Taking a page from the wingnuts

Hat tip to Memeorandum. The New York Times is reporting that liberal, progressive bloggers are trying to play catchup with the (very rarely) right wing bloggers effectiveness in getting other media to pick up their stories.

Even as online pundits criticize traditional news organizations as slow, biased and technologically challenged, a group of bloggers is trying to use old-fashioned telephone conference calls to share their ideas with newspaper and television journalists.

The bloggers, who describe themselves as liberal or progressive, say the conference calls are intended to counter what they regard as the much stronger influence of conservative pundits online. Bob Fertik, president of Democrats.com, the host of the two calls so far, views them as a step toward getting their reports out to mainstream news organizations.

There is one interesting observation made about the conservative branch of conventional "news" which I found highly amusing. (Emphasis mine.)

Mr. Fertik maintains that the blurring of boundaries has benefited left-wing bloggers less than their adversaries on the right, saying that reports posted on conservative blogs more easily make the jump to the main news media. "The way we perceive it," he said, "is that right-wing bloggers are able to invent stories, get them out on Drudge, get them on Rush Limbaugh, get them on Fox, and pretty soon that spills over into the mainstream media. We, the progressives, we don't have that kind of network to work with."

It's good to see that at least they recognize in public the fact that Drudge, Rush and Faux are not really part of the legitimate Fourth Estate.

The right wingers will still keep claiming that the MSM is already "librul" and they are just playing catchup themselves, ( a complete fallacy, as has been repeatedly shown) but even Deacon from Powerline gets a piece of this interview.

But he [Deacon] disputed the idea that conservative bloggers had greater success in getting their stories spread by mainstream reporters. "The left just thinks we're getting a free ride and the mainstream media are just eating out of our hand," he said. "That's just not the case."

He added that he would be curious to see what happened with the conference call effort. "It never would've occurred to me," he said. "It seems a reasonable thing to do and if it works, we might copy it."

There was the normal chorus of, "oh that liberal media" from the usual list of suspects.

Comments from The Clairemont Institute (Powerline's pimps), Powerline themselves, and a rather curious reaction from Outside the Beltway.