What would be more disturbing is if the larger news networks are using the blogsphere to let them know which stories are "hot" and worth investing the resources of a news crew. This, in turn, would allow unscrupulous persons to peddle their influence through bloggers or by putting up blogging fronts. I would not normally imagine such behind the scenes manipulation would be attempted if it weren't for such tactics as the 'newsclips' released by the administration to news agencies to be used as actual news stories. Or that blogger Gannon (sp?) who got a spot on the White House Press Corps. The net moves more information around, but does it also make it more prone to manipulation? Of have people been sucessfully manipulating information since the caveman days?

I also noticed this awhile back. The most extreme case was when I'd heard or read something on a blog, another website, or in RL, and then saw it as a "hot news story" on cnn.com six weeks later. Talk about old news!

I don't follow CNN, but I do listen to NPR regularly and I too have noticed a lag between various net sources (blogs, rss, email feeds, etc.) of about two days. I agree that there is something to the idea that major news sources scrape the net for what is "hot".

Steve - SIX weeks! HAHAHAHA!

Kevin - Hey, maybe cave paintings at Lascaux are primitive spin.....

Fritz - I think that is exactly what is happening. It's even more frequent nowadays to hear about "a blog broke the story"...and it's not like anybody hasn't predicted the fall of the MSM, I just kinda feel like it's very transparent right now.

has anyone considered the possibility
that it takes two days
for a reputable news source
to actually -confirm- a story
whereas a blogger can print it
the minute they hear about it
because if they get it wrong
there are essentially no consequences?

jhimm - That's a very good point and no I hadn't thought of it. However, the MSM isn't always good at verifying their sources either.

CNN does the "We don't know all of the story right now, but what we do know is what we don't know." kind of thing that The Daily Show riffs on a lot and I laught at. Whereas a blogger will sometimes take the same morsel of information CNN has and then give speculation or opinions and present as The Truth without even worrying about the consequences. That actually is an irritation I have with some blogs and I stopped reading them. They'd post a story, give an opinion and _then_ when further news came out that shifts their take they don't even update their original post or add a new post re-defining their opinion/analysis/whatever. That pisses me off.

absolutely.
and i think the reason -why- the MSM
does things like
"there is a story
we don't know what it is
but we know there's a story we don't know about"
is because if they don't
they get accused of being too slow
and out of date.

i just don't buy into the idea
that somehow bloggers
have such better inside connections
that they are better journalists
who are going to get us real news, faster.
most blogs are for punditry, not journalism.
and punditry with very little
in the way of obligation to reality
as you point out.

the MSM isn't going anywhere.
it's just going through growing pains of a sort.

blogs are great
for expanding our national dialog
away from the 3 major news networks' opinions
and for potentially expanding the power
of emerging third parties.
but i don't see truly independent blogs
becoming a serious replacement
for the MSM
in terms of harvesting and distributing
actual, objective reality news stories.
the only blogs currently doing that well,
are in some way shape or form
directly connected to some MSM outlet anyway.

the real revolution in news distribution
is aggregation (slash dot, fark, RSS feeds)
not blogging
because it allows us
to see a half dozen or more reports
on the exact same event
which hopefully allows us
to filter out the punditry and perspective
and get a better sense of the objective reality.
it's also helped expose
how overly dependent much of the MSM has become
on the associated press
which isn't even remotely a good thing.

jhimm - I hadn't thought of things that way.

>>accused of too slow and out of date>>

Too true.

>>that hopefully allows us to filter out the punditry and perspective and get a better sense of objective reality>>

And maybe that's what I really meant to say in my post. That certainly resonates true to me. I do know that when I see a story on a blog I do follow the link (god does it irritate me when the link goes to another blog and then they have a link to another blog and so on until I find I just need to google it to find a more "legitimate" news source) and try to find an original news source or something that could confirm it. In some respects I feel I work harder trying to find "truth" because of blog punditry than I ever did before. Which isn't necessarily a bad thing. I've found myself increasingly scanning the actual bills that are proposed in congress that get mentioned in the news and people are all up in arms about, whereas I did it far less before.

On the other hand, I don't always have time for it and sometimes want to just be fed my news. :-)

on the other hand,
before we had this much information
at our fingertips,
congress probably didn't "propose" as many bills
that they know will never become a law
just to force everyone to vote yay or nay
so that they can use it against them in the public,
because they knew no one was paying
that much detailed attention.

So how do daily papers stack up to CNN? Are they in blog time or CNN time?

Could it be that the audience for CNN is different than active news seekers? The get people who want the news dropped into their lap in a nice candy-coated 3-D package. (segues off into the new-as-entertainment discussion)

And to make a wild jab, Fox News panders to people who want news _and_ opinion spoon fed to them with some hot sauce to cover the sour taste.

Kevin - Hate to break it to you but CNN also panders to the same type of people...:-)

newspapers are yesterday's news
and only stack up next to recycling bings.