A new Pew study done together with BuzzMetrics failed to find inordinate agenda influence by bloggers in the 2004 presidential campaign. The dominant factor found by the study was, not terribly surprisingly, news events. Bloggers and “chatter” sites then amplified and analyzed the memes about as much as other media. The study took specific news events and then employed key word searches to determine relative weights across blogs, traditional media and discussion sites. But by choosing significant news events as the central topic of the study, the project may have biased results toward media such as newspapers.

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