Michelle Malkin’s vaunted list of “investigative online reporting published on conservative blogs” demonstrates, for the umpteenth time, that Michelle Malkin can’t tell the difference between reporters and partisan political operatives. She opens the list reportly enough—Patterico’s posts on William Jefferson, Alex Kozinski and Chuck Philips are, in fact, works of investigative journalism—but after that you have:

  1. a hit-piece on Air America
  2. a hit-piece on Al Franken
  3. an unpublished hit-piece by Larry Grathwohl that Confederate Yankee posted because neither knew the New York Times doesn’t print op-ed rebuttals
  4. something or other in which someone talks about attending political rallies
  5. a hit-piece on Ayers in which one “Zombie” did a Lexis-Nexis search
  6. numerous failed hit-pieces by Charles Johnson—representative—about trolls on Obama’s community blogs
  7. a hit-piece on Jeremiah Wright
  8. a hit-piece on Obama Jr. via Obama Sr.
  9. numerous hit-pieces by Stanley Kurtz—representative—on Obama
  10. numerous hit-pieces on Obama for his “abortion extremism” in which his public voting record and campaign statements were “reported on”
  11. some “top notch investigative work” that links to back to Malkin’s post
  12. some video hit-pieces on YouTube that rebroadcast Obama’s never-before-heard and never-anywhere-seen statements about “redistributing wealth”
  13. a Google search for Ed Morrissey at Hot Air that “brought down [Canada's] liberal government in 2005
  14. a whole slew of hit-pieces written by Malkin herself which I won’t bother to link to

My point?

Doing a Lexis-Nexis search is not investigative reporting.

Reprinting material from social networking sites is not investigative reporting.

Rebroadcasting clips that every network—including Foxnews—had in heavy rotation for weeks on end is not investigative reporting.

Attacking people with whom a Presidential candidate had some contact is not investigative reporting.

While it’s possible for partisan hacks like Malkin to do investigative reporting, little of what she presents as investigative reporting is investigative reporting.  The majority of her links are to undisguised attacks by unpaid political operatives, and—say it with me now—an undisguised attack by an unpaid political operative is not investigative reporting.

(via Young Matthew.)

(x-posted.)