Everyone knows that blogs are open source journalism.
The out-of-pocket cost for me to offer this to you is minimal. Its economic value to me is based on how many of you read it. Every blogger is a publisher as well as an editor, subject to both sets of ethics by the requirements of the market.
What is missed by analysts like the National Hotline and its Blogometer is that reading also means something. What we read does not determine what is true. What we read, in a world where anything is available, reveals the biases of the readers. The fact, that say, Michelle Malkin is avidly read by conservatives, doesn’t mean that she speaks truth to power. It says she says what her readers want said.
A true meta-journalism of the blogosphere would, unlike the National Journal, speak truth to this power — in this case the power of the blogosphere and its readers. Instead we get this "he said, she said" nonsense in which each claim is given equal weight, measured only by its audience.
Biases must be applied, bullshit must be called, and readers’ biases, not just writers’, need to go under the microscope.
The right’s preferences for increasingly outrageous liars — Instapundit begets Hugh Hewitt begets Malkin — is a very important piece of data. Reynolds at least pretended to some form of impartiality. Malkin is a raving loon. Does not the fact of her rise and his fall say something about the people who read conservative blogs?
I think it does. I think it says something important. But you’ll never see The National Journal call the readers on this. And that’s a shame. Because readers are a vital part of the blogging process. Their choices mean something, just as the choices of bloggers mean something. Because if readers are expressing a preference for lies and bigotry over journalism and analysis, it says something about them.
There is, frankly, no one on the left who is equivalent to Malkin. As much as conservatives might wish it so, there is no one on the left with any audience who spends all day spewing out hatred, bigotry, and lies as she does. No one.
Instead we have TalkingPointsMemo, which does actual journalism in
that they gather facts and set them in order, rather than just
bloviating. Eschaton is equivalent to Instapundit, Crooks and Liars is a
video site, and then we have Hullaballoo and Firedoglake.
Another fault in the Blogometer "list of leading blogs" is that not
all those sites on the list are blogs. DailyKos and RedState are
community sites, running CNS software. Crooks and Liars is mainly a
link to TV clips. The Huffington Post isn’t a blog, but a collection of
columns, updated dozens of times per day. Same with the National Review
Corner.
Not all blogging is blogging. And there are many ways to do a blog. Reynolds and Black are
tour guides for their ideological audiences, adding a few words of
snark to what are essentially a collection of links. TalkingPointsMemo
was originally a blog, but now it’s the heart of a larger operation,
with TPMCafe, and spends much of its time publicizing the work within
its journalistic universe.
Of the "blogs" in the Blogometer top 10 only two –Hullaballoo and
Firedoglake — are really blogs in the sense that this is a blog. That
is, they consist of articles written at length, often with new
information, by journalist-columnists. And as time goes on both, in
order to keep their ratings, are becoming more-and-more like The
Corner, with a number of writers.
In the end, analyzing "blogs" as though you can put them in a box, then under a microscope, is a mistake. Blogging is evolving, blogging software is evolving, blog reading is evolving, the blog business is evolving, and any snapshot is going to miss several dimensions of what is happening.
