DOUG ROSS: Nick Shirley’s Exposé – The Infographic.

Shirley deserves all of the fame he’s currently getting, but hopefully he’ll be joined in short succession in covering Minnesota’s Somali Pirates by many other new media types. Because otherwise, it becomes a repeat of when Matt Drudge ran Newsweek’s* spiked story on Clinton’s affair with Monaca Lewinsky, and the DNC-MSM trained all of their guns on Drudge in response for having to be shamed into reporting something bad about their idol. Because this was still the early days of the World Wide Web, and blogs were still mostly used as daily diaries rather than new media platforms, Drudge was absolutely crucified by the legacy media, in a classic case of Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals #12: “Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.” Not surprisingly, Tim Walz is already trying this technique on Shirley, who so far is very wisely resisting taking the bait:

* Back when Newsweek was still owned by the Washington Post, a newspaper that only aims their fire at the other party’s presidents.