From W.N.Y.C. in New York, this is NPR's On the Media.

Bob Garfield has laryngitis. Really, he does.

And I'm Bob Garfield. I think I'll just be quiet for a little while.

And I'm Brooke Gladstone.

As you certainly know by now, Mississippi Republican Trent Lott has relinquished his role as Senate Majority Leader.

He was dislodged by a wave of condemnation that followed a comment he made at Strom Thurman's

100th birthday party.

Thurmond ran for president on a segregationist platform in 1948.

I want to say this about my state.

When Strom Thurman ran for president, we voted for him. We're proud of it.

And if the rest of the country had fallen our lead, we wouldn't have had all these problems

over all these years either. According to New York Post columnist John Podhoritz, the credit,

or the blame, for the fall of Trent Lott, belongs to a group that lives solely in cyberspace, the bloggers.

The term bloggers comes from blog, which comes from weblog.

Bloggers are innumerable and opinionated, and they are all over the web, chatting, arguing, spinning the news, and making the news.

In fact, Trent Lott's infamous birthday party comment burst into the headlines because of the blogs.

John Pod Horowitz joins me now. Welcome to On the Media. Thanks, Brooke. So it's bloggers that made

hay of the Trent Lott story. Do you know on which blog and by whom?

Well, the most important figure in this story is probably Josh Marshall, who runs a blog

called Talking Points Memo.com. The lot story broke on a Friday, and over the weekend, Marshall highlighted it.

Other people saw it there.

Another blogger named Atreus then ran with it as well, dug up some very interesting stuff

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