U. of Chicago’s Cass Sunstein’s essay “The Daily Me” argues that those of us who use the internet as our news source tailor our link choices to sites that reinforce what we already believe. Both Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit and Perry de Havilland of Libertarian Samizdata have other ideas, however — including this volley from Perry:

I suspect that customised news from the established media’s on-line outlets is not all that perturbs the good Professor. Although news collection remains the realm of well resourced established media companies, the oligopoly of interpreting what the crude news data actually means has been broken forever […]

I suggest to you that in our own small but growing way, the newsblog movement is contributing to this disquiet in academia who are, even more than the media companies themselves, the distilled essence of the ‘qualified’ purveyors of opinions. Yet the Internet can, and indeed has, provided a true market place for punditry that is aggressively non-deferential, fact-checking and dissecting the ‘experts’ in near real time… and some people out there don’t much like it [ … emphasis in the original]

Like Dr. Sunstein I make my living toiling in the academy; but like both Reynolds and de Havilland, I’m convinced that for a real diversity of perspective, the scope of the internet — with it’s ease of hyperlink-ery (which urges the follow-up of interesting nuggets; and which makes accessing international news a snap) — cannot be challenged by traditional print sources. Plus, as Ken Layne has eloquently suggested, internet newsies have a penchant for “fact-checking your ass.”

…Which should suggest (and let’s hope this comes as some relief to Perry) that not all academics are disquieted by the freedom of surfing the ether.

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