MSM and Bloggers

[Annie]

I think it was Hobbit's post that brought this to mind. Some bloggers are nonsense, they don't get much traffic and they have even less to say. Others are better:

http://www.usnews.com/usnews/opinion/baroneblog/columns/barone_050816.htm

8/16/05
All the bad news that's fit to print

On Friday the Washington Post front-paged a story on military bloggers.
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Michael Barone is a senior writer for U.S.News & World Report and principal coauthor of The Almanac of American Politics. He has written for many publications — including the Economist and the New York Times.
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Reporter Jonathan Finer concentrated almost entirely on bloggers critical of the war effort and mentioned next to nothing about the military bloggers who have been presenting the good news that the Post and other mainstream media almost never choose to print. It's not that such blogs are hard to find; Finer could have accessed several by clicking on the MILBLOGS listed on Hugh Hewitt's blogroll. Polls suggest that military personnel by wide margins support the war effort and support George W. Bush. Finer and the Post have chosen to highlight the minority who share the dominant views of the Post's newsroom and to conceal from their readers the majority who take a different view.

Is it just imagination, or have the Post's news pages taken a more leftward tilt since Phil Bennett replaced Steve Coll as managing editor? To gauge where Bennett is coming from, read this interview. Excerpt spotlighted by Michelle Malkin: "For me, this episode [the administration's claims that there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq] is a good example of how difficult it is to independently verify the government's claims when the government is lying to you." Coll, who has just announced he is moving from the Post to the New Yorker, is certainly not a movement conservative. But he is a brilliant reporter and a gifted writer whose books show a clear-eyed view of the world and a determination to take the reader where the facts warrant, rather than to the destination favored by the leftist newsroom culture.