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A new Pew study done together with BuzzMetrics failed to find inordinate agenda influence by bloggers in the 2004 presidential campaign. The dominant factor found by the study was, not terribly surprisingly, news events. Bloggers and "chatter" sites then amplified and analyzed the memes about as much as other media. The study took specific news events and then employed key word searches to determine relative weights across blogs, traditional media and discussion sites. But by choosing significant news events as the central topic of the study, the project may have biased results toward media such as newspapers. A similar study on, for instance, the adjectives used to characterize presidential candidates, may have shown greater weight of influence of the opinion sites.

Events used for the study's tracking included the "Rathergate" affair, the Iraq war, a Bin Laden video and the fracas surrounding explosives found to be missing in Iraq. The authors were careful to note that the methodology was an exploratory start.

One of the study's authors said "Bloggers are not themselves super columnists or super advocates." He compared them instead to rather traditional moderators appearing in other media. "Bloggers are as much hosts of the conversation as they are directors of a sort of show or columnists."