I thought this was relevant, considering the flap over the weekend concerning a NYT columnist who lifted content from a prominent TPM blogger without giving credit. From BYUNews:
Professional journalists and political bloggers have different takes on accuracy in the world of political news, with the former pursuing objectivity and the latter openly peddling their personal opinions.
Yet political bloggers hold an edge with shared readers when it comes to the trust factor.
- 30 percent said blogs are more accurate
- 8 percent said traditional media are more accurate
- 40 percent said they’re about equal
- 21 percent were not sure
Davis also queried more than 200 journalists to learn how they use blog content in their coverage of political news. Most journalists were aware of influential blogs on both sides of the political spectrum, such as Daily Kos and Talking Points on the left and Michelle Malkin and Instapundit on the right. Despite equal awareness, journalists spend more time reading posts in the liberal blogosphere.
For example, more journalists know about Michelle Malkin than Talking Points. Yet twice as many journalists actually read Talking Points than read Michelle Malkin.
“When journalists take story ideas from blogs, those ideas naturally will come from blogs they read,” Davis said. “These reading patterns suggest journalists may be getting primarily one view of the blogosphere.”
I think one of the flaws in Davis’s conclusion is making comparisons between Malkin and TPM. Malkin is a wingnut. TPM, an investigative journalism blog. One may be right, one left, but I’m inclined to believe journalists may be reading TPM more because Malkin is a bit loose with the facts. As a journalist, such a source is useless (while fun) to read.
Davis obscures his first point with the weaker second, and it’s the first point that means something: Journalists are turning, with increasing frequency, to blogs for stories to cover, and blogs are maintaining a higher “trust” factor with readers than the very newspapers who’s stories they discuss.
Most of the media simply limits the truth and limits it to one side – the statist’s totalitarian liberal side. They sugar-coat it to get the public to swallow it. Many don’t want to swallow their crap anymore, and now they don’t have to.