No, the lefty Web won't get credit for Lou Dobbs' departure

To answer the interesting question Greg Sargent raised yesterday. As he noted, the Beltway press in the past has often been generous in crediting conservative bloggers for changing the game:

When right wing bloggers got Dan Rather fired from CBS, traditional news orgs widely hailed the role of right blogostan in exposing the shortcomings of Rather’s story on Bush and the National Guard and gave the right full credit for bringing him down.

Now that Lou Dobbs — also a major media figure — has quit CNN, it remains to be seen whether the online left will get anywhere near the same level of credit.

With the initial news cycle surrounding Dobbs' resignation complete, it's safe to say that most news outlets did not credit the lefty Web for making life difficult for Dobbs and CNN over recent months. In fact, most news outlets didn't even mention the role the liberal blogosphere and the larger netroots movement played in helping drive Dobbs from his longtime CNN perch.

This is isn't surprising at all. As I noted in Bloggers on the Bus, Beltway media elites have for years gone out of their way to downplay, if not flat-out ignore, the extraordinary impact liberal bloggers have had on both politics and the press.

From Bloggers:

Perhaps driven by feelings of competitive jealousy for the fresh generation of citizen journalists and their new found clout, or fueled by contempt for the bloggers who so effectively critiqued the Beltway media's often shoddy work, the press corps mostly kept its distance and chose not to shine a spotlight on the new generation of citizen journalists busy reinventing politics and as journalism. (That's when the press wasn't being openly contemptuous: During the 2004 campaign, a New York Times writer expressed his "half-sickening feeling" at the realization that the news agenda was being set by a "largely unpaid, T-shirt-clad army of bloggers.")

Instead, the press clung to its outdated blogger caricatures, portraying them as polarizing, amateurish extremists, downplaying their concrete achievements, and reluctant to tell the personal stories behind the creation of the blogosphere; the unlikely personal, and professional, odysseys bloggers took before securing leadership positions within the vibrant political community. (How reluctant? As of January 2009, the normally media-obsessed Washington Post still had not published--ever--a single feature profile of an A-list liberal blogger.)