Peggy Noonan has some thoughts on blogging vis a vis the Mainstream Media, especially in how the MSM reviles bloggers (and in many cases the feeling is returned). She lists the strength and weaknesses of blogging, and how they can be complementary to the MSM; it doesn’t have to be confrontational. She also makes a few interesting predictions, among them:
Most of the blogstorms of the past few years have resulted in outcomes that left and right admit or bray were legitimate. Dan Rather fell because his big story was based on a fabrication, Trent Lott said things that it could be proved he said. But coming down the pike is a blogstorm in which the bloggers turn out to be wrong. Good news: They’ll probably be caught and exposed by bloggers. Bad news: It will show that blogging isn’t nirvana, and its stars aren’t foolproof. But then we already know that, don’t we?
I think we’ve already seen a few cases where a blogstorm ignites over something, and it is quickly doused because the source was wrong. One of the great things about the blogosphere is that it’s self-correcting. You have millions of blogs, and perhaps several thousand are involved in some form of punditry (the type of blogging we’re talking about here). In a system with that many independent variables, the push-back against false information is hefty as is the capacity to detect it. I’m not worried that this is going to happen on a large scale. Heck, it even happens here in St. Blog’s, a much smaller system.
