Blog P.I.

“The Daily Show” certainly jacks some of its content from the web, and it’s almost hard to imagine “The Colbert Report” without web interaction. Other entertainment programs and news outlets are also jacking story concepts, news leads and other useful content from online amateurs — and as I noted last week, they don’t always give credit where credit is due.

This past weekend, I was invited by the online magazine Brainwash to expand on this very theme for their latest edition:

You’re with me, blogger by William Beutler | Oct 8, 2006 On Sept. 28, Comedy Central’s long-running program “The Daily Show” ran a segment with correspondent Jason Jones lampooning the “trench coat, stick-mic journalism” of one Carl Monday, an on-air reporter for WKYC-TV in Cleveland. If you are familiar with the segment, chances are good you had first heard of Monday from the Gawker Media-owned sports blog, Deadspin. In May, Deadspin’s Will Leitch turned Monday’s relentless reports about a college student caught (on tape) masturbating at a public library into an Internet phenomenon. On Oct. 5, on-again, off-again journalistic enterprise Radar Online posted an “Exclusive” story pointing out that a weblog hawking stories of former Rep. Mark Foley’s advances toward House pages — including the ambiguous e-mails now causing Denny Hastert so much trouble — was not a real blog at all. The weeks-old site was, they wrote, “filled with plagiarized, hastily-assembled posts, which no one seems to have heard of, visited, or linked to before last week.” But this story was hardly exclusive to Radar — political bloggers at Just One Minute, Daily Kos and elsewhere had uncovered all these details the weekend prior.

Of course, so had Blog P.I., but I’m not about to cite myself as an authority… at least not yet. To read the column in full, just click here.