I want to say this about my state. When Strom Thurmond ran for president, we voted for him. We're proud of it. And if the rest of the country had followed our lead, we wouldn't have had all these problems over all these years either.
-- Mississippi Senator Trent Lott, Dec. 5, 2002

One way to learn that pack journalism is real is to be caught outside the pack with a story it does not recognize. This happened to Ed O'Keefe, a young "off-air reporter" for ABC News in Washington, who happened to be in the room when Trent Lott, then the most powerful man in the United States Senate, gave remarks that embraced the spirit of Strom Thurmond's 1948 campaign for president. O'Keefe knew enough about that campaign to find Lott's words shocking, and he said to himself, "This is news."

But Washington journalism said back to him: we don't think so.

O'Keefe's judgment later won out. Pack judgment was wrong-- in this case, extremely so. Lott became the first majority leader in Senate history to resign under pressure. How it all happened is told in the new case study from Harvard's Kennedy School, "Big Media" Meets the "Bloggers." (By Esther Scott, supervised by Alex Jones of the Shorenstein Center at the Kennedy School of Government. Available only in pdf form here.)

My favorite moment in the story is when O'Keefe's counterpart at another network asks a more senior producer in the Washington bureau to look at what Lott said that evening at Thurmond's 100th birthday party. "No, I don't think it's anything" says the more experienced pro.

This gave O'Keefe some pause, causing him to second-guess his judgment. "I think there is something to the [notion] of pack journalism," he reflects, "of individuals believing that if something is noteworthy, ... everyone will get it... If they didn't all get it, then it couldn't possibly be a newsworthy item."

The conservative writer David Frum would later call Lott's words, "the most emphatic repudiation of desegregation to be heard from a national political figure since George Wallace's first presidential campaign." But when "everyone" didn't get it, O'Keefe began to doubt himself. That's how group think works.

The Harvard study has gotten notice in Blogistan, but its stingy formatting (the pdf is encrypted and won't allow you to cut and paste) has been discussed in greater depth than the story it tells, perhaps because we think the events are well known. According to legend--partially confirmed by the report--webloggers from Left and Right were responsible for pushing the Trent Lott story into the news, after the mainstream media missed it.

"The Internet's First Scalp" said John Podhoretz in the New York Post. That's hyperbole, but the report makes clear that webloggers had a crucial role. It also delimits and describes that role. Now we know more precisely why--and when--the bloggers were needed.