It's interesting to watch the two layers, official and unofficial, support each other. The freelancers provide a steady stream of spurious claims from which to cherry-pick the day's claim that "Americans are concerned about..." whatever insane claim some trailer park wingnut made in a free blog. The freelancers in their turn gain legitimacy from that notice, and the process feeds on itself.

The blogosphere exhibits emergent "flocking" behavior. There doesn't have to be a conscious or explicit central control mechanism. Like a flock of birds wheeling aside when one member spots a hawk, when one blog makes a claim that's blessed by the establishment, they all pick it up and amplify it, and it becomes a new political reality. And everybody's hands are clean.

It's a brilliant system, really. Too bad it'll prove fatal for American democracy. To paraphrase Jefferson, democracy depends on the citizenry possessing pure unadulterated facts upon which to make decisions. Poison the civic infosphere and you poison democracy.