Saturday, August 19, 2006

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The power and politics of blogs in the New York Times

Many readers will find this Adam Liptak story in the New York Times on the legal reaction to the NSA surveillance decision interesting because of the near-unanimity among "legal experts" that the judge's legal reasoning in the case was poor.

Some readers will be interested in the story because, as Ann Althouse points out, it contradicts the NYT editorial from the previous day.

Henry Farrell and I are interested in the story because the first five "legal experts" quoted are also bloggers -- Howard Bashman, Jack Balkin, Orin Kerr, Cass Sunstein, and Eugene Volokh.

This would seem to be a classic case of bloggers from different ideological stripes using their first-mover advantage to developing a common frame on an event, which is then picked up by the mainstream media.

posted by Dan on 08.19.06 at 11:28 AM




Comments:

Well, the more important point is the Times' failure to link to said bloggers blog posts.

posted by: Dave on 08.19.06 at 11:28 AM [permalink]



This would seem to be a classic case of bloggers from different ideological stripes using their fiorst-mover advantage to developing a common frame on an event,...

...as well as a classic example of the lack of legal expertise on the Editorial Board of the New York Times.


How do these people expect to enable us to come to an informed opinion if they don't know what they're talking about in the first place?

posted by: rosignol on 08.19.06 at 11:28 AM [permalink]



The post title "The power and politics of blogs" would be more compelling if not for the previous and still-visible post title.

posted by: bgates on 08.19.06 at 11:28 AM [permalink]



Perhaps not really the best example . . . Judge Taylor's opinion really was so palpably bad that the MSM would have picked up on that even if the bloggers hadn't prompted them.

I love your 'first-mover' theory though.

posted by: Ken McCracken on 08.19.06 at 11:28 AM [permalink]



I thought a newspaper's news content was supposed to be independent of its editorial page. The Wall Street Journal's editorial page is to the right of Atilla the Hun but that doesn't stop the paper from putting stories on the front page that may cause the Bush administration to get heartburn.

Or is the NY Times a special case?

posted by: art hackett on 08.19.06 at 11:28 AM [permalink]



It is also a classic case of reporters being incredibly lazy. Why make rounds of phone calls, when you can read blogs?

posted by: Allison on 08.19.06 at 11:28 AM [permalink]






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