Recently, I noticed that several webloggers that discussed the suspected chemical weapons plant found in southern Iraq on March 24 weren’t mentioning those claims turned out to be false, even after the story was retracted revised on USA Today, New York Times, the Washington Post, and Yahoo’s front page yesterday.
I thought this particular example would be an interesting case study to study how bias affects story selection on weblogs. So I searched Technorati for weblogs that linked to the four most popular URLs (1, 2, 3, 4) about the chemical plant. Starting with a list of 148 weblogs spanning the socio-political spectrum, I located the relevant entry on each site and searched for followups or updates.
In brief, here are my findings. 112 weblogs linked to the original story, but didn’t follow up with another entry or correct their existing entry in any way. 28 weblogs linked to the original story, and later posted a correction or other addendum. 8 weblogs only linked to the story after it proved to be false, but didn’t link to it when the news originally broke. The complete list of categorized links is below. (If you have any corrections, please e-mail or leave a comment.)
If you look at the sites, it appears that conservative weblogs tended to only link the original report, liberal weblogs tended to only link to the correction, and mixed and group weblogs linked to both.
I’m not going to jump to conclusions with these results; they don’t necessarily imply bias from their authors. The followup article could be considered less newsworthy as the breaking news, for example, or it might be more a reflection of a reluctance to rehash a story that a weblogger has already covered. I would love to hear from any of the webloggers, explaining why they did or didn’t follow up with an update to the story. Any theories or interpretations of the data are also welcome.
And if you can think of a polarizing breaking news story that many left-wing, anti-war webloggers jumped on but later neglected to retract, e-mail me.
Continue reading “Bias Affects Story Updates on Political Weblogs” →
