Bloggers drive the News Agenda

Traditional Media trailing the Internet

This was the year when mainstream media outlets unexpectedly found themselves looking over their shoulders at the internet and, perhaps most surprisingly, at the new armies of political bloggers.

“Things start on the fringes of the blogosphere, become the buzz, and then move to cable news,” observed Alex Jones, director of Harvard’s Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press.

And often, critics note, the cable news channels pick up the stories, without always verifying all the facts.

A signal media moment in this season was the furore that followed a 60 Minutes report by Dan Rather of CBS purporting to have a memo showing that George Bush ducked his National Guard duties. Mr Rather was tripped up when word surfaced that the memo may in fact have been forged - in the blogs.

“Bloggers, in some instances, are pushing the envelope in defining the political agenda and news coverage,” remarked Pete Blackshaw of the press monitoring service Intelliseek.

More at INDEPENDENT PORTFOLIO…