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Introduction
In June 2007, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) unleashed a minor firestorm of
criticism when he described the outgoing Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff as “incompetent,”
and the leading general in Iraq as “out of touch” (Bresnahan 2007). Not surprisingly, the news
media considered the spectacle of a major party leader criticizing uniformed members of the
military as historically novel and controversial. It is thus also unsurprising that nearly all major
U.S. news outlets – print, broadcast, and web-based – reported the story, frequently at length.
What is less historically typical, on the other hand, was the venue in which Reid chose to
make his comments. He was not speaking to a crowd of citizens, a gathering of journalists, or his
fellow politicians on the Senate floor. Instead, Reid made these incendiary statements during a
conference call with self-identified liberal bloggers (many of whom initially rallied around Reid
and denied he had made the statements).
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In explaining the genesis of Reid’s comments,
Democratic strategist Bob Beckel criticized Reid for allowing left-wing bloggers to get “too
much influence over him” and asserted that the “marriage” between Reid and the bloggers had
caused him to take such extreme positions (Beckel 2007).
Less than a decade earlier, in 1998, John Chambers, the CEO of Cisco Systems famously
stated, "What people have not grasped is that the Internet will change everything" (Friedman
1998).
Since that time, pundits, journalists, and scholars have searched for evidence of such
revolutionary changes in nearly every area of modern life, including politics. Of course,
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Blogger Greg Sargent of TPM’s (Talking Points Memo) Election Central site collected several
denials in a post titled “Politico Story Saying Reid Called Generals ‘Incompetent’ Is Denied”
(Sargent 2007). Significantly for this paper, two of the cited liberal bloggers quoted as denying
the story (Joan McCarter (“McJoan”) and Barbara Morrill (“BarbinMD”)) are prominent
bloggers at DailyKos. Subsequently, a transcript made from a recording of the event surfaced
confirming the account in the Politico story, and Reid himself confirmed having made the
remarks (Garrett and Turner 2007).
Convention