For many people blogs have changed how information is accessed. Besides the traditional news outlets, cable news and well funded internet news and opinion ventures (and not so well funded efforts) there thousands of citizen journalists/opinion blogs. Some are collaborative efforts but most are not.

The credibility of the blogger does not guarantee a quality product. Some lawyers who blog produce a fine product. There other lawyers who do not, There are non political types who provide terrific politcal insights and there are political insiders who use the medium to serve their own self serving needs.

Some bloggers have made real contributions. Little Green Footballs was the primary force which confronted CBS and Dan Rather over the Bush military service controversy in what was later to become known as Rathergate. See Bush Documents: Forged. The story was important enough to be of real concern to some in the mainstream media. See NPR Rewrites Rathergate History to Cover Up Fraud.

When the history of the internet and blogs will be written, LGF will certainly merit more than a mention.

That isn’t to say even the better blogs are without fault. One good day at blog does not mean the following day will bring forth equally meritorious results. Agendas, politics and blindly followed ideologies can take worthy efforts and dilute them in same way that happens at other media. Without real editorial supervision opinion can quickly become expressions of dogma.

However,at newspapers and other media outlets there are usually ombudsmen who if necessary, can initiate a correction, apology or even a retraction. There is no independent arbiter at blogs- the author is also tasked with deciding when and whether to make corrections and/or apologies or to issue clarifications. Unfortunately, that doesn’t happen often enough.

Blogs are here to stay. Most will be forgotten, some will be remembered and others will become real resources.

The ‘Blog Mob’ Revisited: On the Impact Blogs and the Internet Have on Journalism. « Sigmund, Carl and Alfred

Sometime in 2006, freshly graduated from college and newly employed as a junior editor at The Wall Street Journal, I decided it would be a good idea to publish my musings about the Internet. The op-ed quoted Joseph Conrad to the effect that newspapers are “written by fools to be read by imbeciles” and suggested that blogs are the new newspapers. It turns out that people do not like to be called imbeciles, bloggers in general and imbecile bloggers in particular.

The piece, which carried the headline “The Blog Mob,” was a sensation, a controversy, and, finally, a mistake. It is worth recalling not because it has much lasting value—it does not—but partially because the situation surrounding the piece was hilarious and partially because writers who opine on public affairs ought at some point to be held accountable for their positions. They rarely are, not least by themselves. Maybe the rumpus also serves as an education in the new economics of the modern digital era and the ramifying political, cultural, and journalistic transformations wrought by the terabyte and the computer network.

“Blogs are not as significant as their self-endeared creators would like to think,” I wrote of the advent of the Web log, which still then retained some novelty. Bloggers saw themselves as an independent counterweight to the legacy mainstream media, or the MSM—“the lamestream media,” to borrow Sarah Palin’s subsequent neologism. They believed that the establishment had been corrupted by bias and groupthink. In my view, they weren’t doing a particularly good job at replacing the institutions that were supposedly discredited, and they mostly tended to comment on MSM reportage—riding along “like remora fish on the bellies of sharks, picking at the scraps,” to recall my characteristic diplomacy.

“The larger problem with blogs,” it seemed to me, “is quality. Most of them are pretty awful. Many, even some with large followings, are downright appalling.” Then I revved up the RPMs:

More

Unfortunately no props to LGF, where this story had been broken by our fellow lizard Killgore Trout.

Also missing from the conversation on the program (only briefly touched upon by Boehlert as “delusional talk”) is this important part, as noted by Penn Bullock:

Then he says that unnamed senior military officials have personally assured him that they’ll throw in with the right-wing in a civil war.

And I have people who come up to me in the military, major named people in the military, who grab me and they go, ‘Thank you for what you’re doing, we’ve got your back.’

They understand that. These are the unspoken things we know, they know.

On the face of it, Breitbart’s admission demands a congressional or criminal investigation. If he’s implying that military officials have pledged their armed support to him and the right-wing, those officials are guilty of treason. If Breitbart is lying, he’s diagnosable.

Another weird thing is that Boehlert seems to exclude Fox News from the MSM in this interview.

When I was a little kid, I had a friend who was from Kentucky. His mother was a real southern lady type - bobbed hair, extremely socialized, married a few times.

One outing we did looked alot like the one seen in this video. The population there was very similar - gun nuts, military guys, etc. All of the things you see at a military surplus were in abundance - knives, guns, weird paintings of a cyborg John F. Kennedy, anti-Jane Fonda stuff from the Vietnam era.

Now, the festival we went to was in Washington state, so it may have been catering far more to a military audience than a militant audience. I’d seen confederate flags for sale in rural Washington but certainly never prominently displayed Nazi paraphernalia. As retrograde as Confederate nostalgia may be, it makes sense that it would still linger in the south when you look at how historic sentiments stay around (think of how Arabs and North Africans still idolize Saladin and those that fought the Crusaders.) When there’s suddenly a big, open market for Nazi-themed goods, that’s a whole other enchilada.

I first heard of Little Green Footballs while reading “Truth and Duty” by Mary Mapes. You’d think after that I’d want nothing to do with this place but I was curious about the blog that “took down Dan Rather” so I started visiting from time to time.

I was a lurker for probably a year or so before I finally caught a registration window and became a member. “Truth and Duty” makes LGF out to be very right wing and there are plenty who say it was more right wing back during the Killian Memos mess than it is day.

Certainly Charles posting the famous “Why I parted ways with the Right” piece along with his being named one of the “most annoying Liberals” should indicate there’s been a shift in the overall political tone of this blog.

But I think it’s the U.S. political landscape that has shifted more than this blog.

The right wing of 2004 was VASTLY different from the right wing of today. I would argue LGF probably has gone a little more Liberal since the Rather heydays but it still very much right wing.

You wouldn’t think that looking at the articles since Obama got elected since they are filled with posts highlighting all the crazy things the GOP and Right wing have been doing in the meantime. On that basis alone, it’s easy to label this blog “Liberal”, but to do that would be a mistake I think. Not because “Liberal” is a dirty word but because I sense a lot of LGF posters do consider themselves such and still hold conservative leaning viewpoints.

I’ve noticed a wide range of opinions expressed on LGF these days, some would be considered Conservative and others Liberal. In my opinion the site would be best labeled as moderate with a slight tilt to the right, which I don’t think is a bad thing. It’s clear to me reading the comments and pages from the posters here that the site is NOT properly classified as straight left wing or right wing but more of a melting pot of both sides.

I have honestly found more informed dialogue and discussions on this site than any other polticial site, period. It’s nice to have a place where I can have real intelligent discussions with people that don’t degenerate into partisan bickering and name calling.

Do you think the politics of LGF have changed and if so, has it been a change for the better?

Cross-posted at Deschamps.

I wrote up a comment on samuraishake’s post and it turned into something long enough for an entire post, so here it is.

I listened to Dennis Prager’s radio show regularly during the Bush years and stopped a little after Obama was elected. During the Bush years, he largely made alot of sense. He would talk about how the Left tended to use racial victimization, while illustrating that the Bush administration had brought in more minorities than any other administration. He had a really candid conversation with a caller of Indian descent about how, in her words, her culture found lighter skin to be preferable. Prager said gently that this was something she would have to overcome.

After Obama was elected, Prager descended into the mud. His columns are pure reaction and he is constantly (and apparently thoughtlessly) defending the Right against all criticism, buying into the nonsense that a liberal media is trying to paint conservatives as racists, when conservatives paint themselves that way and the media just highlights it.

I interned for a prominent conservative organization (which will not be named) and was disturbed by some racial comments co-workers made. It caught me off guard because I’d actually believed alot of the things I heard on Prager’s show. I actually wrote in a letter to his program asking him if he thought there was a racism problem on the Right and what I should think of such comments. I got no response, not even a form letter.

I feel sorry for him honestly. He co-authored an entire book called Why The Jews that is about the historical persecution of the Jewish people. He’s had wonderful, candid discussions about the role of men and woman towards one another. If he keeps going the way he’s going, however, he’s going to find himself surrounded by anti-Semites because he refused to see what’s obvious.

Prager is a good example of what happens when a commentator ties himself to one side of the political spectrum permanently.