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February 14, 2007
I've just come across an innovative way of blogging. It's 'blogging the Scooter Libby trial' based on the team assembled by Jane Hamsher and FireDogLake. Hamsher built FDLwith her blogging partner, former prosecutor Christy Hardin Smith).This kind of work partially supplants, or at least supplements, that produced by the national media, as it develops an independent means of reporting on and analyzing key political events. It shows the potential of political blogging.
Glenn Greenward over at Salon (scroll down) describes what has been produced by the assembled FireDogLake team:
The reporting produced by the FDL team has been, as one would expect, intense, comprehensive and superb. In addition to daily live-blogging of every single witness, which entails almost every question asked and answer given, as well as close-to-verbatim accounts of legal arguments between the Fitzgerald's team and Libby's lawyers, the FDL Plame experts have been providing day-by-day analysis of the legal, political and journalistic issues raised by this trial. In short, they have produced coverage of this clearly significant event -- one which has provided rare insight into the inner workings of the Beltway political and journalistic elite -- that simply never is, and perhaps cannot be, matched by even our largest national media outlets.
A lot of it is live blogging from the court room--the team works along side the corporate media types in the media room throughout the trial coverage. Would Australian courts allow legal bloggers to work in the court room.
Christy Hardin Smith in this post says that:
According to prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald, Libby's case amounts to an attempt at "jury nullification." Libby is charged with five counts of perjury and obstruction of justice for lying about where he learned the identity of CIA undercover operative Valerie Plame (Wilson's wife) and to whom he spread that information.... Fitzgerald's prosecution was well honed, unadorned and a straight arrow.....Libby's defense was the legal equivalent of the fog of war. He sought to obfuscate the clarity of the prosecution's case by raising irrelevant issues, turning the jury's attention away from the charges themselves and creating doubt by getting witnesses to admit small lapses of memory, thereby underlining Libby's memory defense
This kind of work is at the forefront of the new media. In this earlier post at FireDogLake TRex at says that:
originally blogging was a mostly Right Wing creature. It began as an extension of talk radio and for years the field was kind of like a wet t-shirt contest at an old folks' home. You had to give them credit for trying...Now, Righty bloggers are finding themselves in a bit of a pickle. Their audience is shrinking and whatever tissue-thin veneer of credibility they may have gained since 2003 has been squandered like a pallet of shrink-wrapped cash in Iraq as they have gone chasing around and around Big Media's coverage of the Middle East in an increasingly embarrassing quest for signs of "liberal bias".
I'm not sure whether that judgement can apply in Australia.
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I forget the name of the site, but there was a similar effort done somewhere with the SCO and IBM case over Linux.