Media is Afraid of Bloggers: They Don't Have To Be If They Do Their Jobs

It’s been suggested that media outlets may become afraid of reporting negative stories on the administration because bloggers will poke holes in their stories.

That isn’t true.

What the media outlets should be afraid of is what will happen if they do anything except report the facts. CBS got into trouble because they wanted to get an untrue story about President Bush out on the airwaves before their competitors did first. As a result of that haste, they used falsified documents and were greatly embarrassed when it was proven that the documents on President Bush’s tour of duty in the National Guard were frauds.

It’s true that bloggers were the first to raise questions of the authenticity of the National Guard documents; there’s a prevailing snide attitude at the networks that bloggers are guys who sit in their living rooms wearing pajamas (that’s what former CBS executive VP Jonathan Kline said in a debate with Steven Hayes, writer for the Weekly Standard) when compared to the “checks and balances” system at CBS (and other networks) that Mr. Kline was extolling (and which failed miserably on the CBS story).

There are all kinds of bloggers; they come from different walks of life, and often have more depth than the talent at the networks. The bloggers that raised the authenticity issue were attorneys, analysts, average janes and joes, and so forth. The Internet community outmaneuvered CBS and the network had to hire people (who had similar training to some of the bloggers, mind you) to do an in-depth analysis of the documents to find out that the documents WERE false.

So, the media shouldn’t be afraid of doing their jobs, but they should fear the repercussions of deceiving the American public and making news instead of reporting it.