Good Blog, Bad Blog

This piece on NPR about science journalism kind of ruffled my feathers because of this quote:

Professor Stephen Schneider, Professor of Climatology, Stanford University: I got to put down the blogosphere. The blogosphere is one of the worst places to go for information, because, unlike Paul and others, most public people are not going to spend three hours a day doing this. We really need to reestablish the mainstream media in putting some specialists back in who can smell the north end of a southbound horse, because most general assignment reporters can't and certainly their editors can't.

Now, I could care less what people think of this blog, and it probably isn't even in the top 100 for blogs by professional economists. But I can probably name 10 economics blogs off the top of my head that cover important issues in economics far, far better than any economic journalist, and many of them link over into science, technology, and humanities blogs that are equally good for their fields and subfields. True, within the blogosphere exists a substantial amount of crap, but finding a well-done blog by a professional in the field is not too tough, and many of these professionals blog, in part, because they are weary of science journalists, many of whom are barely even functionally literate in the fields they cover, consistently misquote their work or take their results horribly out of context.