Mainstream media has decided how they’re going to report on blogs—as “propagators of faulty analyses:” Vote Fraud Theories, Spread by Blogs, Are Quickly Buried.

The New York Times, like other mainstream media, makes no distinction between the left and right of the blogosphere, and fails to note that all of this “faulty analysis” is coming from the left side. They report a story at commondreams.org (which is not a blog), and don’t mention that CommonDreams is a radical left wing site.

And please note that, once again, the main blog held up as an example of shoddy conspiracy theories and lousy fact-checking is … none other than Daily Kos. Good work, Rising Star Markos! You’re single-handedly dragging the reputation of blogs into the gutter.

The e-mail messages and Web postings had all the twitchy cloak-and-dagger thrust of a Hollywood blockbuster. “Evidence mounts that the vote may have been hacked,” trumpeted a headline on the Web site CommonDreams.org. “Fraud took place in the 2004 election through electronic voting machines,” declared BlackBoxVoting.org.

In the space of seven days, an online market of dark ideas surrounding last week’s presidential election took root and multiplied.

But while the widely read universe of Web logs was often blamed for the swift propagation of faulty analyses, the blogosphere, as it has come to be known, spread the rumors so fast that experts were soon able to debunk them, rather than allowing them to linger and feed conspiracy theories. Within days of the first rumors of a stolen election, in fact, the most popular theories were being proved wrong - though many were still reluctant to let them go. …

“I love the process of democracy, and I think it’s more important than the outcome,” said Kathy Dopp, an Internet enthusiast living near Salt Lake City. It was Ms. Dopp’s analysis of the vote in Florida (she has a master’s degree in mathematics) that set off a flurry of post-election theorizing by disheartened Democrats who were certain, given early surveys of voters leaving the polls that were leaked, showing Senator John Kerry winning handily, that something was amiss.

The day after the election, Ms. Dopp posted to her Web site, www.ustogether.org, a table comparing party registrations in each of Florida’s 67 counties, the method of voting used and the number of votes cast for each presidential candidate. Ms. Dopp, along with other statisticians contributing to the site, suggested a “surprising pattern” in Florida’s results showing inexplicable gains for President Bush in Democratic counties that used optical-scan voting systems.

The zeal and sophistication of Ms. Dopp’s number crunching was hard to dismiss out of hand, and other Web users began creating their own bar charts and regression models in support of other theories. In a breathless cycle of hey-check-this-out, the theories - along with their visual aids - were distributed by e-mail messages containing links to popular Web sites and Web logs, or blogs, where other eager readers diligently passed them along.

Within one day, the number of visits to Ms. Dopp’s site jumped from 50 to more than 500, according to site logs. On Nov. 4, that number tipped 17,000. Her findings were noted on popular left-leaning Web logs like DailyKos.com and FreePress.org. Last Friday, three Democratic members of Congress - John Conyers Jr. of Michigan, Jerrold Nadler of New York and Robert Wexler of Florida - sent a letter to the Government Accountability Office seeking an investigation of voting machines. A link to Ms. Dopp’s site was included in the letter.