Meltdown of the ancient media
The latest flap over possibly forged documents, along with the recent fabricated AP stories and poorly editied quotes has led me to a theory about the mainstream media and the blogosphere.
As many people have noted before, there are no real qualifications that one must meet in order to be a journalist. At some point, journalism students stopped going to J-school to learn how to “get at the truth”, and started going to “change the world”. This has led them to slant hard news stories with their own biases, and even fabricate news altogether.
The Internet was always a repository of knowledge. It started as a military project, and was quickly adopted by scientific academia as a way for minds to share their thoughts. Put succinctly, the Internet is the largest gathering of subject matter experts there is. It is nearly impossible for something incorrect to be put on the Internet without it being corrected almost immediately.
The advent of the weblog has amplified this a thousand times. Places like Power Line, Little Green Footballs, Instapundit and more than I have the storage space to name are individual or community blogs of experts in various fields.
Basically, there now exists a repository of expertise on nearly every subject of human endeavor that is instanly accessible, always available, and paying attention. The mainstream media no longer have a monopoly on the dissemination and analysis of events. This is a Good Thing.
As proof of my theory, I commend to you these entries at Power Line, and Little Green Footballs.