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It’s true that some blogs have had a big political impact. Daily Kos, a site founded by Markos Moulitsas, was a force behind Howard Dean’s 2004 presidential campaign, and it claimed to have raised more than $1 million for a dozen liberal congressional candidates running in 2004. It’s also true that a number of bloggers offer opinion and commentary as well written as any you’ll find in the opinion pages of major newspapers and magazines. Some mainstream journalists also blog. The best bloggers read widely and bring to their journals a collection of links to the most interesting items they’ve found, making some blogs a fine place to keep up on what’s being said about certain subjects in a lot of different places. That’s especially true for politics. The Pew poll found that 11 percent of bloggers say they deal primarily with politics and government.

However, it’s rare to find solid, original reporting on a blog. The most celebrated example is still the 2004 coup scored by the conservative website Little Green Footballs, whose owner, with help from other like-minded bloggers, quickly exposed as likely forgeries some documents used by CBS News’s Dan Rather to back up a report that President Bush had shirked his duties as a young pilot in the Texas Air National Guard. The memos were supposedly written by Bush’s commanding officer in 1973. Within hours of the CBS broadcast, LGF’s Charles Johnson produced a seemingly exact match for one of the memos using the standard settings on Microsoft Word and a computer printer, technology that didn’t come into widespread use until the 1990s. The memos included effects such as proportional spacing and a superscript (the “th” in “187th”), and even today we know of nobody who has reproduced the CBS memos using the office technology of 1973. Nearly all experts believe the documents were fakes.

Sometimes an individual blogger can go places and see things that news reporters can’t; notable for this were the Iraqi and U.S. military bloggers who posted personal journals of life in Iraq, and the bloggers who were on the scene of the earthquake and tsunami of December 26, 2004. Other blogs have evolved into mini–news organizations, employing small staffs of professional reporters and writers. We found TPM Muckraker a fine place to follow Washington corruption scandals as they unfolded during 2006, for example. The site’s staff cast a wide net for bits of new information—an exclusive interview in a San Diego newspaper, a little-noticed affidavit from a government investigator filed in a Washington, D.C., courthouse—and presented them in one place along with thoughtful and careful speculation about the possible implications. Even though it was established by a liberal website, Talking Points Memo, the Muckraker site was equally vigorous in following the legal troubles of both Republicans and Democrats. It provided more detailed and up-to-the-minute coverage of the congressional scandals than we found in any other place. But unbiased, professional-quality news blogs are rare, and the unwary blog reader can still be taken in by spectacular mistakes such as truthout.org’s “exclusive” report of Karl Rove’s “indictment,” mentioned earlier, or the rumor-has-it style of “reporting” favored by Matt Drudge (the Drudge Report) and his imitators.

It bears repeating: something stated as a fact on a blog might be true, or it might not. Verify it elsewhere. Often bloggers provide links to the source of their information, which can be helpful. But sometimes those links just lead to another blog, which may or may not have provided a link to the original source.

Due Diligence

There’s more to evaluating a website than figuring out whether it is sponsored by a government agency, a university think tank or scholar, or just some crank, however. As we’ve shown, even a government site can turn out to contain little more than the talking points of the political party that controls it, and a lone blogger can—sometimes—have better evidence than an