My initial read was a quick one on my phone, so I went back to make sure I wasn't wrong.... "This could make us the most noisily opinionated nation on earth."

My initial read was a quick one on my phone, so I went back to make sure I wasn't wrong.... "This could make us the most noisily opinionated nation on earth." - Just a noisy opinion, in my opinion. "All this fits with the trend toward Opinion TV. Less and less of our information flow is devoted to gathering facts, and more and more is going toward popularizing opinion. Twenty-four-hour news channels have been replaced by 24-hour opinion channels. The chatter is the story." - Nice job fitting in another baseless stance around a fact simply to legitimize said opinion by proximity. Conveniently left unsaid is the fact that the "twenty-four-hour news channels" he holds up on a pedestal are themselves 24-hour opinion channels. Have you ever stayed home from work for a day and watched CNN or Fox News? "Bloggers make money if their consumers click the ads on their sites. Some sites even pay writers by the click, which is of course a system that promotes sensationalism, or doing whatever it takes to get noticed." - Again, assigning a label ("sensationalism") to blogs as if it didn't exist before blogs did. National Enquirer-type rags aside, all the major news channels before the internet have been perfecting this art for the past couple of decades. The author is not presenting an unbiased report of facts. He is presenting his own viewpoint DISGUISED as a neutral report. This report, coming from a "reputable" source like the WSJ is a great example of why the democratization of the publishing business is good for the public. There may be a lot of fluff out there, as he states, but the good stuff rises to the top.