The debut of Pajamas TV

Back in September 2004, the big blog brou-ha-ha was Dan Rather and the phony Texas Air National Guard memos being debunked with lightning speed, thanks to the Internet. The likes of the three Powerline guys, Charles Johnson of Little Green Footballs and others brought the fraud to the light of day with a sledgehammer blow.

I think we can safely say that is when blogs came into their own as a major engine of social information-sharing, and the beginning of the bell tolling for Old Media.

Right around that very time, Jonathan Klein, president of CNN-US, contemptuously dismissed bloggers as "guys sitting around in their pajamas" daring to intrude into the sacred realm of News. The metaphor caught fire in a big way. Today's bloggers might include some pajama-clad posters, but people like Glenn Reynolds, John Hinderaker, Scott Johnson, Paul Mirengoff and Charles Johnson hardly spend much time in THEIR jammies, being law professors, lawyers, Web designers, Hollywood screenwriters and other disciplines not usually seen in the kind of basement-dwellers Klein so arrogantly derided.

So a bunch of these bloggers took on the pajama mantle cheerfully. So much so, it became the germ of an idea -- Pajamas Media, a consortium of bloggers who wanted to take news and politics blogging to the next level.

That is -- challenge the MSM on their own turf. They've evolved to the point that they've received accreditation to cover the Republican National Convention along with the traditional bigs.

Not bad, for a bunch of knuckle-walkers in nightclothes ;)

So -- with all of that said, check out Pajamas TV. It's brand-new, still in the Alpha stage (with Beta not far behind). They do charge, alas ... can't produce something like actual TV in a vacuum. And I can't even afford the $15 monthly fee for basic feeds. (For now -- maybe later.)

But it's a totally cool idea, and these are thinkers you can trust to deliver the straight dope. Give 'em a look.