The Anchoress has a brilliant idea for a post: using President Clinton's appearance on Fox this weekend as a metric for assessing the power of two mediums: the legacy media and its successor:

Blogs have made inroads, but not enough, and all of their fact-checking amounts (in the eyes of the MSM) to little more than soundwaves in the echo chamber. “One side” of the partisan chasm has the whole story and sits nearly impotent with it, while the other has the “preferred story,” accredited and promoted by the “mediating intelligences,” who still (and will for the foreseeable future) hold the largest sway over public opinion, by sheer dint of their control of public knowledge.

The blogs did an incredible job of fact-checking Clinton - they were quick and accurate - they found files of articles from the NY Times and the WaPo utterly dismantling Clinton’s assertions. They floated the video from NBC News (not a known right-wing establishment) suggesting we had OBL more than “in our sites.” But it will be to little effect, I fear. In subsequent news reports, the “mediating intelligences” have not picked up a bit of the analysis, have not used any of the facts easily available on hundreds of blogs.

Not the right story, you see. Clinton is not the right president to prove a “liar.” The press wants desperately to bring down a president, but Clinton is not the one. And so, facts-schmacts, the only facts that matter are the ones the master can pull out of thin air.

And if that doesn’t demonstrate, more than anything, that we are living in an age of diabolical disorientation, where up is down (the excellent economic news is bad) and right is wrong (men who served with John Kerry know nothing about him) and truths are lies, (US policy from 1998 on was regime change in Iraq, but only until we did it) I don’t know what can.

I feel no great thrill here to see Clinton in a purple rage, nor to see how brilliantly some parts of the blogosphere responded, because in the end our limited audience is still been trumped by the vast and attention-span-challenged audience of the MSM, who click on, absorb a thirty second “Clinton good, others bad” sound bite and click out, certain they’ve got the information they need.

The blogosphere is growing in effectiveness. Blog commentary is increasingly dependable, professional and penetrating, and the fact-checking is above reproach, but our effectiveness is still limited.

I think that's exactly right, and the Achoress's denouement dovetails nicely with some thoughts Peggy Noonan had this past summer, when she compared the strength of Democrats currently in office to the infinitely more powerful strength of Democrats permanently manning newspaper op-ed pages.

Update: Here's another metric for the health of the Blogosphere: the Senate Majority Leader praises "the bipartisan citizen journalism of the blogosphere" for its role in passing the Federal Funding Accountability and Transparency Act--a.k.a., the Porkbusters Act.