"I don't know if there's any larger lesson about the blogosphere in the media here. I doubt anything like this will happen again; it's just too much a unique confluence of circumstances."

I have to politely differ on this point, since it actually does have a very close analogue, though not in what would typically be considered the "political" realm. A few years ago, the SCO group, formerly known as Caldera systems (not the Santa Cruz organization, though it's a long story), sued IBM and a number of other technology companies claiming essentially that they owned all of Unix, and that Linux is an unauthorized derivative for which they were owed billions. Their rather exorbitant claims really pissed off the open-source community, leading among othr things to the creation of the groklaw blog, http://www.groklaw.net ,
which has covered the case in even greater detail, transcribing every single unsealed court document, and having contributors send in court proceeding reports from trials taking place in several states. We even have the presence of both execrable journalism (particularly from Forbes magazine) and some very good reporting. In particular Steven Vaughn-Nichols of eWeek has done yeoman's work.

Again, my disagreement with your point should be taken as nothing but polite, but I think the immediacy of blogging truly does offer a more transparent means of disseminating information on important court cases than was humanly possible just a few years ago.

Marcy's coverage of the Libby trial has been nothing short of astonishing given that she's not even a lawyer.

As for Russert's testimony, if you want to rehabilitate him you're really going to have to make the case in some detail, as opposed to this drive-by tut-tutting.

Was it Judge Walton who made the decision to let the blogs into the courtroom? If so, it's worth considering that he also allows the jury to pose questions to the witnesses. These are both really unusual and new courtroom practices. It would be great to learn more about him and what motivates him to make decisions like these. (Decisions which I wholeheartedly support, by the way.)

jfaberuiuc

Thanks for the example and the polite disagreement. I don't really disagree with you; I would only add that part of the unique circumstances here was the prominence of the case, the involvement of the most powerful officials in the Bush administration, the prominence of media coverage, 200,000 hits on the liveblogging, and so on.

Steve

Well, a number of assertions the defense made about Russert have turned out to be false. A minor one, for instance, is that the "buzz" Russert referred to had to do with the post-Novak period, not before.

More significantly, the portrayal of Russert as a hypocrite of the First Amendment was just false. Russert did not try to hide his FBI interview from Judge Hogan, as we learned. And there's nothing hypocritical about the posture of strong First Amendment defense he took with respect to the grand jury subpoena. Not only was this in a different category than a talk with an FBI agent, Russert's brief was very clear about one of the differences: the ramifications for sources in the plural. A big fight over grand jury subpoena and the First Amendment is quite a different matter from a quiet discussion with an FBI agent, where, moreover, Russert surely thought he was not in the least actually involved in the case.

Steve

Let me also add that while Russert is not particularly to my taste, we've learned a lot of information we wouldn't otherwise have learned through his reporting; he is not particularly partisan, doesn't press harder on Democrats than on Republicans.

Again, I'm not a fan. But he's a useful journalist, and it doesn't strike me as impossible to learn from him while recognizing the flaws and limitations of what he does (the gotcha game, the basic commitment to the DC establishment, the self-righteousness, etc).