This is an edited transcript of a Wednesday interview by editors and reporters of The Washington Times with syndicated columnist Michelle Malkin and Bryan Preston, executive producer of HotAir.com:

Robert Stacy McCain, assistant national editor: Liberal bloggers have claimed credit for the Democrats' victory in the 2006 elections, and most observers agree that Democrats have done much better at working with bloggers. Why is that?

Mrs. Malkin: That's a good question. I think there's no question that the left-wing blogosphere had a huge impact on the mid-term campaign. But their No. 1 candidate, [Connecticut Democrat] Ned Lamont, lost. And they certainly can't claim victory for all those [conservative] Blue Dog Democrats who ran to the right of many of the Republicans who lost. So, I think there's certainly a perception that they're very powerful. In practice, I don't know. I don't know how much influence they truly wield.
I do agree that a lot of the Democratic leadership has done a better job than the Republicans have of pandering to the netroots, but look what that got [former North Carolina Sen.] John Edwards. Two of the nuttiest, most vulgar bloggers in the left-wing blogosphere insinuated themselves into that campaign, and no one thought to stop that until it caused him a huge heartache and embarrassment. And, obviously, even now, a lot of these Democrats haven't learned.
Just last week, [New York Sen.] Hillary Clinton was blogging for another of the most vile, hate-filled sites, FireDogLake. Here she is, lecturing Rutgers and the world about the need to stand up to misogyny and bigotry, and yet she guest-blogs for a blog that referred to [National Review editor] Kate O'Beirne as "sandpaper" fill-in-the-blank, and issued death threats against Kate O'Beirne for writing her book about liberal women. Jane Hamsher, who's the head of that blog, is also the person who is responsible for blackfacing [Connecticut Sen.] Joe Lieberman. And yet, all of that's happened and still Hillary Clinton goes and guest-blogs for that blog.
Obviously, they feel the need to pander to those people, but at some point, they'll have to run away from that, and hopefully, that stain will be indelible. I hope so -- I'll try and make it that way.

David Eldridge, managing editor, WashingtonTimes.com: You've become, whether you wanted to or not, sort of a symbol for women online who are standing up to the vulgarity of the blogosphere and the Internet ... can you talk a little bit about that?

Mrs. Malkin: It would have been nice if The Washington Post reporter had actually contacted me before they took what I said out of context. My colleagues at Hot Air took care to make sure that my comments were put in context. Actually, it was on the front page that Ellen Nakashima's article was placed, which had a very sympathetic view toward a lot of these left-wing women bloggers, who are now discovering that there are unhinged elements on the Internet that say very sexually degrading and violent things to women.
And my reaction, when that whole thing blew up -- I mean, it's amazing how much press coverage it got, global press coverage, because one female tech-blogger had gotten anonymous comments on her blog. And these pale in comparison to the signed comments and signed blog comments that I've had to deal with ever since I entered the blogosphere in 2004. What I said was, "Yeah, well, welcome to the club. You know, Janie-come-latelies, thank you for the discovering this, but I've been highlighting this for three years now." I wrote a whole book about it. It was called 'Unhinged,' which exactly captures some of those elements, and I said when those threats are serious, you should report them to law enforcement, but otherwise, you should continue blogging.
I think that cowering and trembling and deciding you're going to quit blogging because some anonymous person has called you some sexist name is the opposite of what a proud feminist position should be. And of course, the way The Post characterized my view was as callous, as sort of brushing off the concerns these women had. In fact, I was expressing a lot of sympathy for it and telling these women to buck up.

Mr. Eldridge: What kind of precautions do you take as you become a public persona online? And how much of it is reasonable precaution and how much of it is, like you say, cowering and allowing someone to bully you away from what you're trying to do as a journalist and as a blogger?

Mrs. Malkin: Well, I think every journalist now, in the context of the 21st-century information age, is essentially a public figure. Everything that you say, whether it's under a byline or offhandedly at a party, is something that could potentially become a public issue.
I think it's a good direction to move in, for The Washington Times and every other paper, for that matter, to become a part of the blogosphere and the Internet. It's just a reality. It's how information gets disseminated.
Precautions? I take plenty of them. I won't get into the details, but it's sad that I can't do things on my blog that I used to when I started out. I used to post pictures of my kids. I used to talk about going fishing with them. I would give people heads-up -- I used to have this feature called "Where in the World," and I would talk about where I would be appearing, what book events, signings, if I was going to be in some part of the country and wanted people to stop by or whatever -- I don't do that anymore.
And I think that journalists who are conservatives have a lot more to worry about than, you know, so-called mainstream journalists or people on the left. I think that the disparate treatment of conservative speakers on college campuses underscores that. You know, the fact is, Cindy Sheehan and Michael Moore don't need bodyguards, but pretty much every speaker on the right does now. The people on the left who appear for speaking events do not have to worry about getting pies or salad dressing or other foreign objects thrown at them. And I just think that now, it just comes with the territory. You just accept that.
There's that level of -- it's more than incivility, because there are those physical threats you have to deal with. So, you know, I just zealously guard the privacy of my family, obviously, but it's not going to stop me from doing what I do.
And so that's why I just felt the need to speak out about Kathy Sierra and the bloggers on the left, because they're saying now that what they have weathered is so drastic and so burdensome to them, that that's what's going to cause them to shut down. It's like, "You ain't seen nothing, honey. You don't know the half of it."

Mr. McCain: How do you see the evolving role of journalists -- specifically newspapers -- in the blogosphere? Can we be full participants?

Mrs. Malkin: I think as long as there's transparency about it. I think that there's no question, for example, that William Arkin at The Washington Post, who blogs there now, is not someone who can be trusted as an objective national security reporter. And I think that what The Washington Post should do is remove that neutral label as his title and just make him a full-time blogger, and to the extent that his pieces appear, they should appear on the opinion page.
But I don't have a problem with newspapers trying to have branded bloggers on their pages, bringing something new to the table and being full participants. I think full participation also argues for, you know, opening yourselves up to comments -- and, you know, The Washington Post has had a mixed record in regard to doing that. I also think they should be honest about where the problems come when they open their comments up. They're always trying to have a pose of moral equivalence, you know, "Oh, the conservative commenters are as bad as the liberal ones." Right. But you know, I think it's fairly clear where most of the incivility in the blogosphere comes from.

Mr. McCain: A friend once warned, "A blog will eat your life" -- it's addictive and time-consuming. Has that been true for you?

Mrs. Malkin: Absolutely. I confess -- I am a full blog junkie. I started out in June 2004 with MichelleMalkin.com.
I originally started that because I wanted to have a full, unadulterated debate about my second book, which is called "In Defense of Internment," and I knew that there would be considerable academic exchanges about it. And, obviously, The New York Times book review page and most mainstream book review pages are not places where conservative authors are treated fairly. And in fact, I had massive dialogue with two of the main scholars in this area, and was able to expose just how dishonest a lot of their arguments were, and really how cowardly they ended up being in challenging the book. And that's served as a great public record for anyone who's really interested in plumbing that history.
After that happened, though, you know, I'd been a blog reader since after 9/11 -- really, actually, before 9/11, I'd read Mickey Kaus' blog and Instapundit in the early days. Actually, I had a pre-blog at the same domain name in between jobs. I'd left the Seattle Times and had started my syndicated column. And so, even before there was blog software, I was using an old program called Microsoft Frontpage -- you can go back to the way-back machine and see the early versions of it. I would manually code the whole thing, and you know you'd have to, like, republish the whole entire Web site, and I probably had about five readers.
But after I jumped into it feet first, it's not something you can turn off. You do it in the middle of the night.