January 31, 2005

Fact-checking, my ass !! Apparently, the Blog of the Year doesn't have much interest in correcting its mistakes. One of the common criticisms against opinion blogs is that there is no one "monitoring the monitors", but that's only half-true. There are bloggers monitoring Powerline, Hugh Hewitt, Daily Kos, et al.; the problem is that most of their readers seldom visit those blogs on account of a pre-existing disagreement in ideology. For the most part, conservatives limit themselves to the sites on the blogroll of Instapundit, while liberals are content picking from the blogroll of Atrios (from whom, natch, I obtained the above link); crossover is limited, so if a popular blog steps in it, its readers may never find out (if you want to know about the intellectual curiosity of a blogger, always check the blogroll). If a blogger doesn't see fit to correct himself, there's little anyone else can do to threaten his reputation.

UPDATE: Kevin Drum eloquently expands on the above point, but also points out that many of the more conservative boosters of the blogosphere lack, shall we say, the self-correcting mechanism that many readers of more liberal blogs take for granted: a comments section.

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