In 2004, Jonathan Klein, president of CNN, was responding to the humiliation of Dan Rather by saying:

"These bloggers have no checks and balances... You couldn't have a starker contrast between the multiple layers of checks and balances [at 60 Minutes] and a guy sitting in his living room in his pajamas writing."

Every since then, "real journalists", both obscure and prominent, feel it necessary to remind the public that they are the professionals, usually in tandem with some dismissive evaluation of the intelligence and contributions of bloggers. This year Joseph Rago of the Wallstreet Journal defends the priesthood in a piece entitled "The Blog Mob: Written by fools to be read by imbeciles."

The blogs are not as significant as their self-endeared curators would like to think. Journalism requires journalists, who are at least fitfully confronting the digital age. The bloggers, for their part, produce minimal reportage. Instead, they ride along with the MSM like remora fish on the bellies of sharks, picking at the scraps.

More success is met in purveying opinion and comment. Some critics reproach the blogs for the coarsening and increasing volatility of political life. Blogs, they say, tend to disinhibit. Maybe so. But politics weren't much rarefied when Andrew Jackson was president, either. The larger problem with blogs, it seems to me, is quality. Most of them are pretty awful. Many, even some with large followings, are downright appalling.

Every conceivable belief is on the scene, but the collective prose, by and large, is homogeneous: A tone of careless informality prevails; posts oscillate between the uselessly brief and the uselessly logorrheic; complexity and complication are eschewed; the humor is cringe-making, with irony present only in its conspicuous absence; arguments are solipsistic; writers traffic more in pronouncement than persuasion . . .

Rago isn't wrong in his criticism of blogs. Many, perhaps most blogs do not provide original reportage, are coarse, pretty awful and some, downright appalling. No--the logical flaw in Rago's argument consists of something called card stacking; in this case ignoring the considerable body of evidence that demonstrates that the MSM is guilty of all the sins he attributes uniquely to bloggers, while simultaneously ignoring all the evidence of journalistic virtue in the new medium.

Certainly the MSM, such as it is, collapsed itself. It was once utterly dominant yet made itself vulnerable by playing on its reputed accuracy and disinterest to pursue adversarial agendas. Still, as far from perfect as that system was, it was and is not wholly imperfect. The technology of ink on paper is highly advanced, and has over centuries accumulated a major institutional culture that screens editorially for originality, expertise and seriousness.

Rago has little choice but to admit to bias, but the heart of the issue is the institutional culture he claims as a bulwark against the excesses he lays at the blogosphere doorstep.

I count five experiences in which the media did a story on an issue I had direct and extensive knowledge about. In every case the media result was unrecognizable. Facts were wrong or simply omitted, distortions abounded but the really obvious flaw was that the story had been "enhanced" to provide a more compelling narrative. Just as in Rago's editorial, the contrast was turned way up so the reader could more easily identify good guys and bad guys and thus obscure the more complex truth Rago purports to value.

Added to my personal experience are recent, very public incidents of media malfeasance. The Killian memos, fauxtography, and non-existence sources in the Iraqi ministry of the Interior.

Sorry Joe, but the emperor has no clothes.

My trust in the media product has been waning for years, until I am now at the point where I consider anything I read and see in the media as no better than gossip. The ease with which the media is manipulated is clearly evident by the number of stories one sees in the New York Times instigated by leaks.

Lets face it--leaks are simply a tool of bureaucratic infighting and the Times is yet another tool in whatever institutional war is being fought. Predictably, the Times simply reports the conflict without ever deigning to explain its nature. To this day, we have no story, no "reportage" on the motivations of the CIA conspirators that sent Joe Wilson to Niger.

This of course leads to the ultimate reason for the blogosphere to exist--we simply will not accept Joe Rago or anyone else, deciding what is news and what is not.

Of course, once a technosocial force like the blog is loosed on the world, it does not go away because some find it undesirable. So grieving over the lost establishment is pointless, and kind of sad. But democracy does not work well, so to speak, without checks and balances. And in acceding so easily to the imperatives of the Internet, we've allowed decay to pass for progress.

Its terribly ironic that assistant editor Rago is invoking democracy--the blogosphere is without doubt, the democratization of information.

We are the checks and balances. The MSM is a deposed corrupt dictatorship.

UPDATE: An example of good reportage or MSM cherry-picking? The New York Sun reports reveals new information...on a three year old story.

" Mr. Berger exited the archive onto Pennsylvania Avenue," the report says, recounting the story the former national security chief told investigators. "He did not want to run the risk of bringing the documents back in the building. … He headed toward a construction area on 9th Street. Mr. Berger looked up and down the street, up into the windows of the archives and the DOJ, and did not see anyone. He removed the documents from his pockets, folded the notes in a ‘V' shape, and inserted the documents in the center. He walked inside the construction fence and slid the documents under a trailer."

According to the report, Mr. Berger said he retrieved the documents after leaving the archives complex for the evening and took the papers to his office. It is not clear how long the documents were unattended at the construction site, but the report suggests it was a few hours, at most.

...

A leading authority on classification policy, Steven Aftergood of the Federation of American Scientists, said Mr. Berger's behavior was reminiscent of a "dead drop," when spies leave records in a park or under a mailbox to be retrieved by a handler.

"It seems deliberate and calculated," Mr. Aftergood said. "It's impossible to maintain the pretense that this was an act of absentmindedness."

The source of this information is a report by the Inspector-General, located in the National Archive--something accessible to public. Is the fact that a journalist accessed the report significant? I doubt it--bloggers have also uncovered buried gems. In what way has the institutional editorial culture contributed to this news story? Checked the story for liability issues for the paper? Corrected spelling?

Editors are going to have to work much harder to convince me that they play some vital role in the process of informing the public.