The effort attracted notice last month when one of the deepest-pocketed conservative groups, Crossroads Grassroots Policy Strategies – or Crossroads GPS – launched an initiative called Wikicountability to crowd-source investigations of President Barack Obama’s administration by collecting government documents obtained through the Freedom of Information Act. As a start, Crossroads GPS pushed three relatively low-impact findings based on FOIAs – including that $3.66 million in taxpayer money was used to pay for an ad promoting last year’s Democratic healthcare overhaul.

“The left is still beating the right at the game of doing investigative reporting, but I think the right has finally realized both the need and the problem,” said Erick Erickson, editor of Red State, an influential conservative blog that occasionally features or aggregates researched reporting by conservatives critical of the left. “After a couple of years of thinking the right was dropping the ball, I finally think the train is moving and building up momentum.”…

“A lot of conservatives think that you have to abide by Marquess of Queensberry rules even if you’re in a knock-down, drag-out bar fight,” said Matthew Vadum, a senior editor at Capital Research Center, a conservative non-profit that researches liberal donors. “And it’s good to be ethical, but sometimes maybe you need to explore new frontiers to reflect the changing nature of political combat in modern America.”

He added, “This doesn’t mean we have to go all Saul Alinsky on the left, but the right can be more aggressive in how it deals with the left and we’re starting to see that.”