The Impact of Bloggers on Tom Daschle

John Fund writes today in OpinionJournal.com regarding the impact that bloggers had on the hotly contested Senate election in South Dakota:

Bloggers received a lot of attention for helping to expose the fake documents backing up Dan Rather's "60 Minutes" story on President Bush the Texas Air National Guard. But that's only one of the interesting ways in which the Internet is empowering people and shaping political coverage.

Indeed, the real power of bloggers in politics is how they interact with their mainstream media counterparts. Online journalism gives critics of the media a way to talk back, a platform from which to point out bias, hypocrisy and factual errors. And if the criticisms are on target, old-media institutions can't help but take note. That's exactly what just happened in South Dakota's epic Senate race between Minority Leader Tom Daschle and his GOP challenger, John Thune.

You can read the whole story here.