An article on political blogs that manages not only to avoid meaningful content, it offers up a host of incorrect assumptions;
But for all the political blogs that can be found on the Net, it remains hard to pinpoint with any certainty their impact on voters.
Recent voting patterns indicate turnout among younger Canadians is low and dropping.
How long have we had the “interweb” now? In how many homes? Why does mainstream media continue to stereotype political bloggers and our readers as “tech savvy” twenty year olds?
Here’s a comment that appeared here at SDA a couple of days ago;
Typical CBC leading off with poll showing the Liberals ahead. For the duration, that is the last time I watch any news. I’ll get all my updates on this blog so keep up the good work with your posts. At 77, I have to watch the old b.p.
A surprisingly high number of the visitors to SDA are retired or nearing retirement age – and if the emails I receive privately are any indication, the typical reader here is male, and in their late thirties to early fifties. That’s certainly not the demographic one ordinarily thinks of as the “tech savvy younger generation”.
It’s a misconception held not only by many in media, but by those in political circles, and it results in idiotic prattlings like this by writers dropped into the blogosphere who have no clue what they’re doing, or who their audience really is.
But just because it’s an Internet-savvy generation doesn’t mean blogging is the answer to engaging disaffected voters, said Chris Waddell, a journalism professor at Carleton University who teaches web publishing.
“I’m not convinced anyone reads them other than a small group of insiders,” said Waddell.
“People are not coming home from work at night and deciding they have to read 10 or 12 blogs before dinner in the same way they may read the newspaper or sit down to watch the news.”
Emphasis mine. Who is this man and who’s allowing him to teach your children?
My traffic patterns indicate most people read blogs during the day, often at work (that’s supported by logfile data) with another surge in the early evening.
He adds some of the more effective blogs, especially in the United States, have reached mass audiences – but it’s because reporters from mainstream media pick up on a blog posting.
And there we have it, courtesy of the mainstream media, another “expert opinion” offered by someone who might have saved himself the professional embarrassment by simply admitting he doesn’t know much about the topic.
Blogging is a niche media. Very few political bloggers seek to be all things to all people, no more than most who write political columns in the mainstream media aim to do so. Single bloggers aren’t isolated entities competing with one another, but participants in an ever evolving, open source staff of opinion writers and information providers connected electronically.
One doesn’t compare the traffic of any individual poliblogger to the circulation figures of a city newspaper – the blogger is to the blogosphere what the polticial columnist or financial reporter is to the paper. The web user can pick and choose who he reads and doesn’t read in the same way I skip over columns or sections of the paper I’m not interested in.
But the most serious flaw in the article is that it assumes the transference of opinion and information is one way – from blogger to reader in the same “top down” fashion that mainstream journalism speaks to their consumers.
It’s really the other way around – as a blog develops traffic, the information flow reverses, as readers begin to inform other readers, with the blogger as interpreter and facilitator – functioning, as Hugh Hewitt described it, as an internet guide or “cyber sherpa”.
The impact of blogging on the poltiical landscape doesn’t happen here on these “pages” nor is it measured in my traffic. I don’t write to “sway disaffected voters”.
It occurs when the reader who visits SDA – who follows the links in posts and comments to an Auditor General’s report, to military bloggers in Iraq, who has viewed scanned letters issued from the Finance Department to Adscam players – sends a link to a friend in Nova Scotia, sits down at the table with family, at coffee break at the work place, and someone else raises a subject for discussion that has been framed in the mainstream – such as the war in Iraq, income trusts, Paul Martin’s involvement in Sponsorship. And that person, the blog reader, has information that no one else has heard.
(Update – the comments are confirming my estimate on typical age of SDA readers).
The tech savvy twenty somethings are using their savvy to excel at video games.
They mostly all identify with the leftists … as it goes if you aren’t a socialist at twenty .. you have no heart … if you aren’t a conservative at 40 you have no head.
Young people are all about feelings and that there is a free lunch for them …. They still don’t know what its like to have to put themselves second to a child or something other than self.
They also don’t bother to go vote. They whine about whose in power and how unfair it all is.
I am 62 and I am tech savvy and so are most of the people I know over 40 ….
What did you expect from a professor … their are the last people to know anything about anything but their own tenured little world.
It’s really scary when they don’t even understand the nature of their own field of study.
40 year old farmer. Read your blog daily.
Kate,
This late forties guy is not surprised that the left leaning Canadian MSM would try to downplay blogs: Torqued, misleading stories, often larded with editorialising, can now be subjected to public fact checks, correction, and well deserved ridicule. The MSM gods also get subjected to personal scrutiny; if I see a CBC reporter high fiving with Scott Reid I will post it here and it will become widely known.
Blogs mean accountability to the MSM. They are not used to it and they don’t like it.
I guess I’m one of the youngsters here. I’m 41 years old, small business owner in a bedroom community of Edmonton.
Despise the Edmonton Journal as a pinko commie rag. Read the Edmonton Sun online ever morning, especially editorials and letters to editor from all the Sun chain papers. Whoever it was at the Sun who hired Sheila Copps, Charles Adler and Eric Margolis needs a serious labotomy/ass kicking.
Read SDA, Day by Day (cartoon), Ann Coulter, Mark Steyn, Nealenews, Drudge, Laura Ingraham and scan through the daily offerings at The Blogging Tories and Angry in the Great White North.
SDA is, undoubtedly, the BEST Canadian blog and Kate is Wonderwoman! Keep it up!
Married White Male, 35 with 5 kids living in Calgary. I can honestly say that I can’t remember when the last time was that I sat down to watch the news on TV or read it in a paper. I listen to radio news on my way to and from work, and I will go to the TV if there was a major disaster and I want to see video. Blogs are good with pictures, but still a little slow on video coverage. Most of my news comes from the internet with the political coverage coming from blogs.
Jaymeister, Bell and CanWest are beholden to the Cdn gov’t because of the CRTC. CRTC is a direct arm of the gov’t despite claims to the contrary. CanWest is also owned by the Asper family where Izzy (yes, I know he’s dead) was head of the Manitoba Liberals.
Evil Prince, Harper came out now with his So-Con agenda now so that they have time to deal with it rather than waiting for the Libs to bring it up and smear him with it in the last week of the race. Also, I believe a slim majority of Cdn’s were AGAINST SSM, like I am, so it actually isn’t a bad thing to bring up. Those who are strongly in favour of SSM enough to make it their sole choice for voting always vote Lib or NDP anyway and never would vote CPC so he’s not losing any voters.
62 years old, buy three newspapers per day, two freebies per day, perhaps a half-dozen more on the internet. Watch the news and the house of parliament on the ‘tube everyday. Most of my chums are neither on the ‘net, nor read any newspapers !?! Nor are they political in any sense. That’s how it is these days. (And that is probably why the politics of this country are where they are-don’t know, don’t care, don’t make any difference?
Sorry- the Liberal Party of Canada is a criminal organization. The NDP are nothing more than Liberals by another name. The Bloc applies only to Quebec. The ‘Greens’ ( I kinda like ’em)-but they do not meet my priorities.
If the stench of corruption in Ottawa is not cleaned up, ( and only Harper can accomplish that)- I already have the country I intend to relocate to, (at the age of 62)-and you can stuff this one up your ass! This is the last opportunity you will get, to change this! (Evilprinceweasel- you are correct.)
Forgot to mention: Kate rules!
I caught the lame CBC take on blogs – of course, the pinhead just had to point to Rabble Babble as the top site – a site which rigorously bans any critical conservative comment – as one where anything goes, yeh right. Then Liblogs, with comment, Blogging Tories, with no comment, then lingering shots of NDP blogs, with his wrap up comment that blogs let people react immediately when Harper makes a comment. Spin much?
Great comment, Shane.
As a 77-yr old female I researched local men who died in both world wars (and co-authored a book now in print)which means I have read far more books and seen far more documentaries on the wars than any elderly woman should (for her bp). I’ve also read at least one hundred letters written from the front and believe me, they fought for the rights of all of us to be able to express ourselves in a democracy.
For EPW – Those of us who oppose SSM and abortion-on-demand have the same rights in this hard-won democracy. The discussion can’t be open to one group and not the other. Which is really what we’re asking of the MSM – present both views and let us decide.
Yes Kate I agree the Trudeaupian MSM has a smarmy, edging on nasty, opinion of people who frequent the blogeshere or any alternate electronic media….pompous media asshats like Wells (and the like) try to justify their covetous contemp for us by wrapping themselves in in a sanitizing mist of mythical “professional journalistic ideals”….but the bottom line is we are essentially their competitors and the media pontificating monopolists don’t really like being questioned by us nor sharingor losing audience… nor do they relatre to the average Canadian, let alone our opinions…and now that E-publishing makes everyone who is literate an editor and publisher…this is simply too much for them.
The bottom line is ANYONE’s opinion is just a valid as the Wellsian opinion of the cloistered media clique…probably more so because unlike Wells and other elite class scribblers is that. unlike them, we don’t reap any benefits from hob knobing and playing sycophant with the political elite…they must go along to get along to keep their incomes and priviledge…..we ( blogerphere) OHOH, are largely populayed by peole directly effected by the poor administration or errant policies of the political elites that wells and company are willing to overlook to keep thei jobs.
I put most of the MSM smarmy contempt of alternate media and opinion to the inbred hubris and snobbery of an elitist media clique who have had a monopoly on opinion for too damn long…..the crusty pontiffs just can’t stand real competition or being corrected when they are decidedly errant 😉
Marc: ditto your comment about the Post (back in the good old days) introducing me to The One Man Global Content Provider. Steyn rocks!
I’m near Toronto, 54, male and, as a computer professional for over 20 years, one of the ‘tech-savvy.’ (and a Mensan. 🙂 ) This is my first comment here.
I rarely watch TV, and I haven’t bought a newspaper in years, though I will pick one up the odd time in waiting rooms, etc. I listen to the radio in the car and at home — mostly jazz, though I do end up getting some news that way.
I get my news from blogs and other sources on the Internet. Your’s is one of the blogs I read daily, Kate. I appreciate what you do, and I thank you.
34-yr-old female, American, living in Edmonton. Had abandoned newspapers and TV news (except for occasionally watching Fox and local weather) back in the States. We (personally) don’t have cable here, except for some funky channels that the board must pay for with reception, so I might watch CPAC (if something’s happening) or the business channel, but we really only put the TV on to watch videos/DVDs. Enjoy reading the Post on Saturdays (with G. Owen, special columns, & books) but that’s about it. Have personally had a blog, off and on, since 2002. My husband is 52 but would not know a blog if it bit him; however, my father (67, American) gets most of his news from the internet, always sending me interesting links, and my father-in-law (79, Polish-born Canadian) is also very into the internet and especially keeps up with Poland on Polish-language websites and blogs. Both of them used to be two-paper-a-day men (my father, the local paper and the WSJ; my f-in-l, the local and the G&M, then the NYT, now the WSJ); my father now only takes the paper on Sunday, and my f-in-l still takes 2 papers, but says he reads less and less of them, as he’s already read about the events online.
As for :
“People are not coming home from work at night and deciding they have to read 10 or 12 blogs before dinner in the same way they may read the newspaper or sit down to watch the news.”
Haven’t you heard of a blog feed aggregator??? That’s exactly what people do!!! Man, these journalism people need to add some blog studies, post-haste.
What these yahoo’s seem to forget is that those of us who grew up in the 60’s, 70’s and 80’s kept following technology through the popular years of the 90’s. We are raised with it, we like it, we are educated with it, and sometimes we earn our paychecks from it. Heck, we control the security of the country, we even wrote the stuff that handles the Liberals transactions.
So, all they are showing us is that THEY don’t understand this stuff, THEY don’t know what it is for, and THEY are out of touch with the common man and with what the country is doing.
I mean c’mon guys, the Space race was in the 50’s and 60’s, do you think we did that with a slingshot? The Internet was created awfully darn close to that time period. Get with the times….this is how we communicate these days.
Excuse me, I have to run. The doctor is coming over to apply leeches to an ailing family member, and I think I just heard his buggy turn the corner a half mile away.
One of the many equations of life is that: all things must change.
These symptoms we see from the old style media are endemic of a group of people/organizations that fear change and rely heavily on the government to ensure that �change�or �different� is seen as a dirty word by the general populace. As the MSM falls further into obscurity we can expect to see this dinosaur continue to lash out at its newer more agile competitor.
A litlle advice to the MSM.
You are either a leader or an also ran.
Hi Kate.
Like the posters above I to am a mid forties male. The MSM has become so biased and full of S___ that they make me sick. A very long time ago I locked out the Communist Brainwashing Channel to save my child from their evil. I no long will buy any main stream paper as they fill it them with mistruths and blatent lies. I find the bias on the tv new from ctv and global will be getting them the same treatment as the CBC (locked out!)
You scare the hell out of these scum and they will do everything and anything to doscredit the voice of the people. These people that call themselves journalists are nothing more than second rate shills for the liberano’s.
Keep up the good work Kate.
And remember if the liberano’s get back in it won’t take them very long to lock down the net so free speach will be even further restricted.
I’m 59 yrs and a retired male federal civil servant. I read about 10 blogs daily (including SDA)to supplement the crap I get from the MSM. I know Chris Waddell. He’s actually pretty smart, but he was wrong on this one!
47 year old MWM. Was up north for a week with no computer access. In my opinion I’d give up caffeine before SDA. Blog on, Kate.
I’m 31. What’s a newspaper?
I’m 37 Kate, I’ve read your blog going on two years now, I have 26 blogs I hit every day. Some political like yours, some US political sites, some financial sites, and so on. Chris Waddell should grab his shoulders as should the rest of these guys and pull their heads out of their asses.
Blogs provide very good forums which lead people to ask questions, and provides a venue for discussion wether you reside on the right or left of the political equation the discussion can and frequently leads to clarity, the paltry few trolls both left and right aside mind you…
59, pushing 60, male, semi-retired, lovin’ daily doses of SDA.
BTW: Kate, I think one of the reasons we are seeing increased negative, dismissive or distorted MSM articles on the blogesphere is twofold:
a) the numbers show MSM media subscribers and viewers dropping and alternate e-media is increasing their readership and is picking those ex-MSM readers up.
b)The tone and outcome of this election will be defined by the behaviour of the MSM…they are obviously taking a “more active roll” in partisan politics and actually believe it is ethical to sway an election to their partisan leanings….fair enough if you declare yourself as a liberal or conservative media source and you negative messaging as unsubstantiated biased “opinion”….but don’t give us these partisan negative messaging pieces disguised as “news”…like the CBC did last night. That gets me crazy and insults me at an intellectual level (even though Wells and his CBC contemporaries may hold my intellect in contempt).
This type of media interference in the due process of democracy will incur the wrath of the alternate media…they know it and they are trying to discredit us before we start catching them in their sleazy little acts of bias.
They’re scared Kate…..they’re scared because they know they’re being watched and that we have a way of making their disinformation and unethical behaviour public. Their response is the same they have used for years….discredit all other opinion….see what Asper did to Harper when Harper indicated that the Post was not a true conservative voice in media….reactionary hatchet job…that’s your professional journalist ethics right there baby…..the Blogesphere can only improve from this standard.
I’m 63, a university teacher nearing retirement, and I’ve been using computers for 20 years, and email for 15. I gave up on CBC TV news about 1980, and radio CBC a couple of years ago. I cancelled the Post earlier this year…it was great at first, but it’s gone downhill.
Note to Duke: not all university teachers are crazed lefties, though you’d certainly think so from the ones you see in the media…..
The great thing about blogs (and about the Post in its early days) is the liberating feeling that there are others out there who feel the same way you do about current affairs. This is a great site….keep up the good work…
Yea, what everybody else said. Blog on, Kate.
42-yr married father of 2 🙂 The first blog I ever read was angry in the great white north and have been hooked since. The bias in the MSM has me deeply concerned. Love your blog,Kate,as well as so many other Blogging Tories. Thank you all.
BTW#2:
50- Separated, small town White Male, self employed engineer, stopped subscription to news papers in the early 90s when Southam’s stale filtered news, open partisan bias and preachy social engineering was at its height. The only thing I ever payed attention to on CBC or CBC newsworld was the articles in Frank mag or what the blogs were saying…haven’t watched corporate TV news for 8 years….subscribed to Fox news…saw it was just as biased and preachy and unsubscribed….read mostly internet news groups, political boards, private individual-owned and operated e-news, E-zines and blogs…have done so since I got connected in the days when a 486 100mhz was a rocket 😉
My distain for the open manipulative journalism and preachy social engineering of the MSM has reached critical mass…the tipping point was the MSM circus of the 2000 election which played out like the Scopes Monkey trial… all the issues and government record were ignored and the opposition leader’s religious faith and character was assassinated by the MSM…it was a low point for me…it made me shamed to be a Canadian. Today I catagorize the central Canadian media in the same slot as the federal Liberal patronage cartel…actually, as a wing of it.
I look forward to seeing HSM bias in this election met head on with the counterbias of the internet and Canadian online community.
I am a male, will be 52 in January (if I remember correctly) and stopped watching broadcast “news” several years ago. I find the newspaper nearly irrelevant, always a couple of days behind the blogosphere and I don’t own a birdcage so why subscribe? Love SDA. Stay warm up there.
So, 73 comments posted in a few hours, before most people are even home from work. This “echo chamber” is huge, and a lot more prevalent than the MSM would like – or admit.
A lot of them must be feeling an itch between their shoulder blades. And the smarter MSM types who have read this far must feel like the soldier who hears a *click* when taking a step…
Bravo, Kate! You and others like you are the only check or balance left in this crypto-fascist dictatorship…
Kate – I’m 57, and have tried to be computer savvy ever since university days. The notion that computers are “new” is at least thirty five years out of date. The people that hold that notion are similarly eligible for reference in the past tense.
And it didn’t take blogs to make me realize that the Globe and Mail and others of that ilk were tools of the Liberal party.
44, almost 45. Design engineer for a communications manufacturer. I vote regularly, read two or three newspapers a day… read about 15 blogs, also daily. I make a decent living, own a house, etc. and have a good credit rating.
So, doesn’t that make me one of the people the media want to reach? Guess not.
Mid-forties, involved with tech and the Internet since before it was called “the Internet.” Way more tech-savvy than most of the 20-year-olds I’ve met recently (their appreciation for tech is very much of the “light-switch” persuasion — they know how to turn it on and off, but have no idea how it works [same as for most people, actually]). The lack of “tech-savviness” amongst the youngsters is probably a good thing overall — it means that most of the tech in their daily lives is background, something in their perceptual landscape they use without even thinking about it.
Chris Waddell’s sucking air.
And blog use? Purely a check on the MSM. I love the self-correcting nature of the blogosphere when it’s in heavy-duty fact-checking mode. Can’t get that in the MSM for any price!
Harper’s speech at the Halifax rally is a beaut.He has put 10 Lib seats in play.Funny how Ctv Newsnet and CBC ended coverage abruptly.
40+ male, married. Anything but tech savvy. Have been reading for a long time, first comment. We have a NP sub. this year (cheap through Telus). Won’t miss it next year. We read several blogs every day. Love your blog, who needs MSM?
Late 30’s, formerly 3 newspapers a day.
No newspapers, top 5 minutes (maybe) of the news ONLY when some big event is on.
MSM so full of it, twisted news, big events not even covered.
Where do they think this declining readership in newspapers is going? Have we just stopped taking an interest in news?
You are getting alot of mention Kate. CaptainsQuarters and SDA my first two blogs. Well done.
enough
I’m 43, married 20 years, one daughter, 17. This blog has supplanted a great deal of what I watch in the national media as I faithfully follow and perpend each releveant link provided by Kate, contributors and those who partake in the comments section.
I am thankful for Kate for providing this forum to me (us) to examine and even to in a small scale partake in sociopolitical matters affecting my family, Canadians, and Albertans. There is no particular mechanism in the MSM which facilitates this process as well as blogs such as this one does.
If I would like to listen to “a journalism professor”, I would listen to Robert Murdoch and he doesn’t believe in the future of printed press.
Kate….Is it a secret how much traffic your site generates? Would you be willing to sell advertisement space?
Approaching double-nickels, read newspapers only for sports and opinions. There, at least I know what I’m getting.
46 SWM heard about blogs on talk radio finaly figured out how to access them about ayear ago still not to good buy the sun for the sports section and sunshine girl to post in my private work area and piss off people who want to act so correct TV news time for the sportscast only
I am fairly new to politicals blogs. I find them knowledgable and full of refreshing ideas. I don’t always agree with them but it is refreshing to hear more than one side of an issue. I am male 46 years old and yes I read them while I have a few minutes of down time at work. I have a hard tiem trusting any news papers
I have been reading SDA for about a year(?) now. Well, a while anyway. I am 28 years of age and I have followed politics since becoming a member of the Reform Party. From what this professor has said, it seems like he is exactly wrong (I am positive large amounts of people access this blog and others, and I know for myself I check them whenever I am at a computer � hoping for that next posting!).
I think that blogging is an application of the web that combines the attributes of MSM reporting/journalism and the good old fashioned Usenet (newsgroups). For me, I have read the newspapers since I started working at a corner gas station and talking about news to customers was a job requirement (we needed ammo in other words). I am also a long time user of the newsgroups. Since I have discovered SDA (and other sites), I no longer actively read the political newsgroups and I have stopped reading the national post. This blog is significant to me because it has directly modified how I obtain the news. However, I think that a lot of the information on this site wouldn�t exist without MSM reporters first obtaining and writing about the news (I assume this because most entries here refer to a story written by a MSM provider). What is significant is what happens after that. The story doesn�t end! Facts are checked and re-checked by dozens of �correspondents�, additional information is researched and posted in real-time, opinions are gathered and updated, letters are scanned in and uploaded, jpg images are edited and literally hundreds of �journalists� (some of which are better than many professionals writing today) provide witty remarks.
To me the ‘Blogosphere’, is a system composed of technology and people that filter all the political news for me. I can look at one or two sites (SDA is the first one I read) and get news and opinions from many sources. This saves me a lot of time. I don’t have to wade through a newspaper, partially reading columns, that in the end don’t interest me in the slightest. I don’t have to visit half a dozen newspaper sites with their tedious little keys all over the place.
I also consider the blogs an opinion amplifier. One of my favourite sections of any newspaper are the letters. For some reason I prefer to read the newspaper starting with the letters (something to do with getting multiple peoples opinions on a subject – it seems more balanced). I read the letters and then I read the articles referenced (thanks to the NP 7 day archive). Where I once read articles that were compositions of one persons opinion, I now have access to literally hundreds of peoples opinions. Now if I feel the columnist is incorrect about something or is basically full of it, I get direct feedback in the form of dozens of people’s opinions reflecting as much.
What I appreciate the most is the information I get that helps me during conversations with people who don’t read the news (exactly as Kate puts it in her last sentence – paragraph?).
Hey, I have you all beat, age-wise. I am a 78 year old lady and I keep up with all the news reading the blogs. My favourite is yours, Kate.
I learned to type on an IBM card punch when I wrote my first program in 1971. I’ve had email since 1974, participated in can.politics back in the UseNET days, and wrote my first web log server software in 1998.
You tell that to kids today, they won’t believe you – http://tinyurl.com/cdhw
I essentially don’t watch television any more, now that Bugs Bunny, Julia Child, Banacek, Yes Prime Minister, and The Iron Chef are no longer broadcast. Although I heard a rumour that they might rerun Kolchak, which would be good.
Fortunately I made an exception for the Grey Cup. What a game!
23, Yank, word-of-mouth you Canadian blogstar who wants to save the world.
Thank God.
I’m here for the straight scoop. Martini and his faux patriotism dishonor my Ontario Liberal friends and exemplar (okay, role model) Sandra “Lady Churchill” Pupatello. Harper’s gonna avenge the Magna when Belinda Stronach is bye-bye-bimbo and Paul Martini has to run for Prime Minister… of the Bermudas. I’m gonna go nuts, jump up and down, cry a little and make the V-sign when the news comes: CONSERVATIVES WIN, STAND UP FOR CANADA!
Then America should say with one voice: WELCOME BACK!!
50, female, married mom and homemaker, Sunday Sun for the crossword puzzle
SDA, the Shotgun, Damian Penney, Angry, Tim Blair, Captains’ Quarters, LGF, Mark Steyn.
Why? From a columnist at the Knoxville(TN) News Sentinel about Mapes, Rather and the memos:
Neither she nor CBS were prepared for the carefully orchestrated “killing” of what was, by every industry standard, a well-documented report, substantiated beyond the highest journalistic protocol.
Even crack whores have higher standards – they don’t lie about what they do.
37 year old male Army officer preparing to deploy to Kandahar in January. I get my news from all the usual news suspects, but I take it all with a grain of salt until I’ve checked the facts – and by far the most effective way to do that is with the help of a few blogs.
Keep up the good work, Kate. SDA is where I start my fact checking.
41 yr old tech-savy MWM, half a dozen blogs per day, sda several times a day.
No idiot box (books much better), papers only to “know thy enemy”.
Hey Duke! some of us profs do pay attention to the rest of the universe…
hps
Kathryn,
It appears that Rather and Mapes aren’t the only ones who believe in fake but accurate reporting.
Good Lord! I think that Texan Canuck has been peeking over my shoulder! The only thing different is I don’t read the Houston Chronicle. Cancelled my Calgary Herald years ago as I know the routine by rote. Cancelled my NP about a year ago as they too started to lean heavy Liberal. I am 62 years old and a female ,have most always been a homemaker and raised five kids, also have 12 grandkids so have seen a bit of life. My son-in-law is a techie so he has been my support to get online. Hardly ever have to call him anymore. I too e-mail articles and am sure many get passed on down the line. I love the blogs and love to be able to get the truth instead of being force-fed crap from the MSM . Is it any wonder the press is in such a tizzy, they have lost so many customers to the internet. Keep up the good work Kate, you have a big following.
Jaymeister, it’s off topic for this thread, but from what I can see, it omits info that is anti-American, one of the greatest crimes that the LATimes, NYT, CBS, etc. can imagine.
One side of the story is not even close to fake, fraudulent and false memos.
No further thread-jacking from me.
DWM – mid-forties – no newspapers for me – the money I save easily covers the cost of my internet – used to read 3-4 papers a day depending upon which part of the country I was in – refuse to let my $$$’s go to the enemies of democracy – except CBC which I currently have no choice but to pay for – watch only HNIC there – the MSM is the most flawed institution in our democracy – a truly un-biased media would not allow things like adscam to occur – investigative journalism?? What’s that??