华尔街日报一篇有意思的文章。一洋教授研究了中国众多博客后，发现61%的博客里都是“带有批评性”。而相对比，中国媒体中只有19%的比例。下面的图里具体列出了数字。


难道中国博客中愤青居多？



【WSJ.COM】Western journalists often write aboutthe ability of Chinese bloggers to challenge authority and provide analternative voice to the propaganda that often fills China’s officialnews media. How accurate is that description across China’s vastblogosphere?

Ashley Esarey, an assistant professor at Middlebury College,set out to describe the political discussion on Chinese blogs in aquantitative way. At the Chinese Internet Research Conference onSaturday, he shared the results of content analysis he conducted onmore than 500 blogs with political content and discussion of newsevents from 2006. He compared the results of that study to a similarcontent analysis of major Chinese newspapers.

He found that, at least in empirical terms, Chinese bloggers do liveup to their reputation. Some 61% of Chinese blogs he studied carriedcriticism, while only 19% of Chinese newspapers did the same. (Notably,corporations were a top subject of criticism for the bloggers, alongwith national events and the central government– Esarey’s chart belowhas more details).




Similarly, some 36% of blogs demonstrated “pluralism”–the presenceof two or more opposing perspectives–as opposed to just 5% ofnewspapers. Meanwhile, only 4% of blogs carried national propaganda, asopposed to 21% of newspapers.

A few bloggers seemed to carry a lot of influence, according to hissurvey. Just 5% of the blogs were influential enough to be linked to100 or more other blogs.

Esarey said his research shows that blogging has weakened thestate’s ability to control discourse. So will the revolution beblogged? Not so fast, he said: blogging is a harbinger of higherpopular participation in politics, but not necessarily a revolution.

The most critical blog posts, he noted, were usually written between midnight and 4 a.m.

-Geoffrey A. Fowler