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Thursday, September 23, 2004

CBS fiasco: SCLM gets "the blogosphere" wrong again 

And surprise! It's to the winger's advantage! What liberal media?

Would it be too much to ask that journalists do just a little basic research?

They know enough to know that Limbaugh is "conservative" [pause for true conservatives to gag] but they don't think to ask whether the blogs are.

Unbelievable? All too believable. From often reasonably reliable (at least when WaPo owned a piece of it) International Herald Tribune. Watch how seemingly neutral reportage eliminates half of your discourse:

It was largely the hammering of Web sites like www.freerepublic.com, www.instapundit.com and www.littlegreenfootballs.com, echoed by talk-show hosts - from the conservative talk-meister Rush Limbaugh to imitators like Sean Hannity and Michael Savage - that left CBS News without cover or defense, like a boxer too exhausted to protect his head.

As if the freepers and LGF weren't conservative? Puh-leeze! Can we have just a little objectivity here?

The blogs' response in the CBS News case was so immediate that some shaken Democrats muttered about a White House conspiracy.

"The" blogs? Like all blogs?

Within hours of the memos' becoming electronically viewable, according to Kelly McBride of the Poynter Institute, www.freerepublic.com had posted a message from a certain “Buckhead,” who said the memos appeared typographically anachronistic - likely produced by computers unavailable in the early 1970s. Remarkably, a plethora of other experts on 1970s' fonts and spacing popped up almost instantly to agree.

Um, and it turned out that F/Buckhead was a winger oeprative, a lawyer, and a member of the Federalist society (back) Not exactly a guy in his pajamas, eh?

This writer learned in an earlier life, editing letters to this newspaper, that an error that might go unchallenged in a local American paper would almost invariably be caught by someone among the International Herald Tribune's far-flung readership. Someone, somewhere, would always know.

Blogs have the unknown reliability of “a tipster calling a reporter on the phone,” South said. Some tips pan out, others fizzle. But someone, somewhere, will always know.
(via Herald Trib)

Right. "Someone will always know." We'll be waiting for the correction real soon....

You'd think that a first thing that a journalist [cough] would do, when talking about a new medium that he or she does not understand, would check the circulation figure.

Here are the top 1o blogs from the NZ Bear ecosystem (here):



Looks pretty much like America, right? Evenly divided.

Daily Kos: Liberal

Talking Points Memo: Liberal

Eschaton: Liberal

And Volokh, if not liberal, is nothing like LGF.

Yet, for some reason, the SCLM, when it talks about "blogs," leaves out the liberal half of the blogosphere. I wonder why?

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