The question forwarded to my in box was simple: Would Trent Lott be in so much trouble were it not for online journalism and its various offshoots?

Yes -- and no.

The romanticized story has the weblogs beating the drums until the media was forced to pick up the rhythm. That doesn?t explain how the bloggers who didn?t have an invite to Strom Thurmond?s party heard about Lott?s Dec. 5 comments. 

		It took a combination of mainstream media outlets online, in print and on the air to make the incident public.

It took a combination of mainstream media outlets online, in print and on the air to make the incident public. The opinion bloggers, including journalists and their amateur counterparts, upped the ante, latching on to the comments and using the instant distribution system known as the Web.

The one media item that probably turned Lott into a ?walking pi?ata? -- my favorite anonymous quote so far -- was the C-SPAN footage of him actually making the comments.

Still, the myriad facets of the online world make it a perfect incubator.

Just a few examples: An item midway through The Note, ABCNews.com?s near-encyclopedic political digest, put the issue on the radar the very next morning for hundreds of journalists and politicians checking out what has become a must-read. Time used its Web site to get out a story its reporter had known for years but had never seen a reason to use. Conservative columnists ticked off at Lott for his gaffe and gleeful liberals were able to get their messages across quickly and to spread it in the news-politics equivalent of viral marketing.

Transcripts and video clips are always at the ready, making it possible as the story rolls out for people to hop online when they hear it exists. And nearly two weeks later discussion boards and Usenet groups are still teeming as users react to Lott?s various apologies.

	BET.com's coverage of Lott

Lott?s Dec. 16 interview with Ed Gordon on Viacom?s Black Entertainment Network. sent traffic and attention to BET.com. The site rose to the occasion with a mix of features, including an explanation of the majority leader's job, a running poll, and an active discussion about ?why Trent Lott's words hurt some of us so deeply.? Users were asked to ?tell us here about things/stories from the past that happened to your people.?

Late that night more than 200 ?anonymous users? were browsing the BET.com forum, which allows replies from non-registered, anonymous visitors. Unfortunately, few of the hundreds who posted answered the core question, opting instead simply to vent about Lott. Another thread asked for reaction to the interview. Posts rapidly piled up.

Just when I was feeling all warm and fuzzy about the way people were responding to BET?s online equivalent of open mike night I made the mistake of opening another thread that started last spring when Vanderbilt?s effort to encourage Jewish high school students to consider the Nashville university got publicity.

It was like stepping into a cesspool with precious few pockets of air. On part of the BET Vanderbilt discussion boards people are talking about the ill effects of racism; on another are some of the most racist and bigoted remarks I?ve ever seen -- and I?ve seen and heard a few. Part of the problem rests with BET, not for making the comments visible but for failing to provide people with the foundation to have a legitimate discussion.

	BET.com's Active        Discussion Board

At the time the thread started in May those responding might have seen reports on CNN or in print that put the matter in context. By December that context was long gone. Posters were responding simply to the provocative comment made by the anonymous BET ?administrator? to start things off.  

(Anyone who thinks Joe Lieberman has a chance to be president should spend a few minutes scanning this forum.)

I knew the Lott story was taking on steam when I saw the number of links start to expand on Google News.

I?ve never met David Espo but thanks to Google News the AP special correspondent is my new best friend. Espo is on the Trent Lott (that?s Chester Trent Lott to those who read Time) beat, churning out copy in the running saga ?As the Majority Leader Turns.?

Click on News.Google.com and chances are the first few dozen stories you see about Lott will be by Espo. His work ripples out across the Web, appearing on news sites as automated software does its job or editors yank the latest on Lott from the wire and plop it on the front page.

Of course, Google News isn?t all Espo all the time. Reloading is like playing a shell game. You never know where the story you?re following may end up on the page or what you might end up with by changing the way you sort results. The ?In the News? feature alternately mystifies with some of its selections and alerts users to some new blip in the news cycle.

At a glance I can see which outlets have posted new stories, check out coverage in Lott?s home state and see how the story is playing abroad.

It?s addictive, particularly when a story is morphing not just daily but hourly.

Online dynamics pushed the Lott story in other ways.

For instance, the notion that the mainstream media was mostly ignoring the story gained credence when Howard Kurtz used his washingtonpost.com weblog/digest to ask why the major media -- except for his own Washington Post, which played it inside the A section Dec. 7 -- was AWOL.  Kurtz acknowledged Meet the Press and CNN (another of his employers) but singled out the online pundits for tackling the Lott question while ?the establishment press is largely yawning?; he sang the same refrain in print a few days later in his print Media Notes column.

Let?s review the way this seeped out: Lott was among 30-plus senators and former senators toasting Thurmond for achieving the age of 100. Numerous reporters were present when he said the country would have been better off if Thurmond, then a leading segregationist, had been elected president on the Dixiecrat ticket in 1948.

	Results of search for       "Lott and Thurmond"      on NYTimes.com

Lumped in with the Viagra jokes, Lott?s words produced a gasp from some attendees but not a lot of action from reporters who should have known better. Perhaps they were caught up in the moment. Perhaps they were so accustomed to hearing Lott they didn?t realize the import of those words coming from the Senate Majority Leader. Maybe they were just having senior moments in honor of the occasion.

Some did know better.

ABCNews.com alerted on Friday morning the nearly 14,000 subscribers of The Note's e-mail newsletter, and the story started to make the rounds.  Gwen Ifill picked up on it that night on PBS's Washington Week, as did James Carville on CNN's Crossfire.  The Post?s story ran Saturday and was picked up by a number of papers including the Chicago Tribune. It hit CNN?s Capitol Gang that night.

	Here's what I found when     the NYT search worked.

By Sunday morning, the Rev. Jesse Jackson was on the phone to NBC telling Tim Russert that Lott was a Confederate who should resign. Russert in turn played the tape and tossed the question to ?Meet The Press? panelists David Broder, Joe Klein, William Safire and Robert Novak. 

Novak quickly suggested it was the media?s fault that anyone was even taking this seriously. ?He?s at a damn birthday party. I mean, this is the kind of thing that makes people infuriated with the media, is they pick up something that?s said at a birthday party and turn it into a case of whether he should be impeached.?

That would be the same birthday party attended by dozen of politicians who knew it was a photo-op loaded with TV cameras and journalists.

The issue came up on Wolf Blitzer?s CNN show Sunday morning, Dec. 8, and CBS news that night. By Monday it had spiraled out as far as the Xinhua General News Service, Slate, NPR and numerous newspapers. Al Gore called Lott a racist on CNN. It was on Fox. Salon's Joe Conason expressed his disappointment in the "so-called liberal media establishment."

And yet on Tuesday, Dec. 10, Kurtz complained that the media wasn?t covering the story, that ?most major newspapers hadn?t done squat,? that it took Lott?s apology to get coverage in the major newspapers. 

Part of the issue here is the journalism version of the Church Lady?s superior dance on Saturday Night Live: If it isn?t in The New York Times, the media must be ignoring it. The obverse of this is that if it?s on the front page of the Times it must be news.

(I?ve had my own run-ins with this way of thinking, like the 1988 U.S. drought I just couldn?t convince Life magazine was a major story. When I saw the photo of cracked earth on the front page of the Times I knew the call from the Time-Life building would be coming soon.)

That doesn?t excuse the Times. The gray lady was a tad too late to this tea party. (For a look at what happened when I tried a search for Lott and Thurmond on NYTimes.com click here. Here's a link to what I found when it worked.)

It also doesn?t mean the story was being ignored by most of the media. Heck, by Dec. 10 when Kurtz?s online column ran the San Francisco Chronicle was already running letters to the editor about Lott.

It?s just that it wasn?t picked up first by the outlets some people use as a measure.

Staci D. Kramer is Editor at Large at Cable World and was a contributing editor to Inside.com. Based in University City, Mo., Kramer's clients have included Time, Life, the Detroit Free Press, the Chicago Tribune, The New York Times, Multichannel News, APBNews.com, mediainfo.com, Editor & Publisher, The Sporting News, St. Louis magazine, several major papers in Canada, and numerous others. Her work has been syndicated by the Los Angeles Times Syndicate, reprinted in two books and she has even co-produced a segment for "Nightline."