You can't trust anything you read on-line, because bloggers are just a bunch of nerds in pajamas, typing away in the middle of the night without editors or fact-checkers. Newspapers and TV news operations are arrogant elitists still trying to filter information for people who want to decide for themselves what's important.
That pretty much sums up the current war global confrontation between the new and old media about how people are going to get their news in the Information Age. Since I now have one foot in both worlds, I feel uniquely qualified to comment on the opposing views. As with most assertions by zealous partisans, there is both a grain of truth and some oversimplification in each camp.
On Wednesday, I published a post concerning my curiosity about the origin of the name of the Fifth Third Bank. What I discovered was interesting and resulted in a link to a clever piece by Cecil Adams of The Straight Dope fame. That would have been it, except for a brain spasm I had that compelled me to make the offhand observation that Fifth Third does not operate in Fort Wayne. In less than half a day, two readers had commented on the post by listing all the Fifth Third branches that are, in fact, in Fort Wayne. Apparently there are more Fifth Third banks in Fort Wayne than there are Starbucks in the Midwest, but some evil sorcerer, perhaps employed by Wells Fargo, had clouded my mind and prevented me from seeing them. (And this just in, for pity's sake; Fifth Third has been so successful here that it needs more space.)
Bloggers are not without fact-checkers and editors; in fact, we have millions of them. The blogosphere is the most open medium in the history of communications. Everything that's posted there goes out to the world, which is full of experts of all sorts more than eager to correct any little thing that strikes them wrong. (And note that the correction gets added to the original post, not buried in small type on Page 37 and written in such obtuse language that it's impossible to understand what the mistake was, let alone what the correction means.) Certainly, any specific thing on any specific site should be regarded with skepticism, but over time it gets sorted out. The blogosphere works for the same reasons that F. A. Hayek observed that the free market works. The mainstream press is feeling a little defensive right now because blogs have made press criticism one of their chief objectives. But as blogs evolve into more original reporting, they will face the same criticism and scrutiny, from each other and everyone else who's paying attention.
The rising stars of the blogosphere, on the other hand, are much too dismissive of the gatekeeping function performed by newspapers, magazines, TV news operations and others of the mainstream press. Yes, it might be arrogant and elitist. But the people who do it are trying to filter what they think their audience wants and needs from the ever-growing streams of information we can't possibly keep up with. Yes, you can find out anything and everything on the Web, but to make it useful, you're going to have to narrow down your sources to a few that you trust. You have a way you look at the world, and you need templates that help sort the information in a way that keeps that world making sense to you. That's what The News-Sentinel provides -- and the Journal Gazette and WANE-TV and WOWO radio -- templates that attempt to sort information for you.
It doesn't make sense to rely just on one template, whether it's The News-Sentinel's or anyone else's, and be confident that it gives you all you need to know about the world. But you can't just take in everything from everywhere and try to sort it out yourself. As the mainstream media wrestle with making their filtering less elitist, and as participants in the blogosphere help create new templates by the interactivity of the medium, we're all going to have a lot to figure out.
