The most I can conclude from the present observations is that a beltway pundit such as Paul Begala is capable himself of knowing the “physics of a hunting accident.” Your post continues the push the myth that reporters haven’t the foggiest of who to ask when something veers outside their territory. Yes, the Internet helps. But here the case is that the “Big Head” of the pundit is orders of magnitude more reliable than the “Long Tail.”

Please, by all means, call up Paul Begala and ask him whether the comments to his story proved any more help than any professional pundit. Or ask the community whether any of the posts proved helpful to each other. I am willing to draw conclusions based on the data we find. I have done some studies along these lines of this on the whole of the Howard Dean campaign blog, and the only thing I can conclude so far was that Joe Trippi’s conclusions aren’t backed by the evidence. Further hypothesis: for an outside reader, past a certain number of comments, there’s no value to reading any more. These are all things we need to study, and my patience is running thin on the number of academic journals that are actually advocating for rigorous study of these phenomena.

If you are looking for evidence of sucessful distributed reporting, I would submit that the “Jeff Gannon” investigation a year ago qualified, since the DKos community did produce key key facts towards the eventual storyline. And remember also that some of the most advanced reporting on the recent cartoon row came via Wikipedia at first, because of the global nature of the story. I’d wager that far more national reporters can find people familiar with bird hunting than people familiar with Denmark.

This isn’t about people cracking wise. (Though there is much of that out there.) This is about trying to get at the facts of the story, which the White House seems eager to block. Traditional journalists should welcome the public’s assistance, and follow up on these leads. These folks, in this example, know a lot more about the physics of a hunting accident than the White House press corps, I’d wager.

All we see is the distributed speculation as a result of the paucity of information that’s been delivered– not to mention the overnight growth of “Duck Cheney” fan clubs. This is not a new phenomenon.