Bowden has a long piece online, which looks at the future of journalism at a time of partisan programming and deep staff cut-backs. He's correctly concerned about how those two trends are changing the type of news consumers get.

Bowden focuses on the Sotomayor coverage, and specifically how an amateur online conservative sleuth was able to dig up some dirt on Sotomayor before she was even nominated. How small-time blogger Morgen Richmond was able to uncover the video of her 2005 Duke University appearance where Sotomayor said amidst laughter that appellate judges “make law.” And how Richmond uncovered Sotomayor's now-famous “wise Latina woman” quote from an address at Berkeley Law School.

Bowden, a former Philadelphia Inquirer reporter, sees danger for journalism in simply airing the oppo work of a partisan like Richmond:

Richmond seems a bright and fair-minded fellow, but he makes no bones about his political convictions or the purpose of his research and blogging. He has some of the skills and instincts of a reporter but not the motivation or ethics. Any news organization that simply trusted and aired his editing of Sotomayor's remarks, as every one of them did, was abdicating its responsibility to do its own reporting. It was airing propaganda. There is nothing wrong with reporting propaganda, per se, so long as it is labeled as such.

Thankfully, Bowden did what so few Beltway reporters who covered Sotomayor did: He put the Duke and Berkeley comments in context. Bowden noted specifically that the “wise Latina woman” remark was made in reference to discrimination cases. A key point that reporters and pundits pretty much refused to do this summer, even though they knew the facts.

But that's also where I think Bowden let the press off way too easy in his piece, which focused on TV news outlets which aired the Sotomayor video clip that Richmond had unearthed from Duke, as well as the “wise Latina woman” passage he found. I don't think there was anything wrong, journalistically, with broadcasting the clip or referencing the quote Richmond found. The problem with the Sotomayor coverage--and print outlets were just as guilty as television--was that journalists refused to include the obvious context of the Duke and Berkley quotes.

Back during the confirmation coverage I stopped counting, but at one point I found more than 900 “wise Latina woman” news references that failed to mention her quote was made in the context of discrimination cases. The media, through no fault of an online activist like Richmond, categorically failed to include the context. The press simply reported as fact that Sotomayor had claimed that a female Hispanic judge would make better decisions from the bench, on all types of cases, than would a white male.

None of that is the fault of conservative sleuth Morgen Richmond, who helped uncover the Sotomayor nuggets. And journalists were right to report on the video clip and speech passage that he highlighted. The epic fail came when journalists consciously, and uniformly, failed to provide proper context. For like, five weeks running.

And on that count, I think Bowden goes way too easy on the press.

UPDATED: Blogger Scott Rosenberg makes a similar point:

The trouble with all this is that Bowden is focusing his ire on the wrong people. Richmond is not, as far as I know, claiming to be a journalist — and yet, as Bowden admits, he is actually “fair-minded” enough to feel that the Sotomayor quote was maybe not that big a deal. Surely the failure here is on the part of the TV news organizations that turned it into a marquee soundbite without looking more deeply into it. Wasn't that their job, their process, their vetting — the safeguard that ostensibly distinguishes them from the unwashed blogging masses? Aren't they the ones who are supposed to be after truth rather than scalps?