Joshua Michael Marshall, the founder Talking Points Memo, is among the recipients of the 2007 George Polk Awards. We're talking about a blogger winning a journalism award that has street cred with the folks who still pride themselves on knowing what a pica stick is for.

Marshall's reporting on the firing of eight US attorneys landed him in the number with martyred Oakland investigative reporter Chauncey Bailey, and creative non-fiction demigod John Mc Phee, among others. Do you think this means that bloggers who do journalism will finally be accorded respect by their traditional media counterparts?

Will Bunch hopes so::

Hopefully, this acknowledgment of what one savvy blogger and his team have accomplished is a milestone that will speed the day when mainstream journalists realize that the best kind of blogger like Marshall is truly one of our own kind, using new tools and a new way of thinking to break a news story that otherwise might have not been discovered.

A George Polk award is a badge of journalistic courage honoring the late CBS news reporter who was shot to death in 1948 after critical reports on both sides in a civil war in Greece. His killers were never found. I had the privilege of knowing 1997 Polk Award winner Dr. Edna McKenzie. Here's what I wrote about her at the time of her death in 2005:

"The former Edna Chappelle began her newspaper career in 1941, after graduating from high school. She was inspired to go into news work by the example of her older sister, a 1936 Wilberforce graduate who edited a paper in Uniontown, Pennsylvania. After a stint at the Los Angeles Tribune, she joined the staff of the Pittsburgh Courier, working on the society column. Within a few years, she elbowed her way on to the news desk and covered murders (including lynchings) and other hard news alongside the men.

"Mc Kenzie was part of the team that carried out the "Double V" campaign during World War II, calling for victory against racism in the US as well as against the Axis powers. Braving threats of violence as well as government intimidation, Mc Kenzie and her colleagues documented discriminatory practices in housing, employment and public accommodations. One of her assignments was to go to restaurants and asked to be served. Sometimes she was just told that the establishment didn't serve blacks; at other times, she was told that the restaurant didn't serve whatever she asked for. McKenzie said that the treatment she was subjected to sometimes made her cry, but she would force herself to go out and endure it all over again. Her reporting buttressed several lawsuits against the restaurants. Ultimately, she told an interviewer, “We broke down discrimination in Pittsburgh many years before the civil rights movement started in the south.”

McKenzie told me that she felt her Polk Award signified recognition that journalists the fight against racism in the US was also a war.

But if you ask Chez Pazienza, mainstream journalism has lost too much of its own soul to appreciate bloggers like Marshall. The award -winning CNN producer says that he turned to blogging for inspiration after coming to feel that "the profession I once loved and felt honored to be a part of has lost its way." How badly?

"During my last couple of years as a television news producer, I watched the networks try to recover from a six year failure to bring truth to power (the political party in power being irrelevant incidentally; the job of the press is to maintain an adversarial relationship with the government at all times) and what's worse, to pretend that they had a backbone all along. I watched my bosses literally stand in the middle of the newsroom and ask, "What can we do to not lead with Iraq?" -- the reason being that Iraq, although an important story, wasn't always a surefire ratings draw. I was asked to complete self-evaluations which pressed me to describe the ways in which I'd "increased shareholder value." (For the record, if you're a rank-and-file member of a newsroom, you should never under any circumstances even hear the word "shareholders," let alone be reminded that you're beholden to them.)..."

He says CNN fired him last week for supposedly violating a little-known company rule requiring employees to get approval before writing for other publishing outlets -- and particularly, for espousing liberal political views:

"When I asked, just out of curiosity, who came across my blog and/or the columns in the Huffington Post, the woman from HR answered, "We have people within the company whose job is specifically to research this kind of thing in regard to employees."

Jesus, we have a Gestapo?"

Kate from Media Bistro exclaimed , "Honest to blog!" at Pazienza's tale, and wondered,

"CNN thinks he's the only employee who's blogging under his own name--and as they have some super-secret HR unit that researches this stuff, it must be so. Imagine what CNN could do if they devoted that energy to sniffing out news."

Who knows? They might even win a Polk Award. Maybe Josh Marshall could give them some tips.