This week, Sports Illustrated has an excerpt in its GolfPlus Special from the recently published tome by Alan Shipnuck on last year's failed effort to integrate the home of the Masters, The Battle for Augusta National. Shipnuck, who covers the sport for the magazine, has some particularly interesting insights on the sad role blogs played in the whole affair. The villain (or hero, amongst the bedsheet-wearing crowd) of the piece is a Beltway flack named Jim McCarthy, who was hired by the restricted country club to go "on the attack--investigate the activists, hold them accountable for their track record and their ideological inconsistencies. You have to take on the press that is often conspiring to give the activists a platform to espouse their views. It's like the argument of appeasement versus aggression in geopolitics, and we all know how Neville Chamberlain fared."(emphasis added)

McCarthy, an avid readers of blogs, planted stories with Internet conservatives to shift the focus away from Augusta National's sorry track record on racial and sexual discrimination and instead towards the New York Times and Howell Raines. With Raines, et al., already unpopular on the right for the Times' oft-critical reporting of the Bush Administration, McCarthy's flackery found a receptive audience in the blogosphere, and hostile coverage elsewhere effectively mau-maued the Times into silence on the issue. As of today, Augusta National still has no female members, and only a smattering of token non-whites, and stands as a shabby symbol of the sport of golf. [additional links via The National Debate]