Who will crowdsource the Lois Lerner e-mails?

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Jazz Shaw:

When we first talked about the “discovery” of tens of thousands of Lois Lerner e-mails stored on backup tapes, I asked who was going to be doing the scud work of digging through them all. I also suggested that it might better to shop the job out to some bloggers who could make the time and find a fine enough toothed comb to do the job justice. Today, Matt Lewis notes that similar things have been done in the past, particularly when it fit a running media narrative, but he seems skeptical that the same effort will be applied in this case.

[A]fter SNL ran an amusing parody of Schoolhouse Rock to satirize Obama’s order on immigration reform, the Washington Post took it upon themselves to fact check a comedy show. As far as I can tell, this service was not provided after Tina Fey’s line “I can see Russia from my house” helped destroy Palin’s image. And that’s too bad, since Palin never said those words (despite what most Americans might think).

A similar example occurred the other day, when a Friday news dump indicated a trove of 30,000 “lost” emails of former IRS official Lois Lerner’s had been discovered by the Inspector General. This was from the time when the IRS was targeting conservative groups. The media mostly reported the news with a yawn, only sometimes noting Lerner’s refusal to testify, or to recall just how amazingly coincidental it was that her hard drive just happened to crash in the first place, or previous statements that the emailscould not be retrieved and were lost forever, or the absurd notion that a government agency couldn’t logistically retrieve two years worth of “lost” emails.

Now compare that to what happened when Sarah Palin’s emails were released. As Politico reported at the time, “Reporters lined up in Juneau and in front of computers across the country spent the afternoon poring over 24,000 newly released emails from Sarah Palin’s first year and a half as governor, hoping for a bombshell.”

In case you’ve forgotten, it was a huge event. Media outlets “crowd sourced” the project, asking readers to help wade through the 24,000 pages of Palin emails. ABC News live blogged it. You can still go to the Washington Postand “Browse through Sarah Palin’s e-mails from her time as governor of Alaska from 2006-2008, or search by keyword to locate a specific topic.” Ditto NBC News (and I’m guessing a lot of other outlets).

Matt makes an excellent point here in terms of either media bias, or to put it a tad bit more kindly, perhaps media interest.

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What would you be willing to bet that a search of these emails would yield considerably more worthy information than the fine-toothed combing of Palin’s emails which yielded… nothing?