Blogs vs. the MSM

I wonder if the Moneyball-style statheads that rose to prominence around the turn of the century, and their tension-filled relationships with old-style managers, provide a good framework through which to view the relationship between the blogosphere and traditional media. In the first case, you had a bunch of young, Ivy-educated, brash stat geeks flooding into the baseball world. They came with a whole new way of looking at things, an obsession with efficiency, and lots and lots of new statistics. Thus, they clashed with the grizzled tobacco chewers who had ruled the previous half-century of baseball, who made decisions based on instinct, or "time-tested" baseball aphorisms, or, often, nothing at all. Now, it's not like old-school types have been utterly eradicated, but the Baseball Prospectus way of viewing the game, with more finely-tuned statistical measurements, certainly has extensive roots.

Compare this with bloggers, who are mostly of the younger generation, tech-savvy, over-confident, and who place a premium on sites like Factcheck. They are also partisan, but -- the good ones, at least -- are willing to engage and listen to differing viewpoints. Whereas the Beltway crowd, or adherents of Broderism, as Greenwald would say, are older, less keyed into the feelings of the country at large (this isn't to say bloggers, who principally reside in Manhattan and Dupont Circle, are shining examples of the "everyman"), less tech-savvy and less modern, and obsessed with appearing centrist and balanced, even at the cost of, you know, facts. As Paul Krugman aptly put it last fall:

Why do the McCain people think they can get away with this stuff? Well, they’re probably counting on the common practice in the news media of being “balanced” at all costs. You know how it goes: If a politician says that black is white, the news report doesn’t say that he’s wrong, it reports that “some Democrats say” that he’s wrong. Or a grotesque lie from one side is paired with a trivial misstatement from the other, conveying the impression that both sides are equally dirty.

Indeed, one of the chief reasons the blogosphere exists, in its current incarnation, is to provide a "new" way of viewing politics that isn't blindly devoted to stale journalistic tricks of the trade. And in many ways, this is very similar to what sabermetricians did to the world of baseball. Indeed, Nate Silver and co.'s PER and PECOTA vs. Batting Average and RBIs provides a nice analogy to 538-style poll weighting and state-result focuses vs. a narrow obsession with daily Gallup results.