Hmm...has anyone done a study on the tendency for blogs/online media to link to particular versions of news stories?

Everyone knows that online linking has both economic value and an affinity element: By linking to stuff, people send traffic towards it; as a result, people tend to link to stuff they like and want to support more than stuff they hate and want to see die, painfully. 

Given that, I wish a media researcher with some actual funds would do a study on "link clustering" and partisanship. 

Looking at memeorandum, it's obvious, as you'd guess, that blogs heavily favor linking to stories whose frame or content support a partisan-friendly narrative (both on the right and on the left).

However, it looks like that's more the case on the right than on the left, just based, again, on casual link counts on memeorandum, not the most scientific methodology.

Still, if that is in fact the case, my take on this is that left blogs tend to show both sides of the story and then add a progressive ideological frame, while right blogs tend to prefer an echo chamber—refusing to link to and thereby support anything that might dissent from their partisan narrative.

But yes, I wish someone would actually test this, as it would help dimensionalize what many studies already suggest...that right-wing news consumers are surprisingly ill-informed about, you know, actual reality (warning: PDF link to PIPA/U. of Maryland report on media consumption and misperceptions of the facts surrounding the Iraq War).  

Posted via email from OriginalSpin