A theme that comes up from time to time here on the Between Lawyers backchannel is: what will the future look like if everyone subscribes to the "Daily Me"? Will people forsake national news sources (denoted in the blogosphere with the usually pejorative term MSM), or will they seek a balance?

There is an on-going attack against MSM that it is biased. Conservatives attack liberal bias in MSM reporters, liberals attack conservative bias in MSM ownership.

One form of criticism is bias by omission or emphasis - the charge that a media source doesn't report or downplays certain stories. For example, Michelle Malkin criticizes MSM for not emphasizing a financial scandal at Air America. Instapundit and Powerline regularly argue that MSM does report enough positive news from Iraq.

On the one hand, the blogosphere has a democratizing affect on fact-checking - Rathergate being held up as the textbook example. Very often bias motivates digging (I suspect that a Democrat didn't drag up the kerning analysis) but the more correct information out there, the better for everyone.

On the other hand, the blogosphere can un-do that good work with partisanship. An unrelenting attack of bias against MSM may not have a completely salutory affect if all it does is to encourage people to indulge more in confirmatory bias - where people feel that they don't need to accept as true any fact that challenges their belief system, if the source of the information is allegedly biased.

However, who are the sources of these charges of bias?

Instapundit, Michelle Malkin, Powerline and Hugh Hewitt are vocal critics of bias in MSM, and all have accused MSM of bias by omission.

All of these bloggers regularly discuss national politics and the Bush Administration. However, to the best of my knowledge, none of them have mentioned this week that a high ranking Bush administration official named Safavian, was arrested. At the time of this writing, if you put 'Safavian' in as a search term in their website searches and you'll get no hits.

Safavian was arrested for allegedly obstructing the investigation of someone named Abramoff. Of these four bloggers, to the best of my knowledge, only Malkin has reported that Abramoff was indicted.

Is this a case of pot, kettle, black?

Well, it seems that a taxonomy of blogging would be useful in order to articulate some kind of standard. The New York Times holds itself out as publishing 'all the news that's fit to print.' It may have editorial guidelines as to the ripeness and importance of a story - but if it completely ignored a news story reported by similar national papers, then it would raise eyebrows.

These bloggers aren't newspapers and don't have a similar obligation to be comprehensive - but they do cover the national beat and I'm interested in why they didn't report this story.

What are bloggers, then? Are they reporters, analysts, columnists or advocates? Or do they change from post to post?

Does the blogger identifying themselves as liberal or conservative solve everything?

Would a code of ethics help?

Maybe the 'Daily Me' of the future would be a good thing - but it concerns me that people may forsake certain forms of media because of charges of bias, and instead subscribe to sources that tell them only what they want to hear - accurate or not.