Blogs and blogging. This story starts out being about "dirty tricks." Here is a man who exploits his children and gets gullible newsies to cover him in campaign after campaign, as he fakes incidents where democratic crowds tear up his signs and be mean to him. The trouble is, Parlock, the guy in question, stages these events to discredit Democrats. What is really of interest to me is William Rivers Pitt's final note about how the mainstream press has missed the story that Parlock is a provocateur. It was bloggers who did the legwork to find the facts and not just take the incidents at face value. That's a shift from the usual assumption that bloggers analyze what reporters track down.t r u t h o u t - William Rivers Pitt | Scamming the Media, Parlock Style