A Word to the Wise.... Guys

FAR BE IT FROM ME TO RAIN ON THE BLOGSPHERE VICTORY LAP this week. It's well earned. At the same time, Poretto @ Eternity Road provides some key facts and factors to remember as we go forward:

So the Rathergate's list of critical factors must include:

CBS News’s images of the memos on its Website;

The decision of a first-echelon blog, Little Green Footballs, to make them a matter of major interest;

Networking technology and support software sufficiently advanced to spread the story quickly and widely, before the memos became “privileged” or the heat bled out of the scandal;

A political campaign whose acrimony would provide the necessary emotional energy to keep the affair alive too long for CBS News to sweep it under the carpet.

The confluence of these four things has disturbed journalism radically, and has changed it for the foreseeable future. This is all to the good. Competition improves everything except sex and homicide. But it ought not to deceive us of the Internet Commentariat about its dependency on factors we cannot yet control. Most notably, we rely upon the Old Media to provide much of what we need to perform our functions of analysis and criticism.

That too could change. Most reporters don’t actually pursue evidence on foot these days, and all but a very few witnesses to newsworthy events are accessible by telephone or Internet. But in the most sensitive cases, where access to physical objects such as the “Killian memos” is central to a story, we will remain dependent on a degree of candid accommodation from the Old Media.

Competition is one thing; a duel to the death is another.

“Your enemy is always your teacher,” wrote science fiction novelist Orson Scott Card in his award-winning novel Ender’s Game, and indeed it is so. By defeating you, your enemy teaches you to unlearn your mistakes and adopt better tactics. For this reason, it is imperative—vital for the health of the Republic—that the Old Media not regard the Internet Commentariat as its enemy. For all its many, many faults, we need the Old Media to remain candid, to provide the backbone for our form of journalism, just as it needs us to keep it on the straight and narrow.