With "hard, up-to-the-second facts," that is! Or, so sayeth a Guardianista named Paul Carr:

Last month, the Boston affiliate of America's Fox TV network ran a news item about a new craze sweeping cyber space...

...as Fox's breathless reporter put it, "to catalogue the details of their lives on web pages created for them, by them ... just blah-blah-blogging".

Incredible. I wonder what burgeoning technological trend Rupert Murdoch's news machine will uncover next? Mobile tar-tar-telephony? The rah-rah-radio? Far-far-fire?

...Fortunately in most other sections of the media, attitudes towards blogging - and online journalism in general - couldn't be more different. Not only are news organisations rolling out blogs of their own, but in the past year the influence of bloggers over their print, television and radio counterparts has grown massively...

An even more impressive example of how web journalism has started to influence the mainstream media comes from the US's newest radio network, Air America Radio. The New York-based station was set up as a liberal challenge to the dominance of right-wing talk radio in the US.

Through affiliates in cities from New York to Honolulu [except for the #2 and #3 markets in the U.S., but your editor quibbles], angry liberal voices such as Al Franken, author of the anti-Bush bible Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them, and Hollywood's Janeane Garofalo are taking on right-wing blowhards such as Rush Limbaugh and Bill O'Reilly.

But unlike Limbaugh and O'Reilly, who frequently replace research and reason with rage and rhetoric, Air America's hosts are armed to the teeth with hard, up-to-the second facts to support their relentless Bush bashing. Their sources? Blogs. And the blogging bloggers who blog them...

Yes, like Daily "mercs" Kos and Hatrios, both of whom are linked to from AA's blogs and referenced by AA's hosts.

[Cross-blogged to BoreAmerica]