Joshua Micah Jesajan-Dorja Marshall (born February 15, 1969) is an American journalist and blogger[1] who founded Talking Points Memo.
[2] A liberal, he currently presides over a network of progressive-oriented sites that operate under the TPM Media banner and average 400,000-page views every weekday[3] and 750,000 unique visitors every month.
[3] Marshall began writing freelance articles about Internet free speech for The American Prospect in 1997 and was soon hired as an associate editor.
[3] Inspired by political bloggers such as Mickey Kaus and Andrew Sullivan, Marshall started Talking Points Memo during the 2000 Florida election recount.
[3] In 2002, Marshall used Talking Points Memo to report on Trent Lott's controversial comments praising Strom Thurmond's 1948 presidential run as a segregationist.
[6] According to Harvard Kennedy School, Marshall was instrumental in fueling the ensuing scandal that eventually led to Trent Lott's resignation as Senate Minority Leader.
[3] In the fall of 2003, as people focused on the failure to find WMD's in Iraq, there was a new surge of traffic to the site; "I remember there being peak days of 60,000-page views, which was really incredible.
[18] This site features a collection of blogs about a wide range of domestic and foreign policy issues written by academics, journalists and former public officials among others.
[2] Marshall won The Polk Award for Legal Reporting for his coverage of the story, which "led the news media" and "connected the dots and found a pattern of federal prosecutors being forced from office for failing to do the Bush Administration's bidding.
Carol Lam successfully prosecuted Republican California Representative Duke Cunningham on bribery charges and was in the middle of an ongoing criminal investigation into a congressional scandal of historic proportions.