A major newspaper publishes something inaccurate. Partisan bloggers seize on the mistake and campaign for a retraction. This has been a familiar story ever since blogs became popular, but recent stories have a new twist: the campaigns against the so-called mainstream media are increasingly coming not from conservatives but from liberals.

Last month, the Washington Post's ombudsman, Deborah Howell, wrote that disgraced lobbyist Jack Abramoff had given money to both Republicans and Democrats. Prompted by links from several liberal blogs, hundreds of people left comments on the Post's in-house blog pointing out that in fact Abramoff personally donated money only to Republicans. Howell was also flooded with emails demanding that she correct the mistake. Response to the article was encouraged by repeated posts on popular liberal blogs such as Firedoglake.blogspot.com and Dailykos.com. In answer to the outcry, the Post disabled the comments feature on its blog, and both Howell and Post online editor Jim Brady complained publicly about the abuse the paper had taken. It was the first widely publicized clash between big media and the liberal "blogosphere" -- but it's not likely to be the last.

Attacks on big media outlets -- like the Post, the New York Times and CNN in the U.S., or the Toronto Star and the CBC in Canada -- traditionally have come from the right, which has made a cottage industry out of bashing the media for liberal bias. But with conservative parties in power in the U.S., Canada and elsewhere, it becomes harder to claim conservatives are being systematically kept down, and conservative bloggers have had a tough time drumming up outrage over the past year.

Liberal bloggers, on the other hand, have become increasingly outraged by what they see as the media's willingness to accept conservative talking points at face value. American bloggers point to New York Times reporter Judith Miller's discredited reporting on Iraq, while liberal Canadian bloggers claimed to see disproportionately negative coverage of Prime Minister Paul Martin. Some of these bloggers have taken it upon themselves to do what their counterparts on the right do: use blogs as a way of putting pressure on media outlets to correct themselves.

Many recent liberal blog campaigns focused on veteran network news hosts, who are seen as uncritically repeating the right's messages. When Chris Matthews, host of MSNBC's Hardball, said that a statement by Osama bin Laden sounded like liberal filmmaker Michael Moore, the blog openlettertochrismatthews.com was set up to encourage complaints to the network and its advertisers. Matthews noticed the criticism enough to say, on a subsequent show, that he had been "misunderstood."

Franklin Foer, a writer for The New Republic, recently chided liberal bloggers for what he saw as "playing into conservatives' hands." By attacking the mainstream media, Foer claimed, liberals are reinforcing the idea that the media is inherently biased and thereby helping to discredit the "Progressive-era ethos of public-minded disinterestedness."

In response, the popular anonymous blogger "Digby" offered a checklist of recent incidents where he feels the media bowed to pressure from the right. "I began to see," he went on, "that the only way to get the press to work properly was to apply equal pressure from the opposite direction." In other words, no quarter: liberal bloggers have decided that the only way to fix the media is to hit them as hard from the left as they have traditionally been hit from the right.

For now, journalists still seem more influenced by attacks from the right: whereas conservative bloggers have been credited with helping force the resignation of CBS anchorman Dan Rather, the complaints of liberal bloggers have not had the same traction. Duncan Black, who blogs at Atrios.blogspot.com, has argued that journalists simply can't understand that their work could be perceived as having a conservative bias: "Their brains are just unable to process any media criticism that doesn't emanate from . . . Rush Limbaugh."

But with liberal blogs becoming increasingly popular, and increasingly outraged by what they see as the failure of the press, there are likely to be more campaigns, bigger ones, to push journalists to correct errors and retract statements. In defending the Washington Post, Jim Brady told an interviewer that when it comes to accusations of bias, "we get it from both sides." But for the first time, they are getting it a little more from the left.

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