January 15, 2008

He Needed a Fact-Checker

Former U.S. Sen. Tom Daschle, D-North South Dakota, speaking in Nashville Tuesday night said this:

"(Issues and politics) are more transparent. The electronic media brings it into the living room. Internet and bloggers are another element. There are no editors on the internet ... so we get all kinds of crazy stuff ... and it only ... exacerbates the issue."

Daschle's probably still peeved that a couple of bloggers helped John Thune de-throne him a few years back, but he's just wrong about there being "no editors on the Internet."

The blogosphere is more heavily edited than the New York Times. It's not edited by a staff of paid editors like those at a typical newspaper, but journalism on blogs is edited by an army of fact-checkers, spin-detectors, grassroots grammarians, volunteer copy editors and experts from almost any field of human endeavor. They are called "readers." Sometimes, they are bloggers, too. The more readers a blog has, the more editors it has. The editing is interactive, the spin-detection is ongoing, the fact-checking never stops.

It was the editors of the blogosphere, after all, who took apart CBS's hit piece on President Bush in 2004, the one based on forged documents. The bloggers consulted more experts and brought more expertise to bear than did CBS and it was the bloggers who exposed the fraud while CBS scrambled to prop it up.

Frankly, given the recent track record of CBS and, more recently, the New York Times, you are better off trusting the blogosphere to get it right on important stories.