2026-10-22: I found these old writings when I was cleaning up some stuff and added them here.
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A claim is made that the rise of blogging and relevant platforms has decreased the quality of political discourse in the United States. Supporting reason given is that standards for news coverage and political topics will decline when any Tom, Dick and Harry can publish their political opinions so easily. I find that this claim is as weak as the reason given for it. Let me elaborate on it in below lines.
The main way in which online blogging increases the standards of political debate is that it does not require someone to be a journalist to get their opinions to the masses. This allows someone inside political leader's campaign, having some secret insider information, to publish the aforementioned information under a pen-name on an online blog. Thus the truth reaches the public without compromising the identity of the involved person. It also circumvents the possibility that some higher authority in a media-house can censor the content published by a journalist only because of their political inclinations and associations. This is the true form of "freedom of opinion" and "free speech", those two things which are considered pillars of the democracy of the United States.
Blogging also allows any political party to directly reach the masses without involving any journalist or media-house. Thus they can get their ideas published without any misinterpretations/mistranslations and vice-versa the concerned public can also reach their politicians directly without relying on other channels.
Surely, there is always the problem of trolls and propaganda creators on the Internet too. They can spread wrong information via their own blogs and/or criticize and denigrate the articles and works of other honest publishers. But they consist of a very small population compared to that of the people who actually want to get good content out to the masses but were hindered in the past by bureaucracy.
Thus we can see that as with everything, the rise of online blogging has both positive and negative effects on coverage and discussion of political topics. But in my opinion, the benefits far outweigh the problems posed by propaganda creators. Actually if the reader is vigilant enough then they can easily notice whether something published by a person has any solid grounds or not by verifying the integrity and credibility of the sources where that person got his/her information from.