Kos-troversy
quote:
I'm going to describe a character assasination attempt, the first one of import, in the blogosphere. This is a complicated story. It involves exploiting a heavily reactionary media environment to strike at speech for political purposes. It reveals a bipartisan problem, because blogs carry some characteristics that make them uniquely vulnerable to exploitation. And it's something that's going to happen, again and again, to both Republicans and Democrats, because of the surfeit of information and mainstreaming of online politics.
The short story is that Markos Moulitsas Zuniga of the Daily Kos said a terrible comment about contractors in Iraq, which he retracted but did not apologize for. The right complained, then attacked, the Daily Kos's advertisers pulled their ads from the site, John Kerry delinked him, several 'reasonable' liberal bloggers piled on him, and the controversy has shown up so far in the Wall Street Journal and on the South Dakotan GOP's web site. It probably won't end there.
But this is something that was going to happen, and it will happen again, because the web creates memory, and all of a sudden, leaves open to exploitation a huge amount of political speech that was never before traceable.