NC Blogs

This week we were asked to examine two blogs that were popularly followed by North Carolina voters during the 2008 presidential election, BlueNC, a left-leaning site and Civitasreview, a site a little more on the right. The posts on each site seem fairly well supported, as they both provide links to the news stories they cite and to the news stories' primary source documents. Some BlueNC posts also include videos (like this) from YouTube or other file sharing sites, while a few Civitasreview postings feature charts and graphs.

But BlueNC's approach is a little overwhelming and seems to rely on the assumption that more sources equal more credibility (often ignoring the reliability of the sources). The text boxes that highlight quotes are an eyesore rather than eye-catching. I much prefered the overall design of Civitasreview-- it was cleaner, and much easier to follow.

It is extremely important to pay attention to the slant of political blogs when perusing the blogosphere. For example, many of the postings I read on BlueNC seemed like attacks rather than interpretations, calls-to-arms rather than analyses. Civitasreview is definitely less shrill, but still it was obvious that the blogger was trying to sway me with each story. I understand that the point of a blog is to voice an alternate opinion, but does it have to dupe readers into believing something?

Neither blog made me feel more informed about North Carolina politics. In both cases it seemed that the bloggers assumed that their readers know what is going on (even though they provide links, they were written in more like memory cues). Both blogs also seemed to be targeting groups that would already agree with their politics. They seem to be in the business of consolidation ("here's a story, this is what you should think") rather than investigation ("here's a story, is this really all that's there?").

In the era of blogs, everyone can be a "journalist." But it's also important to remember that everyone has an opinion. News stories and editorials are not the same thing.