Andrew Baio just posted a short study on how bias affects news story link selection on weblogs.
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plant found in southern Iraq on March 24 weren't mentioning those claims turned out to be false, even after the story was retracted . . . .
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 . . . 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. 113 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. 7 weblogs only linked to the story after it proved to be false, but didn't link to it when the news originally broke.
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.
More interesting reading is found in the comments added to the post, written by some of the bloggers Andrew studied.
Andrew is the son of a fellow student in my Mass Communications Theory class at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. She (Andrew's mom) has her own weblog, but didn't tell me about it even though it's quite interesting. Promoting her son ahead of herself: You've got to respect that.
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