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Is Blogging Journalism?
An anonymous reader writes "In the wake of the judge's refusal to extend journalist protections to Think Secret in its case against Apple, the Net is abuzz with commentaries coming to its defense. MacInTouch points to three of them, from CNET's Declan McCullagh, MP3 Newswire's Richard Menta and grassroots journalism pundit Dan Gillmor. All agree that Apple went too far with its case and question the court's decision that Web journalists don't count."
Caveat: ThinkSecret is not a blog.
REM Old programmers don't die. They just GOSUB without RETURN.
The UCLA/Stanford study was very well done, and measured "bias" as the frequency with which left wing vs right wing sources (such as think tanks) were cited. It was a very objective way to measure bias, if not necessarily what is commonly meant.
Fox news was right of center, but not too far. The PBS News Hour was the most balanced. ABC and NBC were left of center, but not too far. CBS was pretty far to the left.
Fox News is very comercially sucessful because it is the only TV news outlet with a right wing bias. Market research found that a *majority* of Americans thought the existing news at the time had a bias to the left, so creating a station with some bias to the right was an excellent marketing decision: provide what the majority of viewers want to see, and be the only outlet doing so.
That doesn't, by itself, mean the reporting on Fox News is any better or worse than ABC or NBC, or any more biased, just well targeted to the largest demographic in its direction of bias. Personally, I think all the 24-hour news chanels are terrible, as there's usually a lot less news than they have hours to fill, so you get mostly low-quality filler.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
I run CircusNews.com. CircusNews.com runs on PHP-Nuke, aka blogging software.
Is my website a blog or a news service?
I like to think so. CircusNews.com is currently the most widely read news publication in the circus industry. Big Apple, Ringlings, Cirque and everyone else in the industry gladly issues us press passes when ever we ask. State and (in at least one major case) federal agencies have relied on our research and news reports over the years, not to mention the 50,000 readers we see a month. We are looking at licening AP content, and perhaps joining the AP.
So if we are not a news service, can ANYONE explain to me why not?