Blogs or Mainstream News, Where's The Real Information?

I know what you’ve been thinking: man, I’m tired of reading unfounded rumors reported as news. Yeah, me too. Really, I am. So let’s fix this. Let’s stop reading blogs—I mean, you know all they do is just post anything that comes into their heads, foundation or not—and stick to the venerable guardians of all truth, the mainstream media. They would never run a thinly-sourced story or publish rumors, and we know that every word they write is as from the mouth of God.New York Times raised this weekend. The NYT accurately points out that the blogosphere is regularly aTwitter (*snort*) with rumors, from a single source—or none at all. Many of them don’t pan out to be true; some do. The implication here is that blogging is an unreliable medium (and that if you want “just the facts, ma’am,” you should stick to the bastion of journalistic integrity. Because they’ve never gotten anything wrong, you know).

Jeff Jarvis is taking up for the defense, saying that (newsflash!) blogs and mainstream media are fundamentally different. Whereas MSM tries to collect “all” the truth (as if that were possible—and let’s pull an Indiana Jones and just stick to facts, mmkay? If it’s truth you’re looking for, Dr. Tyree’s philosophy class is right down the hall), blogs see fact-finding as a collaborative effort. So while bloggers make a good-faith effort to check sources, there’s nothing wrong with reporting what they know (especially since even in the NYT’s examples, the bloggers like Michael Arrington acknowledged that they didn’t have much corroboration in their posts), and finding the full set of facts in the comments. It’s the Comments