Whither the Blogs?Rachel has an interesting post on the
future of blogging.
As I mentioned in her comments, I think long-term the MSM will start to co-opt the bloggers. You can already see signs of it; Captain Ed has written for the New York Sun and Kevin Drum now plies his trade at Washington Monthly, while the Daou Report has been absorbed into Salon.
The interesting thing is that the right side of the blogosphere seems much healthier than the left side. That's because the left side of the media are so dominant and blinkered by their institutional biases. Look at the big stories to come out of the blogs in 2004: Ra
thergate and Christmas in Cambodia. Why did they arise? The first one happened because an MSM outlet was so blinded by anger at Bush they ran with an obviously bad story, and then compounded the error by stonewalling for days before admitting that perhaps the documents could not be proven true. The second came about because the media were unwilling to dig deep into Kerry's past for fear of finding something that would scotch his candidacy.
In other words, neither story would have happened had the media been doing its job. Look at the lefty bloggers' big story of 2004. As best I can figure it's the mysterious object Bush had under his jacket at the first debate. In 2005, they got Jeff Gannon; our side brought down Eason Jordan, again after the media tried to bury the story.
