Unless you have been living under a rock for the last few weeks, it can't have escaped your attention that the Liberal Democrats have been the focus of more than the usual amounts of media coverage. A series of stories have appeared in the press; first the stories about Charles Kennedy, then Mark Oaten and now Simon Hughes.

However, it has not just been the traditional media that have been involved. The rumours about Oaten were circulated around the internet before they made it into the News of the World, and rumours about Simon Hughes likewise. A controversial podcast by bloggers Guido Fawkes and Recess Monkey contained various allusions to stories about Oaten and about Hughes. Much of what was said was unprintable by newspaper standards, but its effect in spreading rumour was significant.

Of course, this is, in some ways, what the internet is all about. Circumventing slow and outdated information systems and replacing them with up-to-the-minute commentary from ordinary people with a passion for their subject. It is hard to resist the conclusion that the internet will play an ever-greater role in political reporting.

All of this was in my mind whilst I was checking the Liberal Review log files. These logs keep statistics on which pages are most viewed and which sites direct most traffic here. Most bloggers have systems like this and it's a valuable way of keeping track of what your audience likes to see. In particular, statistics are kept on "referrers" - referrers being sites which link to Liberal Review. Every time someone follows a link to a site, that site is notified of where the link came from. This includes searches on Google, and that's where it gets interesting.

After a brief scan through the log files, I noticed numerous referrers from Google, which included the search terms used. Many were simply "liberal democrat leadership" or similar queries. But in the last week, there was a flurry of queries about Mark Oaten, in combination with various scandal-related words. In the last few days, several queries about Simon Hughes with reference to his sexuality.

What this implies is that the internet is being used to search for such stories, rumours and suchlike. But further investigation proved even more interesting: several of these searches came from IP addresses (the internet's equivalent of phone numbers) belonging to media organisations, including newspapers and TV networks. Perhaps the most amusing example was someone from ITN searching simply for "Chris Huhne dirt" - an optimistic effort at digging up a story if ever I saw one.

What this tells us is that when we read our newspapers or turn on our TV screens, what we see and hear might well have been "researched" by searching for dirt on the internet. Of course, the mainstream media will never admit it; the pretence that they are above such things is too important to them. They rely on the impression that their reporters are out in the field, fearlessly digging for details on the major issues of the day, not sat in an air-conditioned office with a cup of coffee and an open Google window. But it's the truth, and for the sake of their own reputations, it might now be time for them to start admitting that they read the blogs just like the rest of us.