If intelligent voices are being ignored, are the voices that are speaking up not good enough?

With so many creative, insightful bloggers on the web today, sometimes it is difficult to know what information is most trustable, and what information is not. In Joshua Foust’s “Echo Chamber”, he goes over the ways that bloggers have “failed” to do their job. He clearly expresses his disappointment towards the lack of intellectual and powerful contributions that could have been made towards the blogging coverage of the war in Georgia. It strikes a chord with me because for someone like me, who is very unfamiliar with current events and the blogosphere, it is rare to ever notice if a blog or story is “flat” or “narrow” as Foust mentions.

I don’t read much of the news nor do I even follow any particular blogs, so in many ways it is hard for me to give a blog a grade. Foust has clearly given bloggers an “F” for the ways that the current happenings in Georgia were told, but a reader like me would have no sense of a good or bad blog.

“Rather than providing the clarity, nuance, and honesty that they promise to provide, the big blogs instead retreated to their comfortable and predictable ideological corners. By keeping to their usual haunts, these blogs did their readers a tremendous disservice: they were just as incurious and ideological as they regularly accuse the MSM of being.” – “Echo Chamber", Joshua Foust.

 I guess my point is – What truly determines a blog as “flat” and “narrow”? If intelligent voices are being ignored, are the voices that are speaking up not good enough, should I be able to trust the voices that aren’t categorized as intelligent? How do readers like me build a rubric to score a blog as sufficient (with clarity, honesty, and nuance)?While Foust may be disappointed, I wonder what his definition of an intelligent voice may be. Instead of complaining, I wish he would have provided a way for us to look out for the “intelligent” ideal voices – some tips on how we can recognize and avoid bloggers that just talk in big circles.