September 27, 2007

Democrats and their allies acted with unusual efficiency yesterday to condemn Rush Limbaugh, who smeared U.S. troops who support a withdrawal policy in Iraq, calling them “phony soldiers.” The next question is seeing which traditional media outlets picked up on the story.

According to searches on Lexis-Nexis and Google News, the only MSM outlets to pick up on this story were MSNBC (Keith Olbermann mentioned the story on the air last night) and the Chicago Tribune’s blog (not the paper’s print edition). That’s it.

But that’s not to say that the story won’t get picked up at all. When Bill O’Reilly was shocked to find civility in Harlem, it took a few days, but traditional news outlets eventually noticed the story and gave it quite a bit of play. There’s no reason Limbaugh’s smear won’t follow a similar media trajectory.

It’s just going to take a little effort. I think Faiz has the right idea.

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