Tim Grieve of Salon at YearlyKos.

An excerpt from the June 9 posting: (free with a day pass)

At today's YearlyKos panel on the Valerie Plame case, we happened to find ourselves sharing a table with a member of the Washington press corps. He's a terrific reporter and a genuinely good guy, but we watched the color rise in his face as members of the panel discussed the ways in which mainstream reporters protected Plamegate leakers and then failed to investigate the case once it broke open.

By the time panelist Dan Froomkin, who writes his White House Briefing column from home, speculated that reporters may avoid stories like Plamegate in an effort to "bend over backwards" not to be seen as liberals, our reporter had had enough. He turned to us and complained: "If he spends no time with the Washington press corps, how the fuck can he talk about the Washington press corps?"

While YearlyKos has put a lot of bloggers and mainstream political reporters in the same room here, there's still a huge distance between them. The reporters have come to Las Vegas to report on bloggers as a political phenomenon. It's much harder to get them to acknowledge that they're a journalistic one, too. There's an almost willful refusal to understand that people who aren't out conducting interviews can add value to a news story anyway. We've never really understood it. If George Will and Frank Rich and Paul Krugman contribute to our understanding of the news -- a proposition that most mainstream reporters wouldn't have trouble understanding -- how is it that Josh Marshall or the folks at the Next Hurrah don't?

The answer is, they do. As one panelist said today, the blogs can "level the playing field" by giving play to stories, like those Murray Waas writes for the National Journal, that otherwise wouldn't reach a broad audience. More important, though, the best of the bloggers can fact-check and contextualize the news in a way that a 900-word A-section story doesn't. Yes, blogs are sometimes stuffed with comments from true believers who won't let facts get in the way of what they "know." And yes, spending time with some of the more over-the-edge blog readers at YearlyKos can leave you with a sense of what it must feel like to be William Shatner at a Star Trek convention. But when it comes to a complicated, ongoing story like Plamegate, blogs often pull together the strings in ways that the MSM either can't or won't. As one panelist said today, people who read Firedoglake every day probably have a much better grasp of Plamegate than do the readers of The Note -- and that's saying nothing of people who get their news each day from whatever happens to land on their front porch in the morning.