Blogs are Web sites that tend to be narrow in focus and directed at a niche audience. Most operate without editors and give instant reaction to the news.
Their freewheeling, open nature makes them popular but also ripe for unverified statements.
If any of the many NYTimes (Strib, LATimes, substitute any major daily) scandals are any indication, it appears that newspapers are operating without editors and fact checkers as well, they just don’t give you the instantaneous part. Before newspapers start lecturing us about the wild west that is the blogosphere they may want to clean up their own houses first.
In a recent poll [Jeff: 2005, not recent but not old] conducted by the Annenberg Public Policy Center, 65 percent of the respondents thought that most news organizations, if they discover they’ve made a mistake, try to ignore it or cover it up, and 79 percent opined that a media company would hesitate to carry negative stories about a corporation from which it received substantial advertising revenues.
Tags: media, newspapers, blogs