Friday, June 9, 2006 | 7:41 a.m.
When a story about Iran requiring its Jewish citizens to wear a yellow insignia was exposed as a hoax, a Las Vegas woman had as much to do with debunking it as anyone.
Taylor Marsh, a local blogger at taylormarsh.com, found the story suspicious. She began digging and soon, thanks to her reporting, the whole thing unraveled. The former Broadway actress, artist and talk-radio dabbler, working on her computer from home, managed to spear an international story.
High-traffic Web sites, including talkingpointsmemo, gave her credit, as did the mainstream press. She has quickly become a well-known blogger. It's almost a cliche now, but she's emblematic of what the Web has done to politics and journalism.
"You're not relying on this monolithic Fourth Estate stuff anymore," she says, referring to the press corps. "There are so many new sources of information."
Marsh said she has always been animated by politics, since watching her brother and sister cry in front of the TV set in Missouri after John F. Kennedy's assassination.
Politics lost that sense of emotion, especially in the Democratic Party, she said. "Would my brother or sister have cried over (Michael) Dukakis?" she asked of the failed 1988 presidential candidate.
Online politics has injected new emotion into the Democratic Party, she said.
Since college, Marsh has bounced from one career to another, always dreaming that the next one would lead to stardom. She went to New York, spending eight years chasing the Broadway dream. Then it was off to Los Angeles to pursue film and TV. She began writing.
Three years ago, she moved to Las Vegas for her own talk-radio show, but it went under. After the 2004 election, she wrote a one-act play about her political beliefs called "Weeping for JFK" and performed it in L.A., but she couldn't find any takers here, where she lives in a house adorned with her own paintings - and a live peacock sporting a massive plume that struts among the rooms.
Last fall she began blogging. She sells some ads, but it's not enough to make a living. Later this month she'll start her own online show.
"I've risked everything. I've lost everything. And now, here I am."
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