This is something I've noticed for a very long time and I'm a bit glad that my friends aren't of the tendency to engage too greatly in this stupid side-effect of the blogosphere. Whenever there's a news item that has any single sentence in it that can be used to make hay, the bloggers pounce on it and beat that little sentence to tiny bits. This is magnified when a whole article comes out that places certain issues or individuals in a bad light, particularly everyone's current least favorite President.
I'm not particularly pleased with President Bush myself, but to nit-pick everything he says and does because you don't like him is a little pathetic. A lot of conservatives did the same thing to President Clinton when he was in office (I may have even done it a bit myself), but that's no excuse.
This came up because I was looking through my Newsvine feeds and noticed an article pouncing on another article. The pouncer makes an inane comment trying to say that the economy must suck since the markets bounced because of a change in the Treasury Secretary—a "trivial event." I won't try to debunk that one because it's not my point, but I do think she's dead-wrong.
All one has to do is search for "George Bush" and the majority of the hits are either favorite pouncees or top pouncers. It'd be much nicer if such a search yielded substantive and informational hits rather than Bush-bashing. Bush/Clinton-bashing may be a fun hobby, but it doesn't really make for very interesting reading.
This is also not limited to just the President. News articles on anything scientific or mentions the term "intelligent design" usually gets an evolution pounce. The same goes for the separation of church-and-state, abortion, the war in Iraq, et. al.
While I'm not offering any real solutions to the issue, I will make a plug for sane discussion. The key is not to be passionless, but to back up everything with fact and to avoid any specious or emotional argument. If you want to say that the economy sucks and is evidenced by the dip in the markets during a change in the office of the Secretary of the Treasury, by all means say it, but back up the statement with fact and sources. Otherwise, you just add to the noise.
Cheers.
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