Spot on assessment IMO.......
Bill Quick comments:
Tipping Point
...I guess we have to call this another example of the inability of the blogosphere to do original reporting like, say, the Boston Globe does. Of course the fact that the Globe misrepresented their source and essentially lied about his conclusions to further their ideological goals in a supposed news report must be ignored, just as we must also ignore, I guess, that it was a blogger who did the interview with the expert whom the Globe falsified and thus blew the Globe's "original reporting" out of the water.
There is a tectonic phenomenon at work here that is going to become much more obvious over the next few years. It is this: the incentives inherent in the structure of the old media encourage, and come very close to guaranteeing, dishonesty. The structure of the blogosphere, on the other hand, encourage, and come very close to guaranteeing, honesty.
Here's how it works: Old media functions as a gatekeeper. It (at one time, at least) possessed de facto control over what was permitted to become news. Its true motto was, "The power of the press belongs to the man who owns one." The number of such portals was low; the entry cost was extremely high. It became, over time, a very high-profit enterprise as a result. But aside from the money involved (many of the biggest fortunes in this country were founded on media profits), the source of power in the media was the ability to help its friends and punish its enemies, especially in the political arena. It still functions that way today: hence we have the edifying spectacle of the Boston Globe, CBS, and others publishing obvious, outright frauds that favor John Kerry, a candidate they support, and calling it "news." Hence we have the dozens, even hundreds, of instances of incontrovertible liberal bias in NYT, WaPo, LAT, and other titans of the mainstream, that we have seen over the past several decades, and especially in the past four years. Why? Because the structure of a portal-driven, low-unit, high-profit enterprise rewards dishonesty by providing its practitioners with power, money, and influence.
Now look at the structure of the blogosphere. The power of the press is distributed, not individually owned. Glenn Reynolds or Atrios spend not much more money than I do to publish, and I don't spend much more than a blogger with a daily readership of half a dozen. The individual members of the blogosphere do not function as portals: we functions as publishers, filters, and feedback mechanisms. Moreover, since the structure of the blogosphere mirrors that of its medium, the internet, itself, our tens of thousands of units tend to identifty dishonesty or error almost automatically and route around it. Any piece of information passed through the collective, or distributed intelligence of the blogosphere as a whole will be viewed at some point by an expert on that piece of news, and very likely commented on by that same expert. The comment then becomes attached to the news as an integral part of it and will be, just as the original news item was, examined by other experts. The end result is a structural tendency toward factuality and honesty in the final judgment of "conventional wisdom" delivered by the blogosphere as a whole on the original news item.
Further, the structural incentives of the blogosphere tend to reinforce these effects, just as the structural incentives of the old-style mainstream media tend to reinforce dishonesty. After being in this game for almost three years, and attaining a solid, if not spectacular readership, a high ranking among all blogs, and a fair amount of notoriety and reputation (for good or ill), I've come to the conclusion that nobody, not even Atrios or Glenn Reynolds, is likely to get rich blogging. Certainly not rich on the scale of the great newspaper fortunes, for instance. So the incentives for success in the blogosphere become more along the lines of reputation, influence within (and on some occasions, without) the blogosphere itself, and the ability to attract and retain a readership. You do that by writing a good blog, giving your readers what they want from you, allowing them to tell you what they want by their comments and their very presence ("News is a conversation" - Jeff Jarvis), and developing the ability to survive the continuing and unending fact-checking function that is the heart of the structure itself.
How does a small blog get to be a big blog? Well, one good way is to be the first to catch a big blog in an error. Most of the larger blogs I know of - my own included - will print comments that prove us wrong, or link to them, or both. An Instalanche can turn a tiny blog into a medium sized blog almost literally overnight, especially if that blog is already well written and attractive.
Yes, power laws do function here. Those of us who got in early and established ourselves will be very difficult to dislodge from the top ranks, unless we stop blogging entirely - and even then, our reputations linger for a good while, so that within reason it is always possible to re-enter the sphere and regain our former positions. Jeff Goldstein of Protein Wisdom did it, and I left for three months or so and returned with no long-term effects on my own readership, which is larger today than it ever has been. Reputation, not cash or the power to smite our enemies or help our friends by withholding the news or lying about it, is the coin of the realm here. And the primary characteristic that gets a blogger a reputation, and lets the blogger keep it, is the ability to survive the fact-checking function of the structure. You can have all the opinions you want, and as beautifully written as can be imagined, but if you falsify basic factuality, you'll be caught out, and you'll be damaged. Yes, the right side of the blogosphere can argue about Atrios' opinions, and vice versa, but if either of us start claiming that the sun rises in the west - or that an obvious forgery like the Killian memo is a legitimate document, we're going to get splattered, and we know it.
Hence the structural incentives of the blogosphere as a whole push it inexorably toward honesty and accuracy, not the opposite, as is the case with the old-style "portalized" mainstream media.
More and more readers have come to understand this, if not intellectually, then instinctively. We are now approaching a tipping point in that understanding, which we may not be able to precisely identify as we reach it, but will be able to see the effects of after it is behind us. What will those effects be? The primary one will be the complete destruction of any public faith in the honesty or accuracy of the mainstream media. Worse for that media is the fact that it will be structurally unable to save itself. Its very constitution prevents it from taking the necessary steps to save itself. The only thing it can do is to change its structure to become like the blogosphere. But if it does, then it won't be the old mainstream media any more, will it?
It will just be another part of the blogosphere.
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