Contrast the latest coverage of Rathergate by the New York Times, which can’t bring itself to even acknowledge the path-breaking role that blogs played in blowing the whistle on CBS in its 1,208-word article, with the coverage by the New York Sun, which reconstructs how four independent blogs–Powerline, Little Green Footballs, INDC Journal, and Allahpundit–led the way in dealing what may be the death blow to the Tiffany Network.

Would it have killed the New York Times to have put aside its Old Media pajama-phobic snobbery and reported the news?

Powerline’s John Hinderaker comments here.

Update: Right On Red says there should be a Pulitzer Prize award for blogging. The Week magazine gave out its first “Blogger of the Year” award for last year to Joshua Micah Marshall. Send your suggestions for this year’s best bloggers here.

Update II: Patterico’s Pontifications has links to other MSM types who have saluted the triumph of the blogosphere.

Update III: The LA Times tipped its hat to Free Republic posters Buckhead and Tanker KC, who kicked things off:

It was a late-night blog posting by this mystery Netizen that first questioned the validity of documents Rather cited Wednesday as proof that George W. Bush did not fulfill his National Guard duty more than 30 years ago.

Buckhead refuses to further identify himself, other than dropping hints that he is a male who lives on the East Coast – preferring to proclaim that the scramble to verify the contentions in his posting marks an extraordinary achievement for a medium that has operated more as an underground world of ideological venting than a source of legitimate news.

But Buckhead is vehement about one thing: He acted alone when he posted, to the conservative Web site FreeRepublic.com, what was widely believed to be the first allegation that the CBS report relied on documents that could have been forged.

“Absolutely, positively, on my own, sitting at my computer in my bedroom just before midnight – but not in my pajamas,” he wrote in an e-mail exchange with the Los Angeles Times.

“But once I posted the comment to Free Republic I was no longer working alone, and that is the real point of the story about the story about the story.”

That story began Wednesday, 19 minutes after the 60 Minutes IIbroadcast began, when another FreeRepublic poster, TankerKC, noted that the documents were “not in the style that we used when I came into the USAF. . . . Can we get a copy of those memos?”

Less than four hours later, Buckhead pointed to “proportionally spaced fonts” in the memos, which CBS said had been written in the early 1970s by Bush’s commanding officer, Lt. Col. Jerry Killian, who died in 1984. Buckhead concluded that the documents had been drafted on a modern-day word processor rather than a typewriter.

“I am saying these documents are forgeries, run through a copier for 15 generations to make them look old,” Buckhead wrote. “This should be pursued aggressively…”

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