I love Crooks & Liars. They’re a great blog. They’re on my LinkBoard. But I do think that they’re going way overboard with effusive self-praise at a recent ranking released in the press:

There are literally millions of blogs now.  For one single blog, on its own, to generate 40% of the ten most linked-to posts for the year is a truly remarkable achievement.  It is a testament to the uniquely valuable role C&L plays in the blogosphere — not only in providing invaluable video content but, more importantly, in helping to shape the dialogue and agenda for the liberal blogosphere as a whole.

The thing is, all four of their top 10 most-linked-to blog posts were posts that were linked to because they contained video content, namely Colbert’s White House Correspondents’ dinner monologue, Al Gore’s SNL “presidential address,” and two Keith Olbermann commentaries.

The reason people linked to these posts were not because of the commentary offered by C&L, it was because the video was there. But Glenn Greenwald, author of the self-praising post, claims that C&L’s ability to “shape dialog and agenda” was more important than providing video content. Now, I think that C&L does a good job in regard to shaping the liberal dialog and agenda, but in all fairness, I do not believe that they received all those links on those posts for that. Remove the video content from those posts and allow them to stand on their commentary alone, and they would instantly drop into obscurity.

Don’t get me wrong–providing the video content is fantastic, and I depend on C&L to see so much of this stuff that I would never get to see otherwise, living overseas as I do. But the true credit for the inbound links lies with C&L only insofar as they went to the trouble and expense to provide the video content; the credit for shaping the dialog and agenda goes to Stephen Colbert, Al Gore, and most of all, Keith Olbermann.