As a member of the Pajama brigade, I was delighted with Peggy Noonan’s praise for blogs this morning. She notes that members of the MSM are still players, but that now there are other players (or playas, as Tom Wolfe might put it): bloggers.
I’ve noted before that blogs are like the Wild West but that there are checks and balances–if an item is junk, the blogger loses face.
Peggy rejects the Wild West concept, but her assessment of the controls in cyberspace is similar:
“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.”