Leslie Nielsen and WikiLeaks Lead Blogosphere

The raging controversy over the leak of classified State Department cables generated major attention in both the blogosphere and Twitter last week.

The responses highlight the differing emphases of bloggers and Twitter users. For the week of November 29-December 3, fully 16% of the news links on blogs and 24% on Twitter were about WikiLeaks, according to the New Media Index from the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism. That made it the No. 2 topic on both blogs and Twitter. Attention among social media users even tracked closely with that of the mainstream press, where the topic also ranked No. 2 last week, according to PEJ’s News Coverage Index, at 16% of the newshole. Bloggers responded to a number of stories about WikiLeaks last week. But the one linked-to most often was a November 29 Washington Post column by Marc Thiessen. In the column, Thiessen accused the Obama administration of failing to stop the release of the documents and offering a weak response once they went public.


Leslie Nielsen and WikiLeaks Lead Blogosphere