Editing Blog (section)

===Political impact===
[[File:Talkingpointsmemo2.png|thumb|On December 6, 2002, Josh Marshall's talkingpointsmemo.com blog called attention to U.S. Senator [[Trent Lott|Lott's]] comments regarding Senator Thurmond. Senator Lott was eventually to resign his Senate leadership position over the matter.]]

An early milestone in the rise in importance of blogs came in 2002, when many bloggers focused on comments by [[United States Senate Majority Leader|U.S. Senate Majority Leader]] [[Trent Lott]].<ref name="massing essay">{{cite journal | last = Massing | first = Michael | author-link = Michael Massing | title = The News About the Internet | journal = New York Review of Books | volume = 56 | issue = 13 | date = August 13, 2009 | pages = 29–32 | url = http://www.nybooks.com/articles/22960 | access-date = October 10, 2009 }}</ref> Senator Lott, at a party honoring [[United States Senate|U.S. Senator]] [[Strom Thurmond]], praised Senator Thurmond by suggesting that the United States would have been better off had Thurmond been elected president. Lott's critics saw these comments as tacit approval of [[racial segregation]], a policy advocated by Thurmond's [[1948 United States presidential election|1948 presidential campaign]]. This view was reinforced by documents and recorded interviews dug up by bloggers. (See [[Josh Marshall]]'s ''[[Talking Points Memo]]''.) Though Lott's comments were made at a public event attended by the media, no major media organizations reported on his controversial comments until after blogs broke the story. Blogging helped to create a political crisis that forced Lott to step down as majority leader.

Similarly, blogs were among the driving forces behind the "[[Rathergate]]" scandal. Television journalist [[Dan Rather]] presented documents on the CBS show ''[[60 Minutes]]'' that conflicted with accepted accounts of President Bush's military service record. Bloggers declared the documents to be [[forgery|forgeries]] and presented evidence and arguments in support of that view. Consequently, CBS apologized for what it said were inadequate reporting techniques (see: [[Little Green Footballs]]). The impact of these stories gave greater credibility to blogs as a medium of news dissemination.

In Russia, some political bloggers have started to challenge the dominance of official, overwhelmingly pro-government media. Bloggers such as [[Rustem Adagamov]] and [[Alexei Navalny]] have many followers, and the latter's nickname for the ruling [[United Russia]] party as the "party of crooks and thieves" has been adopted by anti-regime protesters.<ref>[[Daniel Sandford (journalist)|Daniel Sandford]], [[BBC News]]: "Russians tire of corruption spectacle", https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-15972326</ref> This led to ''[[The Wall Street Journal]]'' calling Navalny "the man [[Vladimir Putin]] fears most" in March 2012.<ref>{{cite news |title=The Man Vladimir Putin Fears Most (the weekend interview)  |url=https://www.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052970203986604577257321601811092 | first=Matthew | last=Kaminski | newspaper=The Wall Street Journal | date=March 3, 2012 }}</ref>