Well, shoot. I really, really wanted not to get caught up posting right now, because I’ve got a million things to do. But then, Greg sent me this article from Peggy Noonan and … well, what’s a girl to do?

When you hear name-calling like what we’ve been hearing from the elite media this week, you know someone must be doing something right. The hysterical edge makes you wonder if writers for newspapers and magazines and professors in J-schools don’t have a serious case of freedom envy.

I really think this is something every blogger ought to read whether you think you’ll ever touch on politics or not. It isn’t just a matter of whether newspapers and traditional news sources (mainstream media — MSM) are insulting. Sticks and stones, y’know? But her list of the strong points of blogging goes largely ignored, and it shouldn’t. These aren’t difficult things to discern. Of course a constantly growing, shrinking, independently-operating group of self-appointed fact-gatherers has more pure freedom to disseminate information — that shouldn’t even require an argument. The objection is always that since we’re all amateurs (which isn’t true, by the way, but we’ll pass on that just for the sake of argument), we have no credibility. And so we’re just all chowderheads and should go back to shucking corn or whatever we’re good at. Is that a patronizing and arrogant attitude? Yeah, sure. But more than that, it’s wrong.

It is not true that there are no controls. It is not true that the blogosphere is the Wild West. What governs members of the blogosphere is what governs to some degree members of the MSM, and that is the desire for status and respect. In the blogosphere you lose both if you put forward as fact information that is incorrect, specious or cooked. You lose status and respect if your take on a story that is patently stupid. You lose status and respect if you are unprofessional or deliberately misleading. And once you’ve lost a sufficient amount of status and respect, none of the other bloggers link to you anymore or raise your name in their arguments. And you’re over. The great correcting mechanism for people on the Web is people on the Web.

It’s that most dangerous and unruly of things to some — the free market of ideas. You can say anything you want. But you are accountable for what you say. If you’re only interested in hysterical rants, you won’t engage other people and people won’t come back. The blogs that are the most successful not only put thought and research into their posts but — hardest pill for the MSM to swallow coming up here — what they have to say resonates with people in a way that traditional journalism has failed to. They put heart into their posts — they write about what they care about. Rather than fuming at the injustice or the shame of it all, you’d think journalists could stand to take one honest look at the blogosphere and see that reading about moments of real and personal triumph, failure, honesty, tragedy from the people themselves is ten times more interesting than perfect prose from a hired wordsmith. That doesn’t mean that journalistic training means nothing, but it should suggest to the established media that there is a good reason to be glad that blogs are out there.

As for Peggy’s predictions, there are some there that I think you could take to the bank. But this one is a definite — it’s not a question of ‘if’ but ‘when’:

Most of the blogstorms of the past few years have resulted in outcomes that left and right admit or bray were legitimate. Dan Rather fell because his big story was based on a fabrication, Trent Lott said things that it could be proved he said. But coming down the pike is a blogstorm in which the bloggers turn out to be wrong. Good news: They’ll probably be caught and exposed by bloggers. Bad news: It will show that blogging isn’t nirvana, and its stars aren’t foolproof. But then we already know that, don’t we?

Yes, I think we do. Or if we don’t, we will. Bloggers aren’t perfect, and this new medium is no guarantee of absolutely accurate information all the time. We don’t know everything. We can make mistakes. If we forget that, we’ll deserve to share a little of the lack of respect that the MSM has coming their way right now.