Ottawa Citizen: If it's on a blog, it's news

The Citizen:

News stories regularly quote bloggers commenting on the latest political issue -- not just famous bloggers, or those involved in the game, but ordinary guys with blogs, sometimes even anonymous guys making postings on other peoples' blogs. If these ordinary guys were shouting on the street corner, their views would go unmarked, but because they are contained in blogs, they become news, quoted in the same story as the views of Paul Martin, Stephen Harper and the Canadian Taxpayers Federation.

This is compounded by the fact that the anonymous foot soldiers of political campaigns, the so-called backroom boys, have discovered that they need not be anonymous. They put together their own blogs and shout on the street corner, somehow forgetting that people might hear them; they shout rude things that are then reported by blog-smacked media, happy to find anyone saying anything colourful in a time when the leaders are careful and under wraps.