The Rise of the Meta-Newspaper and the Fifth Estate
I came across a fascinating site, the Annotated New York Times, which tracks online discussions on NYTimes articles. We get the physical version of the paper every morning, and occasionally I even have time to read it. I often wonder what kind of reaction certain articles provoke, and now there's a great way to find out.
For example, David Brooks, the token conservative columnist of the NYT Op-Ed page, wrote a negative piece on Tom DeLay (for international readers, he is a top Republican Congressman) about some possibly corrupt practices, like getting $500k paid to members of his family.
This was an example of a Republican criticizing another Republican, something you don't see very often, so I checked out the discussion on the Annotated NYT site to see what the reactions were. There were 21 citations of the Masters of Sleaze piece. Some quotes:
we just aren't very 'conservative' anymore
And:
A miracle has occurred. David Brooks wrote a good column.
The Fourth Estate, from Wikipedia, is
the press, both in its explicit capacity of advocacy and in its implicit ability to frame political issues
The Annotated NYT is part of the phenomenon known as the Fifth Estate, where the people as represented by the blogs, watch the watchers, as represented by the press.