Free Republic

Bloggers go big-game hunting As Internet `journalists' bag another prize, Tim Harper considers the consequences for mainstream media TIM HARPER Often witty, sometimes racy, certainly irreverent, frequently sanctimonious, the blogosphere has been bulking up for years. But the mainstream media have long taken a largely dismissive approach to this world of online political journals: Open. Peek. Chuckle. Close. No more. The growing army of American cyber-pundits hunched over their search engines has begun to wield strength that no one predicted. The bloggers have brought down the powerful. They have unmasked an impostor in the White House briefing room. Perhaps most...

NEW YORK - The consortium of news organizations that runs the election exit polls has voted to delay distributing data for several hours on future election days. Exit poll data will not be distributed until after 4 p.m. ET to the organizations that have paid for it: ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, Fox News Channel and The Associated Press, NBC’s elections director, Sheldon Gawiser, said Thursday. On Nov. 2, the companies conducting the polls, Edison Media Research and Mitofsky International, distributed the first wave of exit poll data at 1 p.m., and the numbers were immediately leaked on the Internet and...

The story of how CBS was caught perpetrating a hoax on the American People. Poor Lt. Col. Killian died in 1984 but I believe he would be surprised at the stir he created some twenty years after his death. On the evening of September 8th, CBS's 60 Minutes II dropped what they considered to be a (rather convenient) "bombshell" regarding President Bush's service in the National Guard. Directly contradicting Defense Department records showing that in 1973 Lt. Col. Killian praised Mr. Bush's performance and approved his honorable discharge, four memos from Killian impugning the service of Bush during those years...

Just brainstorming here. As we all have seen, the "pajama brigade" has proved to be able to expose major media errors and obvious bias. But, what if the freepers were even more organized? Could software take this fact-checking beyond the blog? Consider the kind of software used by Project Gutenberg. They scan a public domain book and have software that can feed out the OCR results one page at a time, along with an image of the scanned page. Thousands of volunteers proof read the OCR output and submit corrections. If a person only has time to proof one single...