It appears the Eason Jordan scandal has shaken professional journalists across this land:

By now, the blog— and pundit-fueled fire that consumed Eason Jordan, head of newsgathering at CNN, is old news. Jordan's resignation made his head the latest to be mounted on the wall of a nastiest subset of the “Blogosphere:” those who think the Internet's self-publishing technology (and free-wheeling definition of “fairness”) has anointed them as the Taliban of the American media.

The other heads he mentions are of course Howard Raines and Dan Rather. I remember the Jayson Blair scandal and recall Raines resigning, however I don't remember the role that blogs played in that event. However, I am very familiar with the other two situations:

Dan Rather went on the air with false documents. While the rest of the MSM looked on with envy, wishing they too had incriminating documents, the common people examined the evidence and noticed several flaws. These 'citizen journalists' worked together to point out the issues with both the documents themselves and their content. Unfazed, Mr. Rather spent nearly two weeks insisting that they were valid and had been verified by experts. It was later revealed that they came from a dubious source and the mentioned experts denied that they ever vouched for the authenticity of the documents.

Eason Jordan made an unsubstantiated slanderous statement about the U.S. Military at an international event. His later correction sought to soften but not reverse his original statement. The role of the blogs in this story was to raise it up until the MSM was eventually forced to take a look at it. They researched Mr. Jordan and discovered similar statements he had made in the past. They interviewed eyewitnesses and tried unsuccessfully to get their hands on the tape from the event to verify exactly what Jordan said.

Holding blogs responsible for the failings of Rather and Jordan is like blaming MSNBC for Bernard Kerik's failed Director of Homeland Security nomination. In all three cases, the issue is not who reported the story but the facts within the story. (Yes, no one has seen the tape from Davos, but if the eyewitness accounts are inaccurate, then why did Jordan 1. fail to produce the tape and exonerate himself and 2. resign from his position at CNN?)

What is so threatening about the 'New Media'? I believe it is the fact that we do not have journalism degrees. We are engineers and lawyers, soldiers and professors, men and women who endure the daily grind in both red and blue states. We are each specialists within our own fields, and within our hobbies and past experiences. Some of us were office workers in 1960s and actually used the typewriters of that era. Others served in the National Guard and are familiar with its procedures and regulations.

Individually, we are powerless. A single web page written as a leisure pursuit can never compete with the likes of the New York Times, CBSNews and CNN. However, we do not act alone - we are networked. We work not only with distributed information but also with distributed experiences. This allows us to compete with the vast resources of the established media and even scoop them on occasion.

Are bloggers really the new Taliban? I think this is merely a self indulgent insult from the columnist. The Taliban are best known for suppressing everything that they disagreed with. The blog as a medium is not terribly conducive to the suppression of speech. It is, however, uniquely suited to allow the expression of speech on little or no budget. It is unfortunate that Moran views citizens expressing themselves as "the enemies of free expression".

I don't see the heads of Raines, Rather and Jordan as trophies. Instead they are grim reminders of occasions where the media failed to do its job…and someone noticed.

UPDATE: Another good take on this article can be found at PowerLine.