Adage.com has published this article* about the harm caused to the United States by (gasp!) BLOGS!

Blog this: U.S. workers in 2005 will waste the equivalent of 551,000 years reading blogs.

Waste? If your only info on Rathergate came from watching CBS News or from reading blogs, which one are you wasting time with? But I digress...

About 35 million workers -- one in four people in the labor force -- visit blogs and on average spend 3.5 hours, or 9%, of the work week engaged with them, according to Advertising Age’s analysis. Time spent in the office on non-work blogs this year will take up the equivalent of 2.3 million jobs. Forget lunch breaks -- blog readers essentially take a daily 40-minute blog break.

For those of you not used to corporate media speak, let me translate the above for you: "Oh God, blogs are taking over news and we don't get ad money for blogs. Our Big Media readership can't win in the marketplace of ideas, so - EMPLOYERS: your business is being destroyed by blogs! Stop the bleeding now and ban all blog reading at work while you still can! (But don't pay attention to all the news sites that your employees read, that's okay and we don't consider that a waste of your company time.)

*Registration required, Bugmenot login: everyone@adage.com, password: password