In his latest "Citizen Journalist" video blog for Hot Air Jeff Goldstein asked Linda Seebach of The Rocky Mountain News her thoughts on this piece by Jeff Jarvis from last September. It was written at the height of what we now know to be the media's painfully botched coverage of Hurricane Katrina:

If we nitpick the facts and follow some rules some committee wrote up, we’ll be safe; we’re doing our jobs. No, sir, our job is to get more than the facts. Anybody can get facts. Facts are the commodity. The truth is harder to find. Justice is harder to fight for. Lessons are what we’re after.

Tim Russert lost sight of the story because he was embarrassed that bloggers caught a guest on his show with facts that were wrong. Russert’s proper response should have been to fix those facts quickly and clear but still pursue the real story. Instead, he chose to shoot the messenger who embarrassed him with the bloggers. He lost sight of his real mission.

The media was more than willing to jettison facts while covering Katrina, because it had a larger purpose in mind. Echoing something that Mickey Kaus spotted almost immediately last year in Big Media's Katrina coverage, Jonah Goldberg writes, "The anti-Bush chorus, including enormous segments of the mainstream media, sees Katrina as nothing more than a good stick for beating on Piñata Bush’s 'competence'":

The hypocrisy is astounding because the media did such an abysmal job covering the reality of New Orleans (contrary to reports, there were no bands of rapists, no disproportionate deaths of poor blacks, nothing close to 10,000 dead, etc.). It seems indisputable that Katrina highlighted the tragedy of New Orleans rather than created it. Long before Katrina, New Orleans was a dysfunctional city in a state with famously corrupt and incompetent leadership, many of whose residents think that it is the job of the federal government to make everyone whole.

The Mississippi coast was hit harder by Katrina than New Orleans was. And although New Orleans’ levee failure was a unique problem — one the local leadership ignored for decades — the devastation in Mississippi was in many respects more severe. And you know what? Mississippi has the same federal government as Louisiana, and reconstruction there is going gangbusters while, after more than $120 billion in federal spending, New Orleans remains a basket case. Here’s a wacky idea: Maybe it’s not all Bush’s fault.

And, as we now know, it also wasn't Bush's fault (or Cheney's, or "some star-chamber neocon", as Jonah writes) that Valerie Plame was outed. Fred Barnes writes:

It's as if a giant hoax were perpetrated on the country--by the media, by partisan opponents of the Bush administration, even by several Bush subordinates who betrayed the president and their White House colleagues. The hoax lingered for three years and is only now being fully exposed for what it was.

Last week, the Washington Post declared--three years after much of the starboard side of the Blogosphere--the Plame story a non-starter. Roger L. Simon has a detailed, thoughtful post on the implications of the Post's admission, and reading it, you can understand how these two seemingly disparate stories intersect, along with several other examples of the media's post-9/11 obsessions:

[W]hat interests me is how the Plame Affair fits into the whole framework. It may be opera bouffe, but it is far from unrelated to the way the press has conducted itself in recent years. Is it so different from Pallywood and the Mohammed Al Doura case, the Reuters photographs, the Jenin "massacre" and so forth - all lies swallowed whole by a gullible Western media? At first glance they would seem far apart, but in this small world one concept draws them all together - narrative. The truth is less important than the weltanschauung of the publication. But we knew that, didn't we?

So next step - why this phenomenon? Why the acceptance of this narrative whose result is so negative to world history and seems in continuous aid of the destruction of the Enlightenment itself? Is it just Bush Derangement Syndrome? Well, I think that's a large part of it. But the term (BDS) is too narrow to encompass the phenomenon. A variety of psychological forces are in the mix, but most notable to me is a sense of deprivation. 9/11 stripped the left of its self-perceived idealism that was the mainstay of its "personality." Forces (like Bush) that lefties once dismissed as reactionary were taking the lead in the preservation of the West instead of supporting dictators as they once did. Furthermore, in the old days the left could take concilation that the enemy (communism) had at least a theoretical rationale - economic fairness to all. The new enemy was more troublesome - on the one hand poor (only seemingly, of course, considering the oil rich) and on the other hand medieval, anti-woman, anti-gay and anti-modern... essentially anti-liberal. What to do.... what to do?

In the beginning the left went along with Bush, but the minute things began to lag in Iraq, they deserted him in a flash. At first glance the reason was political but on a deeper (and I believe more important) level the reason was psychological. The left was in a rush to reclaim its lost idealism (the "it's about oil" nonsense was but an obvious example of this), to preserve its disintegrating sense of self. Of course the big loser in all this is the truth. Sure Bush made a bunch of mistakes (who wouldn't?) but it should be obvious to anyone that we are at the earliest stages of a very long war. Nevertheless, a culture of media corruption set in almost instantly that ended up creating absurdities like the Plame Affair. We are lucky this one got unmasked.

The post 9/11 Blogosphere's role of "Watching The Watchdog", combined with the legacy media's increasingly overstretched narrative lines, is one of the most remarkable intersections between the forces of what Alvin Toffler calls the Second and Third Waves. In other words, the legacy remnants of the mass media versus its decentralized, demassified successor. Roger suggests that we will be lucky "if the conclusions drawn in the WaPo editorial stick for that publication at least". But I'm not as hopeful. As I wrote last October:

It's weirdly ironic--despite the fact that they're in the news business, the media are often the last to spot a realignment of their own industry.

So why should "Plame Out" different?