You provide exactly the kind of network-related insight, terminology, and knowledge I was looking for. You could have the makings of a good article here.

Your analysis is similar to something I saw here a couple of months back showing a graphic linkage of book orders (I think from Amazon). The graphic showed, for specific political books ordered, the other books ordered by the same people. The final image showed a remarkable gap between "liberal" and "conservative" books, not showing much "cross-fertilization" from one side to the other.

I agree with you that there are certainly a lot of "me too" blogs and boards out there, containing largely echoes of the original sentiments on any comments.

But there are a remarkable number of sites where the "other side" figures prominently in the discussions. For LOTS of people on the Net, interacting with, or shooting down, the opposition is much more fun than simply engaging in political self-abuse. I certainly think so, and it's obvious almost everyone else here does too. Otherwise Bowser would hang out at Democraticunderground.com, and I'd be at some LeftistsSuck.com website. But we're not, are we? And neither are a large number of other active minds. I don't post to the conservative-only sites. I follow up any news I find there to the source when I can.

But I do give Kevin Drum and a few others on liberal sites a bit of grief. ;) Hell, talking to people who just agree with me would put me to sleep, and atrophy my brain (can "atrophy" be used as a verb?)

When looking at the graphic of the blogosphere, just route around those isolated clusters of nodes. They're easy to identify. The fun, the heat, and the real processing of data, is at the conflict zones.

The problem with your examples of how "real" journalism is supposed to work is not that you are wrong about the ideals of journalism, but that a lot of the modern mainstream media isn't doing a very good job at being journalists any more. They aren't doing that good at researching, fact-checking, corroboration, reviewing, or any other time-tested method of arriving at the truth, and not just driving a point home.