SWEDISH DAILY WRITES ABOUT BLOGGERS IN USA

The Swedish daily, Svenska Dagladet, has an article on how "political blogs get headlines" in the mainstream media. I wonder if the journalist (Karin Henriksson, Washington D.C.) has read Peggy Noonan's article, The Blogs Must Be Crazy. Robert Tracinski has the following comment on the article.

Peggy Noonan can be an annoyingly emotionalistic and undisciplined writer, but her column today gets close to making a very important point about the panic of the mainstream media (MSM) over the influence of "bloggers." (For an example of which, see today's vaporings from Noonan's equally emotionalist and even more insufferable liberal counterpart, Maureen Dowd, at http://tinyurl.com/5c6mg .)

The point Noonan makes but doesn't explicitly identify: bloggers represent the power of the free market in the realm of ideas. In a free market, established firms can never afford to coast on their reputations--and any upstart innovator with a better idea can wield an influence far out of proportion to his meager resources. That's the intense competitive pressure that the blogs have brought to bear against the mainstream media. (TIADaily.com, The Free Market of Ideas, 02/17/05.)