If newspapers go away as a way of holding politicians accountable, can blogs replace them? Andrew Sullivan says yes:
A good blog, with a tenacious blogger, on a difficult subject, can keep at a subject with intensity newspapers are hard-pressed to match. And as long as there are meta-blogs or aggregators or edited blogs that can highlight niche blogging on important, less-read subjects, these issues can be brought to the fore. Ideally, blogs and newspapers form a helpful nexus. But both can and will evolve to save the old civic function of the press.
I don’t disagree with this. Still, even as recently as the 2008 campaign, it was striking how little impact most net-based feeding frenzies had until they were picked up by someone in the mainstream press. So far, at least, it’s still the MSM that mostly provides legitimacy to stories and forces public officials to react to negative publicity. I wonder how long that will continue to be true?
