re: the topic a priori — I presume you saw last sunday’s nyt magazine.
a good image of two fat old tweedledee-tweedledum type functioning alcoholics masquerading as journalists bracketing a cute sex-in-the-capitol-city obsessed blogger going by the handle wonkette, who for her part, appears to be focused entirely on washington cocktail party gossip. though she once carefully protected her anonymity, its long since been compromised along with her content, and appearing on the cover of nytmag it appears she has gone to the other extreme. characteristically, the print media is running about a year behind.
now while there are thousands of folks out there ‘blogging their spleen’ to the purely hypothetically interested, (see http://www.globeofblogs.com/?x=topic), there are a few who function essentially as columnists and have quite a bit of good insight. a lot of these folks are essentially doing it in their spare time, and giving the pros a run for their money.
its actually a return to a purer form of “journalism” when you think about it, as in “individuals writing in their journals”. its really a leap forward for journalism, although you have to sift through a lot of noise to get to the good stuff.
yet the theme of the nyt piece seemed to be ‘you can’t trust those bloggers, because they don’t conform to the unwritten code of journalistic ethics, like we professionals do.’
wow, no need to parse that one out too closely, I hope.
as for “the good stuff,” my favorite political blog du jour is http://talkingpointsmemo.com/.
he’s got an interesting take on last night’s debates, that sounds like someone who’s living in the real world, not wrapped up in the cocoon like some of these so-called journalists [[20040929190100]] seem to be.
another one that I like is the daily prospect [[ http://www.prospect.org articleId=8691]]
you know from time to time they actually tell me stuff I didn’t know. I wonder if you were aware of this:
“First things first: John Kerry is significantly taller than George W. Bush. But last night, millions of unknowing Americans tuned in and saw a split-screen image of the pair looking exactly the same height.

Leave it to FOX News to distort the truth. The network was charged with camera control for the entire media during the debate tonight, so no matter which network you watched it on, the cameras were run by FOX’s crew. ”
go figure. I guess they just wanted to be “fair and balanced” with respect to the height issue.