It's been a pretty good week for Charles over at Little Green Footballs, a site devoted to covering the spread of Islam in the West and media complacency through a somewhat conservative lens.
Three of his marquee posts this week have ended up on Fox News Channel:
1. This one on the Democratic National Committee's choice of a controversial imam to open its winter meeting (originally reported here).
2. This one on an Islamic school in England that uses a text book referring to Jews as "Apes" and Christians as "Pigs."
And
3. This one, showing the Muslim Student Union at UC-Irvine apparently endorsing violent tactics employed against the state of Israel.
Of these stories, two were originally broken on blogs (the UC-Irvine story by LGF and the DNC Imam story by hotair) and all were blogged about extensively before being picked up by more main stream media. All this seems to indicate that blogs are being relied on more and more as a substitute for wire services such as the AP and Reuters when it comes to news gathering and segment ideas.
Cristina Gonzalez @ Wed, 02/07/2007 - 9:18pm
Derick, I think that you are right in that blogs are able to get the news out their faster than wire sources--at least that is where it seems we are heading. However with this topic in particular, it could also be (spare me!) the fact that traditional media tends to lean politically left. With this in mind, stories such as these, I feel, would be less inclined to be the first on the wire source. That's completely an opinon, but one in which you kind of hinted at ;)
The problem with this information coming from blogs though is that they are still seen as a less reliable and trustworthy source of news. And rightfully so, considering that there are many many blogs out there that are not of the quality of AP or Reuters. But I feel this is also changing.
And lastly, maybe the reason why many blogs might get to this information first is that blogs tend to be more focused on particular issues. Unlike the AP which has to cover everything under the sun, blogs can dig deeper compared to the AP which is forced to report wider.