Of mainstream media, online remarks, and character assasination. Matt Stoller puts together a great many pieces while addressing the fallout from a retracted comment in the blog "Daily Kos."

The short story is that Markos Moulitsas Zuniga of the Daily Kos said a terrible comment about contractors in Iraq, which he retracted but did not apologize for. The right complained, then attacked, the Daily Kos's advertisers pulled their ads from the site, John Kerry delinked him, several 'reasonable' liberal bloggers piled on him, and the controversy has shown up so far in the Wall Street Journal and on the South Dakotan GOP's web site. It probably won't end there.

But the real juice of his post is a larger pontification into the nature of blogs against the nature of big media. Here's his launching off point:

When I produced the call-in talk radio radio pilot 'The Blogging of the President', I noticed some interesting similarities between talk radio and blogs. Call-in talk radio is organized around authentic conversation, and so are blogs; Howard Stern and Atrios have similar levels of devotion among their audiences, because they each connect and seem trustworthy. There is however one key difference between blogs and talk radio; blogs create memory, whereas talk radio and cable punditry destroys it by turning opinion and analysis into an ethereal product. Both talk radio and blogs provide contextualized, chatty information; only blogs actually write it down (Tim Berners Lee has more).

This is why right-wing talk radio rhetoric is so much more extreme than the Republican Party's moderate image would imply. Take Rush Limbaugh, for example, and his short-lived ESPN career. Pandering to racists and the paranoid didn't matter when he was on niche radio, but once he was in the mainstream media spotlight, Rush self-destructed almost immediately. What's surprising in this episode is not Rush's abortive football commenting career, but that ESPN hired him in the first place. Because no one's writing down right-wing talk radio, ESPN program managers simply didn't know what they were getting. Strip out context and memory, and Limbaugh is just a popular DJ with millions of male listeners, many of whom are also sports fans. So they hired him.

for those interested in the internet's effect on media and culture, a must read. There is much more than I can paste or describe here--so give it a read.