Netroots Or The Rise Of Political Blogs

A neat article I came across reading In These Times.This piece explores the growing trend of netroots, or political blogs, which the author considers as having often been most effective as populist fact-checkers, challenging, refuting and correcting perceived errors in news coverage.

Blogs are literally vox populi—or at the least the voice of the people who post entries and comments, and, to a lesser extent, of their devoted readers. Telling bloggers that they’re wrong or to shut up is somewhat like telling respondents to an opinion survey to simply change their mind. When journalists reject bloggers as cranks or wingnuts, they also do the same to a large segment of the American public who see blogs as an expression of their views. Such dismissals feed the very alienation that makes blogs and bloggers popular.