Patterico writes:
On the one hand, I have to hand it to the Los Angeles Times. They have run a front-page story about Justice Ginsburg’s speech to the NOW Legal Defense Fund.
On the other hand, why did I have to be the one to tell them about it? . . .
I suspect that Patterico’s answer to that is that the Times is more interested in finding fault with Justice Scalia on very similar grounds — they had run an article about that a few days before — than in investigating whether Justice Ginsburg might have done the same. Maybe that’s so; but a reader comment (apparently from a Pennsylvania legislator who is himself a blogger) makes another good point:
You had to tell them about because you knew more about the subject than they did, and you cared enough about it enough to want the public to know. . . .
I think that’s quite right — often a lot can be done just by alerting the media to facts that they’re unaware of, whether you e-mail the newspaper’s “Reader’s Representative” (as Patterico did), or the reporter directly. And while any reader can do that, I think the rise of organized blogging helps that: Bloggers end up being more willing to devote more time to such matters (partly because they feel that even if their e-mail gets no reaction from the newspaper, they can at least alert others to the point, and can complain on-blog about how the newspaper isn’t responding); and blogging helps them build on their own information base by using input from other bloggers and from readers.
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