Bloggers vs. Journalists

A lot has been written recently on many of my favorite blogs about mainstream news media criticism of bloggers. Seems to me that the criticism is nothing more than posturing. No editors? Well maybe that's a good thing. We're seeing a demand for transparency in our news media these days. At least when bloggers put something containing a mistake up, it stays up and doesn't mysteriously disappear from the web, to be replaced with corrected versions later with nary a mention of what led the "journalist" to make the mistake in the first place. Typically, when a blogger screws up, the mistake gets corrected with strikethrough, and the world gets to see the screwup for what it is.

And what's this about no fact-checkers? Isn't that a bit silly? Everyone in the blogosphere can be a fact-checker. When bloggers get something wrong, the fact-checkers show up in comments and trackbacks. More often than not, any mistakes are corrected, which is more than one can say for many journalists whose front-page mistakes might or might not be corrected, usually buried on page B36 in a tiny paragraph.

Gimme a break...