Right now, people are using BOTH – We pride ourselves on presenting only REAL news (which is why we have a link identifying our source at the end of every story), but not all websites are that careful. Many of them deal in speculation and even titillation for its own sake. But political blogs have become an important source for people who want to know what’s really going on (perhaps because we’ve heard so many lies in the past few years?)
Political scientists think that people who closely follow both political blogs and traditional news media tend to believe the content on blogs is more accurate. Researcher Richard Davis says, “Blog readers still get most of their news from regular news sources, but they are concerned that they are not getting the whole side of the story there. They suspect habitual bias in the traditional news content.”
The demise of the old-fashioned paper newspaper may be coming soon. The classified sections of most newspapers have already gone online. In the near future, Davis expects the traditional media and blogs to both continue on the internet under the mutually beneficial arrangement where the former produces the news, and the latter provides commentary.
Most blogs are written in the hopes of CHANGING people’s minds about something, but that may be a futile effort because a new study shows that Americans prefer to read political articles that agree with the opinions they already hold.
Researchers found that people spent 36% more time reading articles that agreed with their point of view than they did reading text that challenged their opinions, and even when they did read articles that countered their views, they almost always balanced that with reading others that confirmed their opinions.
Researcher Silvia Knobloch-Westerwick says, “We found that people generally chose media messages that reinforced their own preexisting views. In general, they don
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