers should do more work coming down on these stories, even if it insults our intelligence to acknowledge them. Again, we don't have shininess or money to buy public esteem, so we have to work twice as hard to earn it.

That said, I have to point out that even with the most outlandish example of the worst aspects of blogging, the liberal blogosphere collectively shows way more sense and honesty than either the cable news-driven media or the right wing bloggers. It's not a coincidence that the person who did the most to spread the Palin pregnancy rumor doesn't fit the liberal blogger mold. The only reason the story got much oxygen at all was that Andrew Sullivan, who spent time as an establishment media figure and then as a right wing blogger before becoming an Obama supporter. Both of these fields downright encourage that sort of Drudge-worshipping lack of standards, and both for the same reason---they get lavish rewards on the occasions that their rumor-mongering turns out to be right, and everyone politely ignores it when they get egg on their faces. Sullivan didn't realize that changing camps meant the rules had changed.

Liberal blogs have been an important force in making it harder for the right wing noise machine or their mainstream media enablers don't get away with pushing misinformation. A lot of us did come to blogging in no small part because we couldn't stand how the Bush administration just lied outright about the presence of WMDs in Iraq, and how this lie was echoed uncritically in the mainstream media. We need to keep this part of our identity front and center as we move forward, particularly since the right wing noise machine is gearing up to create another outlandish rumor mill like the kind that legitimately crippled Clinton in the 90s. Now their rumors and conspiracy theories can be subject to the sort of debunking and mockery they didn't get back then, and by holding ourselves to a high standard, we'll make it easier for people to see the huge differences between the liberal blogs and the right wing noise machine.

Title owed, in the true blog fashion, to an in-joke from Eschaton.