Tina Brown's got our number

The blogosphere -- well Ezra Klein and Kevin Drum, anyway -- is abuzz with Tina Brown's accurate and perceptive take on the CBS imbroglio, and about the role of bloggers in it.

Fear of missing the bandwagon is behind all the hype about the brilliance of bloggers who blew the whistle. You'd think "Buckhead," who first spotted the flaws in the documents, is the cyberworld's Woodward and Bernstein. Now the conventional wisdom is that the media will be kept honest and decent by an army of incorruptible amateur gumshoes. In fact, cyberspace is populated by a coalition of political obsessives and pundits on speed who get it wrong as much as they get it right. It's just that they type so much they are bound to nail a story from time to time.

The rapturing about the bloggers is the journalistic equivalent of the stock market's Internet bubble. You can see the news chiefs feeling as spooked as the old-style CEOs in the '90s who had built their companies over 20 years and then saw kids in backward baseball caps on the cover of Fortune. It finally drove them nuts. It was why we saw Time Warner's buttoned-down corporate dealmaker Gerald Levin tearing off his tie and swooning into the embrace of AOL's Steve Case.

And, as Ezra points out, "Buckhead" isn't even a blogger; he's a GOP operative who uses the format to propagandize (and wouldn't it be interesting if some enterprising journalist -- the real kind -- would look into his role in how the documents got on TV in the first place and how "Buckhead" became a typography expert with such amazing speed. But I digress).

Writes the talented Mr. Klein,

Nice to know we're read, but sad to know that this triumphant moment didn't even come from one of our number. We didn't -- couldn't -- break Abu Ghraib. We are not the wellspring of new media nor the providers of an alternative voice. We don't bring you interviews that bare the souls of their subjects and the only news we break is what you can logically deduce from public documents.

At our best, we have an informed opinion or entertaining take on world events. We have vibrant boards of interested activists that provide a public space for political speech and, sometimes, involvement. We have people like Josh Marshall and Juan Cole who decide to use this format to peddle their expertise, but could really choose -- and excel -- in any medium. We're smart guys at the bar and we hopefully, hopefully, make the political sphere slightly better for our involvement. Anything you hear beyond that is simply masturbation -- it feels good and means nothing.

Damn you, man! I thought I was makin' a difference. I'm so disillusioned.

What I most appreciated about Brown's column, she never once used the word pajamas.

Oh, and closing a loop here: The Editors' world has really been rocked by this.