There’s an interesting op-ed about the Columbia Journalism Review over at the new DC Examiner. However, the author misses an important point when she writes:

Blogs these days are holding the MSM’s feet to the fire, forcing newspapers and TV news shows to reflect the country’s politics more accurately.

Yes, they’re doing that, but even more importantly, they’re holding the MSM’s feet to the fire in an attempt to get them to do honest and informed reporting, instead of agenda-driven, ignorant (and often illogical) hackery, of which the subject of the article, Corey Pein’s piece on Ra^thergate, was a textbook case. The op-ed in fact demonstrates this quite clearly:

Newcomer, who voted for Sen. John Kerry in November, was baffled. When I spoke with him recently, he told me that The New Yorker once called his wife, a botanical illustration expert, to ask whether a certain plant could grow in a certain area, because a fiction writer had mentioned it in a piece. That was fact-checking. CJR “did not do any fact-checking,” he says. Pein did spend weeks researching his story, even traveling to Texas to report it. He wrote that CBS screwed up. But the suggestion that blogs were “guilty of many of the very same sins” that CBS committed, and that Newcomer did not know what he was talking about, set the blogosphere howling.

The point of the blogosphere is not so much to get the media to, in the words of the former Clinton administration in another context, “look more like America,” but rather to get them to actually provide balanced and informed newsreporting. For too long have they been allowed to get away with laziness and incompetence. That’s what we are attempting to provide a corrective for, not just the (obvious) political bias.

[Update at 9:30 AM]

Case in point can be found here:

James Watt has written to Bill Moyers, asking him to apologize for the lies in his Star Tribune article. After quoting Moyers’ statements about him, Watt wrote:

I have never thought, believed or said such words. Nor have I ever said anything similar to that thought which could be interpreted by a reasonable person to mean anything similar to the quote attributed to me.

Because you are at least average in intelligence and have a basic understanding of Christian beliefs, you know that no Christian would believe what you attributed to me.

Because you have had the privilege of serving in the White House under President Johnson, you know that no person believing such a thing would be qualified for a Presidential appointment, nor would he be confirmed by the United States Senate, and if confirmed and said such a thing would he be allowed to continue in service.

Since you must have known such a statement would not have been made and you refused or failed to do any primary research on this supposed quote, what was your motive in printing such a damnable lie?

Before the advent of the blogosphere, Bill Moyers–arrogant, rich, powerful and well-connected–would merely have thrown Mr. Watt’s letter into the trash. Today, he may still do so. But he and his friends in the liberal media no longer have a monopoly on information, and those who have been defamed by them, like James Watt, now have the means to make their voices heard.

Yes, Bill Moyers is a leftist, vastly out of touch with Red America, but the real issue is that for years he’s been getting away with these kinds of slanders and libels.

The blogosphere exists to (among many other things, of course) finally allow the truth to come out, ripping open the comfortable cocoons of media polemicists of all stripes. That most of the ire is aimed at so-called progressives is not because the blogosphere has it in for people of that political persuasion per se, but rather because, given the monoculture of the MSM, there are largely only one species of fish in the barrel. As Jim Geraghty says, it’s not ultimately about right and left. It’s about right and wrong.