Of all the media teams at the perjury trial of I. Lewis Libby Jr., none has been bigger than -- or more openly crushed by the defense decision this week not to put Cheney and Libby on the stand -- than Firedoglake.com.

A collective of liberal bloggers, fueled by online donations and a fanatical devotion to the intricacies of the Libby case, Firedoglake has offered intensive trial coverage, using a rotation of six contributors. They include a former prosecutor, a current defense lawyer, a Ph.D. business consultant and a movie producer who are all staying at a Washington apartment rented for the duration of the trial.

Each day during the trial of the former top aide to Vice President Dick Cheney, one Firedoglake blogger is assigned to beam a real-time transcript from the courthouse media room to the Web.

With no audio or video feed permitted, the Firedoglake "live blog" has offered the fullest, fastest public report available. Many mainstream journalists use it to check on the trial.

Libby's lawyers rested their case Wednesday shortly after the judge said he had been misled about whether Libby would take the stand.

A first for bloggers

For blogs, the Libby trial marks a courthouse coming of age. It is the first federal case for which independent bloggers have been given official credentials, said Robert A. Cox, president of the Media Bloggers Association. Cox negotiated access for the bloggers.

"My goal is to get judges to think of bloggers as citizen journalists who should get the same protections as other journalists get," Cox said. He acknowledged that the Libby case has vividly illustrated the limits on those protections, as one reporter, Judith Miller, formerly of The New York Times, went to jail and others were forced to testify about once-confidential sources.

With a mix of news, commentary and inside jokes, Firedoglake's audience has grown steadily during the trial, reaching 200,000 visitors and requiring an additional computer server on its busiest days -- as it did Tuesday, with the revelation that Cheney would not appear.

"After all that, Shooter lets me down," wrote Jane Hamsher, creator of Firedoglake and organizer of its trial team. Cheney is nicknamed on the blog for his infamous hunting accident, which handily rhymes with the nickname for his former aide, Scooter.

At Firedoglake and other sites on the left, Patrick J. Fitzgerald, the prosecutor, comes across as a righteous avenger, exposing the perfidy of Libby in particular and the Bush White House in general.

Over on the right, meanwhile, conservative bloggers portray Fitzgerald's case against Libby as a gratuitous exercise that is slowly coming apart. At American Thinker, Clarice Feldman has repeatedly taken aim at the prosecution's most important witness, the host of NBC's Meet the Press.

"Tim Russert has some explaining to do," Feldman, a lawyer sitting in on the trial this week, wrote in her blog.

Not always objective

Sheldon L. Snook, the court official in charge of the media, said the decision to admit bloggers has worked out well.

"It seems they can provide legal analysis and a level of detail that might not be of interest to the general public but certainly has an audience," Snook said.

Even as they exploit technology, the Libby trial bloggers are a throwback to a journalistic style of decades ago, when reporters made no pretense of political neutrality. Compared with the sober, neutral drudges of the establishment press, the bloggers are class clowns and crusaders, satirists and scolds.

"They're putting in a lot more opinion and a lot more color than the traditional reporters," said Cox, adding that the bloggers were challenging "the theory of objective journalism."

Like the newspaper and network reporters, the bloggers have alternated between sitting in on testimony in Courtroom 16 and watching the video feed to the media room, where laptops are allowed.

Hamsher, 47, created Firedoglake on a shoestring -- its major expense is a $200-a-month charge for Web hosting. Online donors are paying trial coverage costs, including the travel expenses of the bloggers and the $3,500 a month rent on the Washington apartment, dubbed Plame House after Valerie Plame, the CIA operative whose exposure led to the criminal investigation and Libby's indictment.

The bloggers, some of whom are taking vacation or have flexible work schedules, are all unpaid. Hamsher describes the blog as "a collective watering hole" where contributors with diverse expertise "scour every possible source for information and then pool their resources."

Its name is easily explained, she said: "I like lying in front of the fire with my dogs and watching the Lakers."

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