VIRGINIA POSTREL ON BLOGGERS AND EDITORS:

What CBS has learned over the past few days is that its editors aren’t good enough. Nowadays when stories go public, they get checked by after-the-fact editors with expertise in every field imaginable, and that checking gets published to the entire world via the blogosphere. Bloggers may not have editors, but they serve as editors themselves.

What’s so devastating for CBS is that it didn’t make an esoteric mistake, requiring rare expertise. It made a boneheaded mistake on a big story. It’s my professional opinion that any decent journalist over 30 years old would have immediately suspected a forgery when looking at typeset memos supposedly produced for private files in 1972. In fact, any decent journalist over 30 would have suspected a forgery when looking at typeset memos supposedly produced for private files in 1982. (That year, I paid The Daily Princetonian $20 to cover the film cost of a resume that looked like what you can dash off on Microsoft Word; it was produced on an expensive compositing system by a graphics professional.) That those memos managed to get on national television without a caveat about their reliability suggests a complete breakdown of both journalistic instincts and journalistic process.

You shouldn’t need bloggers to catch errors like this. But it helps.

And read this, too. The Seinfeld point had occurred to me, though in a slightly different connection.