Don't Fear the Blog and the Fury: Does a blogosphere frenzy that helps bring down a CNN news exec for a comment he made mean free speech is in peril? Nope. It's exploding
The Blogs Must Be Crazy Or maybe the MSM is just suffering from freedom envy.
The blogosphere isn't some mindless eruption of wild opinion. That isn't their power. This is their power:
1. They use the tools of journalists (computer, keyboard, a spirit of inquiry, a willingness to ask the question) and of the Internet (Google, LexisNexis) to look for and find facts that have been overlooked, ignored or hidden. [...]
2. Bloggers, unlike reporters at elite newspapers and magazines, are independent operators. They are not, and do not have to be, governed by mainstream thinking. [...]
3. Bloggers have an institutional advantage in terms of technology and form. They can post immediately. [...]
4. Bloggers are also selling the smartest take on a story. They're selling an original insight, a new area of inquiry. [...]
5. And they're doing it free. That is, the Times costs me a dollar and so does the Journal, but Kausfiles doesn't cost a dime. [...]
6. It is not true that there are no controls. It is not true that the blogosphere is the Wild West. What governs members of the blogosphere is what governs to some degree members of the MSM, and that is the desire for status and respect. In the blogosphere you lose both if you put forward as fact information that is incorrect, specious or cooked. [...]
7. I don't know if the blogosphere is rougher in the ferocity of its personal attacks than, say, Drew Pearson. Or the rough boys and girls of the great American editorial pages of the 1930s and '40s. Bloggers are certainly not as rough as the splenetic pamphleteers of the 18th and 19th centuries
No Protection for Bloggers: Now, with two reporters from established news organizations facing jail time for defying an order to divulge confidential sources to a federal grand jury, bloggers are clamoring for the same legal protection that journalists are accorded under the First Amendment.
But they won't get it. Besides, even if they did, it wouldn't be of much use.
[Curiosidade: porque será que este blogue ou este, provindos de meios de comunicação social, não são muito referenciados?...]
