“While publications can’t afford them, a blog with ten thousand daily readers has an astonishing number of potential fact-checkers, many of them with specific domain knowledge in the particular area of the post or article, again something the MSM can’t begin to afford.”
I submit that the MSM has always had a very similar corps of fact-checkers. Their motivations are the same as those of the bloggers: to notify the papers of factual errors, with more or less proper bits of outrage. Their celerity, however, was slower than bloggers – since they had to write letters, or to telephone, to get their fact-checkings into the hands of the editors. And the cost of such letters and calls was greater than some online research, some keyboard clattering and hitting the SEND key.
And I submit that printed journals, who received these comments privately, have over centuries habitually round-filed them. Who’s to know we got it wrong? On to the next big story.
This was precisely the attitude owned by the unconsciously illuminating gent who furnished the name for Pajamas Media, and sneered at bloggers in pajamas while Dan Rather was exposed by bloggers as a fraud or a fool.
It took the MSM a while to realize that online fact-checking is blatantly public, as opposed to their old ignorable phone calls and letters to the editor. In fact MSM is still waking up to this fact, viz. TNR in its breathtakingly dense ‘defense’ of its mendacious Beauchamp.
