If you want to see how the blogosphere handles and divides over a news story, look at the missing Iraqi explosives. In three days, views and lines have switched back and forth as supporters of both sides in the US presidential election have tried to claim victory for themselves.
When it emerged in Monday's New York Times, the suggestion that 340 tonnes of powerful explosives were missing from the International Atomic Energy Agency-monitored al-Qaqaa complex was an open goal for the pro-Kerry blogs. "There was a way to safeguard facilities like al-Qaqaa," posted Daily Kos. "The Pentagon could've put more boots on the ground. The fact that the site was not protected is in itself criminally negligent."
Little Green Footballs had a problem. The story, if true, appeared to back up the senator's charge of inadequate postwar planning. But in the blogosphere there is always an answer. "I guess John Kerry feels we were safer when the material was in the hands of Saddam Hussein, because after all ... Saddam was no threat, even though ... he had hundreds of tons of high explosives that could be used to manufacture nuclear weapons, but ... he had no plans for WMD ... uh ... but ... I'm getting a headache."
That post was logged at 8.27am on Monday. Twelve hours and four minutes later, came a line pro-Bush bloggers could run with. "Drudge has an NBC report that the explosives stockpile at al-Qaqaa vanished before US troops arrived in the area," read the top post at the site.
"Vanished" was not quite the word NBC used but it was enough to put the pro-Kerry bloggers on the back foot.
Within hours, Talking Points Memo had a rebuttal detailing its problems with the "Drudge/NBC 'It was gone when we got there' hypothesis".
"Military and non-proliferation analysts say that a detachment of soldiers not specifically trained in weapons inspections work and certainly an NBC news crew simply wouldn't be in a position to make such a determination," wrote Joshua Micah Marshall, the blog's author, as he outlined his first line of defence. "We're not talking about a storage unit with a few boxes in it, but a massive weapons complex made up of almost a hundred buildings and bunkers."
But those were not the doubts on the Bush supporting sites. With his wind in his sails, Captain Ed steered his Captain's Quarters blog onto questioning what the New York Times was up to, especially as it was running with the story for a second day. "This agenda-driven journalism threatens to deflate the Paper of Record's reputation just as surely as Rathergate did CBS, fake documents or no. The Times needs to place a moratorium on further articles on missing weapons until it does proper research, and it owes its readers and the Americans in Iraq working munitions demolitions a big apology."
This is probably where it would have ended – Bush supporters attacking the NYT, Kerry supporters doubting the explosives were already gone – had NBC not neglected to run the weapons-already-gone story on its MSNBC website and, by Tuesday night, issued a clarification. Evening anchor Tom Brokaw said it had reported the 101st airborne could not find the explosives, not that they had gone before the Americans arrived. "That is possible, but that is not what we reported," he told viewers.
So 24 hours after the first twist you got a second, and the happiest faces were on the Kerry side. Talking Points Memo suggested the White House staff should have heeded Bush's advice from the last debate not "to quote leading news organisations" before basing their line "on a short blurb on NBC Nightly News that fell apart about as quickly as it took to get all their surrogates to start talking about it."
Not that the pro-Bush bloggers have stopped talking about it. Power Line accuses the pro-Kerry spin of slandering US soldiers on the ground by taking the word of NBC correspondents that the complex was not searched. "This story now really is about the performance of our troops at the al-Qaqaa facility, and there appears to be no credible evidence that they did not perform competently there."
When a story has been running this long and at this intensity no one wants to give it up.
