Roger must be bored today. The blogosphere remains the unregulated Wild West of news reporting — fractious, fractured, and only slightly more reliable than a Magic 8-Ball. The “wisdom of the crowd” is an illusion, since (outside the established hierarchies and informal “credentialing” of the Web), it’s impossible to distinguish informed, rational voices from hip-shooting poseurs, conspiracy cons or agenda trolls with any degree of certainty. “Facts” that feed emotionally-invested positions are repeated and amplified, while news that doesn’t fit the favored paradigm gets squashed.
Blogs CAN be self-correcting, but the model is still more Wikipedia than inerrant, all-knowing hive-mind. Blogs can be smarter than the MSM, or dumber than a box of rocks; a wildly outlinked source of context and interaction, or a self-exciting feedback loop.
As for “right” blogs versus “left” blogs, information isn’t the issue. Both are self-selecting belief-reinforcement communities. At least in the short term, the wide-open vistas of the Internet remain the ground of competing tribal claims. That will change in time, but — like all new-media denizens — Roger is overselling the relaity, just a tad.
