Alternate subject line: "Groupthink at the speed of light"

It's a tiny misstep, but illustrative of why I challenge the assertion that the blogosphere is inherently more accurate than established news organizations. There's competition all right, but not in fact-checking (except, conspicuously, of opposing viewpoints); bloggers are immersed in a scoop mentality, and compete to see who can post something first. Speed is always the enemy of accuracy, in journalism. Pile partisan fervor on top of the obsession with scoops, and speed denunciation collides with speed browsing to produce a journalistic trainwreck.

Bloggers are not the "new journalists", Tom, sorry, but that's the truth.

It'd be interesting (for somebody with a hefty grant) to perform pattern analysis on blogs, like the NSA is performing on our phone records. For all its lack of journalistic validity, the blogosphere is at least a fine laboratory in which to study meme propagation. Want to bet the pattern in the Right Blogosphere would look like [RNC director of blogging] -- [10 key blogs] -- [ 10,000 echoes ]?