Thursday, September 21, 2006

Shorter Brendan Nyhan*

Everybody Has One: Bloggers and the Death of Opinion Journalism:

Now that the internet has broken the oligopoly held by a small cadre of center-left opinion writers, liberals have a wide enough selection to follow the opinions of only those people they think are wise and insightful. This is lamentable and far inferior to the previous system where there only choice was to read whatever was chosen by a select elite of center-left magazine owners. Select elites like Martin Peretz.

See also: Sadly No!'s take.

*"Shorter" format pioneered by Elton Beard

1 comment:

Bret said...

It's no surprise that, for many, politics and the news are a form of sport, and following them a form of fandom.

Politics is one of those unique disciplines where you're expected to have an opinion, whether you have any idea what's going on or not. Your ignorance may even be prized by modern ward heelers.

This will probably shake out just like the old media did, with a range of quality and scholarship that are more or less publicly understood. The advantage is, with lower barriers to entry, the range of available information, not just available opinions, will be greater than before.