The blogosphere moves on

While some people in the world of journalism sneer at bloggers and their supposed lack of accountability, people from the blogging world continue to raise their profiles in the mainstream media. Still, I wonder what was in the other 7000 words that Mr Den Beste's editors at the Wall Street Journal cut out.

David and many commenters at Samizdata have responded actually already, but accountability and fact checking are a great strength of blogs, not a weakness. Even on a small blog like mine, I will be fact checked to death. Mistakes will not stand. People will suddenly appear in the comments box with amazing amounts of expertise. Sloppy thinking or intellectual dishonesty simply won't stand. Remarkably, such things as the Jayson Blair saga tend to suggest that these things are actually easier to get away with in the general media. In the blogosphere I can write all the inaccurate crap I like. However, if I do, people will firstly tell me it is inaccurate crap, and then they will stop reading it.