The power and politics of blogs in the New York Times

Many readers will find this Adam Liptak story in the New York Times on the legal reaction to the NSA surveillance decision interesting because of the near-unanimity among “legal experts” that the judge’s legal reasoning in the case was poor. Some readers will be interested in the story because, as Ann Althouse points out, it ...

By , a professor of international politics at the Fletcher School at Tufts University and the author of The Ideas Industry.

Many readers will find this Adam Liptak story in the New York Times on the legal reaction to the NSA surveillance decision interesting because of the near-unanimity among "legal experts" that the judge's legal reasoning in the case was poor. Some readers will be interested in the story because, as Ann Althouse points out, it contradicts the NYT editorial from the previous day. Henry Farrell and I are interested in the story because the first five "legal experts" quoted are also bloggers -- Howard Bashman, Jack Balkin, Orin Kerr, Cass Sunstein, and Eugene Volokh. This would seem to be a classic case of bloggers from different ideological stripes using their first-mover advantage to developing a common frame on an event, which is then picked up by the mainstream media.

Many readers will find this Adam Liptak story in the New York Times on the legal reaction to the NSA surveillance decision interesting because of the near-unanimity among “legal experts” that the judge’s legal reasoning in the case was poor. Some readers will be interested in the story because, as Ann Althouse points out, it contradicts the NYT editorial from the previous day. Henry Farrell and I are interested in the story because the first five “legal experts” quoted are also bloggers — Howard Bashman, Jack Balkin, Orin Kerr, Cass Sunstein, and Eugene Volokh. This would seem to be a classic case of bloggers from different ideological stripes using their first-mover advantage to developing a common frame on an event, which is then picked up by the mainstream media.

Daniel W. Drezner is a professor of international politics at the Fletcher School at Tufts University and the author of The Ideas Industry. Twitter: @dandrezner

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