Political seeds

I got an email today. Here is a line from it:

These ideas don't come out of nowhere -- they're planted and spread via talk radio, the blogosphere and the entire right-wing media echo chamber ...

In the current election, partisans on both sides of the divide views blogs as key links in the media chain. Blogs are considered to be sources for extreme, often malicious, accusations, falsities that, once in circulation, are difficult to eliminate.

How can such a claim be studied? What would the step be in identifying and tracing such claims? I encourage those who want to focus on campaigns to think about this question, and begin looking at the resources collected here (and elsewhere) to formulate a research plan. If you are going to study this election, you will need to formulate this plan quickly. Note: internet research have done work on digital methods. The Digital Methods Initiative included in the resources as well as some of the chapters in the Boler book can be very helpful on this.