At least that's what they say they do, even though only 34% of bloggers consider what they do as journalism. 56% may seem low, but it's still a damn sight more than what the self-proclaimed "journalists" have been doing for the past 25 years. To the mainstream media, it seems that fact-checking entails making sure the quote is reported accurately, but not whether what the person is claiming in the quote is accurate.

Hence: Iraq.

Hence: no WMD after all.

Hence: "We were never after WMD - the invasion was a humanitarian mission."

Hence: Global warming ignored.

Hence: ________________ (fill in the blank).

Anyway, the Pew report is here: Bloggers: A portrait of the internet's new storytellers. Here's the shocker: Only 11% of bloggers consider themselves political bloggers.

There's an interesting take in SFGate:

That's the norm, as the Pew study found that the largest percentage of bloggers in their sample (37 percent) blog about their "life and experiences," and 52 percent said the major reason they blog is to express themselves creatively....

...And while many of the world's most visited and influential blogs like www.dailykos.com and the www.instapundit.com are male-run political playgrounds, Pew found only 11 percent of bloggers riff on politics. And that 46 percent are women.

Oh, but those playgrounds are very loud. Very loud indeed. If you go there. But since they don't link much, they don't draw much traffic outside of their own true believers. When you look at it that way, the 1,090,907 other political blogs comprising the 11% of the 12 million American bloggers add up to quite a tidy sum of people, especially when you consider that 72% of American bloggers -- and 58% of internet users in America -- "look online for news or information about politics."

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media girl also blogs at other places.