" What I had meant to describe specifically was the construction of a full-blown alternative media ecosystem, which has been become more self-sufficient and self-contained as it’s become more interconnected. ... That does not mean conservatives are completely cut off from outside information — as David Brooks notes today, research suggests that frequent visitors to partisan sites are actually more likely to also visit “the enemy” — but it tends to be approached in roughly the same spirit we might read the Korean Central News Agency. "

" The output may have varying degrees of liberal slant, but The New York Times is not fundamentally trying to be liberal; they’re trying to get it right. Their conservative counterparts—your Fox News and your Washington Times—always seem to be trying, first and foremost, to be the conservative alternative. And that has implications for how each of them connects to the whole ecosystem of media: Getting an accurate portrait is institutionally secondary to promoting the accounts and interpretations that support the worldview and undermine the liberal media narrative. "
...
" There’s another explanation that’s related to the rise of what I’ve called the politics of ressentiment... So here’s a hypothesis: Epistemic closure is (in part) an attempt to compensate for the collapse of geographic closure. A function no longer effectively served by geographic segregation—because the digital equivalents of your local hangout are open to invasion by the hordes from New York and London—is being passed to media segregation, bolstered by the sudden demand that what was once tacit and given be explicitly defended. "

" One of the more striking features of the contemporary conservative movement is the extent to which it has been moving toward epistemic closure. Reality is defined by a multimedia array of interconnected and cross promoting conservative blogs, radio programs, magazines, and of course, Fox News. Whatever conflicts with that reality can be dismissed out of hand because it comes from the liberal media, and is therefore ipso facto not to be trusted. (How do you know they’re liberal? Well, they disagree with the conservative media!) "

Pseudonymity may be the bush league of public discourse, but that doesn't mean there aren't bastards.

" Now it is eight years later, and Johnson, who is 56, sits in the ashes of an epic flame war that has destroyed his relationships with nearly every one of his old right-wing allies. People who have pledged their lives to fighting Islamic extremism, when asked about Charles Johnson now, unsheathe a word they do not throw around lightly: “evil.” "

Be sure and read the comments, too.

"Ninety-five percent of Baltimore stories with fresh information came from 'old media,' the vast majority from newspapers, a survey funded by the Pew Research Center says."

"the information age has created a demand for processed information. We need someone to put it into context, give it theoretical framing and suggest ways to act on it. The raw material for this processing is evidence-based journalism, something that bloggers are not good at originating. Not all readers demand such quality, but the educated, opinion-leading, news-junkie core of the audience always will. They will insist on it as a defense against advertising, public relations and spin that exploits the confusion of information overload. Readers need and want to be equipped with truth-based defenses. "

"I can’t think of a good way to go about excising someone from one’s archives, because I think it’s entirely wrong to do so in the first place. But doing so and not talking about it for a year does suggest a certain disdain for one’s audience"

"My Beautiful Mommy...has no ISBN that I can detect... this book is not destined to make its way to the shelves of your local bookstore. ... It’s not going to corrupt the values of the youth of America, because they’re never going to see a copy."

"Going to the radian6 website tells us the rest of the story.... A company "focused on building the complete monitoring and analysis solution for PR and advertising professionals so they can be the experts in social media." "

"Have a period? Save your cells?? Your Menstrual Stem Cells???? What the FUCK? I checked the archive, and I have NO IDEA what blog post this might apply to."

"I'm giving up on google adsense. I've removed the ads I had posted and I will likely cancel my whole account. ... The last straw came last night when I saw an ad up about menstrual stem cells."

"Edelman has acquired the Silicon Valley PR company A&R Partners... many of the company's clients are already blogging. Edelman leadership appears focused on bringing corporate communications into the new world of social media"

"PR 2.0 firm Edelman Inc. has announced that it will fund the creation of localized versions of Technorati in German, Korean, Italian, French and Chinese."

"The wrong way, he said, is to create fake blogs (or "flogs") to create the illusion of positive sentiment. That was the approach Wal-Mart took with Edelman Public Relations last year. Edelman set up blogs ..."

"How did blowhard-dom acquire this kind of "it" factor? How could it not have? A decidedly nonpartisan activity, blowing hard is the oral equivalent of blogging, offering all the benefits of name-dropping and discursive ranting."

"It was a catastrophic performance, mainly because the blogger required continual correction on points of fact. He thereby illustrated blogging's central characteristic danger. ... You need no competence to join in."

"Online, though, sexual harassment is not only tolerated - it's often lauded. Blog threads or forums where women are attacked attract hundreds of comments, and their traffic rates rocket."

"A lot of e-mail screeds argue that, in return for the privilege of broadcasting my opinion, I have the responsibility to listen to you. I don't. No more than you have a responsibility to read me. I'm not an elected servant."

"...was in fact a well-planned out marketing campaign by the company. It reminds me how ExxonMobil and its public relations firm DCI Group tried to behave like teenagers making fun of global warming - it backfired."

"The team, working "under the direction of the Army Web Risk Assessment Cell" hunts for "documents, pictures and other items that may compromise security" -- and then orders the parties to take the offensive content offline."

"Whether as mere conversation starter, discussion referee or assessor of others positions and policies, the editorialist fulfills a function that is even more important as the parties to the public policy discussions expand in number and volume."

"There is no more important cause for electronic freedoms and privacy than the call for action to stop DRM from crippling our digital future." No more important cause? DRM is usually vile but this is just plain silly.

"Even at its best and most ambitious, citizen journalism reads like a decent Op-Ed page, and not one that offers daring, brilliant, forbidden opinions that would otherwise be unavailable. Most citizen journalism ... is proudly minor in its concerns."

See also much of political blogging, much of political blog comments, and many published pundits. For added fun, see also the pseudonymity-related exchange several months back in my Bark archives.

"The blogosphere gathers together atypical fans and brings them together in what quickly becomes a broadband echo chamber. The louder and more intense the online community gets, the farther it's likely drifting from what is happening offline."

"the bloggers are basing their comments on photos posted on the Web in compressed jpeg form, with little true detail possible." ... "Many bloggers appear ignorant of time-stamping and the fact that photos are often posted on Web sites out of sequence. "

"In May, Jackson took his interest in Myspace.com a step further, creating his own profile page, where he began posting poetry, chapters of a novel he had written, and what he described as "humor writing." He also mentioned a song parody, "

"His hero is the guy without any expertise who can see through the palaver of elites. There's no need to accumulate expertise through years of study or experience, because the Internet has become the great repository of knowledge and experience."

"Today, a photograph, from Reuters, allegedly of bombing damage in Lebanon appears to have been altered ... to make the damage appear more dramatic and worse than it really is. ... this morning Reuters had admitted that the photograph was doctored."

"Most A-listers are men over 30; have published before; are in it primarily to change public opinions and not to share their experiences; know only a fraction of their readers; and don't conceal their identities."

"It’s currently less important than the death of Pink Floyd guitarist Syd Barrett, or coverage of Zidane’s press coverage, but more important than Bob Novak and the big dig. Where we see a distressing lack of coverage most clearly is amongst political

"The most reliable way to make sure your thoughts remain in cyberspace is to leave them on a blog post on your own blog." / "only 7% of all political blog readers have ever left a comment"

for no other reason than an example of blog/pundit demagoguery

"You do not wish to know anything. You wish only to speak. ..."