In reading We, The Media, in Chapter 3, The Gates Come Down, Gillmor chronicles how the Trent Lott quote was kept alive by the bloggers while the Mainstream Media sort of buried it. I had run across Joshua Marshall several times, his posts being widely quoted by a variety of blogs, but had never really paid much attention. How did that happen? Oh, well, now I notice, and here’s a post that I had already begun to think along the same lines.

Talking Points Memo: by Joshua Micah Marshall

Yet it turns out that this is but one, and not at all the most significant way in which the policy the president has embraced differs from that of the commission. In fact, when you look closely at it, it’s nothing like what the commission recommended at all. The president went out into the Rose Garden, said he was adopting the commission’s proposals. But in fact he was doing close to the opposite, doing more or less what they said shouldn’t be done.
The key point made by the commission, you’ll remember, is that the new NDI would have to have budgetary authority across the various intelligence agencies and the ability to hire and fire senior managers. As the Times makes clear, the president’s proposal does none of those. Indeed, the dailies do a pretty good job making this clear. The Post says that …

I took notice when it was said that “the only reccomendation” that Bush seemed to disagree on was that the new head of intelligence agencies be on the White House staff. This the media did say, but sort of buried it as an “aside” inthe middle of a report that basically siad the President was supportive and plans to implement the suggestions ASAP. It seems that they are already doing the O’Neill treatment on this new office, keeping that person out of the “innermost loop”. (The O’Neill treatment is my name for what I have read and heard and gathered so far in my reading of The Price Of Loyalty, as to how O’Neill, when he began to voice his deepest concerns about the “budgetary process”, or lack of anything substantive in that veign, was gradually relegated to the periphery of the strategies. This is the Secretary of the Treasury now. Seems that O’Neill had some concerns about the deficit— actually, before we jumped headlong back into one from a surplus left by the Clinton Adminstration.)