March 15, 2004

WHY Big Media Disses Blogs

Ed Driscoll examines whether the blogosphere is a glass half empty, or half full in a must-read article today at TechCentralStation.com. Driscoll's piece is filled with links, as any good story on blogs should be. Read the whole thing. Here's an excerpt:

As Bernard Goldberg has written in his best selling books Bias and Arrogance, the combination of entrenched-midtown Manhattan liberalism and ever-tightening standards of political correctness have caused the mainstream media to fumble the ball on numerous stories, and to distort many more, all the while claiming ideological purity (although curiously, perhaps as a result of continually being hammered by Weblogs, lately more and more members of big media seem willing to declare their biases). It's created an opening for first talk radio, then Internet-based e-zines such as this site, then Fox News, and now Weblogs to pick up the slack. As a result - as Brian Anderson wrote late last year - the left is no longer automatically winning the culture war.

No wonder CNN doesn't want the concept of Weblogs to spread. If, as is frequently said, newspapers are the first draft of history, then blogs are its rewrite stage, where the facts and opinions of big media are carefully examined. If they survive repeated analysis by the Blogosphere, they're probably sound. But more and more, the first draft of history is looking like it needs a lot of red rewrite ink.