America: Among the 2,500 media registered for the presidential debate in Miami on Thursday were dozens of bloggers, individuals with their own websites whose reporting and commentaries are changing the way politics is covered in the United States, writes Conor O'Clery.
Thousands more of these mostly part-time entrepreneurs of information were sitting at home, ready to pounce on snippets from the debate to reinforce their points of view.
The bloggers have created a fifth estate where anything goes and they are getting a big following. Daily newspapers and television networks still set the news agenda in the US but items on that agenda are now often initiated by laptop owners with their own web logs (blogs). There are more than two million Americans with web logs, so it's tough to get noticed, but some have scooped the national media.
When CBS showed 31-year- old documents casting doubt on President Bush's National Guard service, conservative bloggers like Charles Johnson started challenging their authenticity within two hours.
He rewrote the documents on Microsoft Word and found them similar in line breaks, margins, type size, tab stops, etc, and made the case they were not written on a 1973 machine.
Days went by before this was picked up by the Drudge Report and then the regular media. It became one of the biggest sto- ries of the election campaign.
A CBS executive dismissed the bloggers as "people writing in their pyjamas", but the network in the end had to admit it could not authenticate the documents. It apologised and its ratings have gone down.
The bloggers have assumed the role of national fact-checkers with attitude. Daily Kos, one of the most popular with the left, keeps a record of Bush's alleged flip-flops and tends to give news items its own spin.
Run by Markos Moulitsas (in T-shirt and shorts) it gets more than 350,000 hits a day, several times greater than the circulation of the influential journal, the New Republic.
Talking Points Memo, run by anti-Bush blogger Joshua Marshall - so well known he got accreditation to the annual party conventions - gleefully reminds people that a year ago, super-hawk Richard Perle said: "A year from now I'll be very surprised if there is not some grand square in Baghdad named after President Bush."
Anti-war bloggers turned the Howard Dean primary campaign into a money-making phenomenon, uniting rebel Democrats across the country.
Some conservative bloggers like Instapundit, created by law professor Glen Reynolds, are regularly accessed in the White House. Instapundit often draws attention to stories on other blogs. This week, for example, it carried a link to Little Green Footballs which claimed another CBS document fraud, charging that a network reporter "used debunked internet hoax e-mails and an unlabelled interest group member to scare viewers into believing that the US government is poised to resume the draft".
Some web logs are now so popular they are attracting ads. These are being run not by people in pyjamas but in business suits.
The bloggers had a good time this week with John Kerry's strange suntan. The Democratic candidate appeared at the start of the week with his customary pallor replaced by a startling deep orange, as if he had used the wrong tanning lotion.
It went the rounds of the web logs and became the talk of the political world. Everybody at a Dick Cheney rally seemed to be in on the joke on Wednesday when the Vice-President asked for questions from supporters with dark orange shirts.
When he paused as if trying to describe the shade of orange, his wife Lynne Cheney said: "How about John Kerry's suntan?" Boom! Boom!
A Kerry campaign spokesman retorted: "Is Mrs Cheney jealous considering how hard it is to get sun in the undisclosed location with her husband Dick or is she distracted over how red-in-the-face George Bush should be considering his failed presidency?"
All Bush and Cheney events are ticket-only affairs. Long gone are the days of preaching to the unconverted from the back of a train where onlookers could exercise the right of free speech.
The Bush-Cheney campaign always asks people applying for tickets to fill in a form giving
email addresses and phone numbers and to say whether they support the president.
After the rallies, they are often escorted into nearby tents or basements set up with phone banks and asked to make calls supporting the Bush-Cheney campaign. Asked if critics of the president were welcome at Republican campaign rallies, a campaign spokesman said the policy was to reward Mr Bush's most eager supporters first when allocating the limited number of tickets.