• by Tom Hespos , August 2, 2004

On July 21, online news outlets posted a story from a popular wire service about the discovery of nuclear missiles in Iraq. And the Internet started buzzing. Some of my conservative friends sent me e-mails with links to the story and comments like, "See, I told you so!" Bloggers posted the story along with mostly skeptical comments. Within a few hours, links to the original wire story from the mainstream online news media had all but disappeared, and the story was replaced with another that quoted U.S. officials as saying that no nuclear missiles had been uncovered.

If you're not an Internet news junkie, much of the unfolding of this non-story might have escaped your attention. Thankfully, it didn't get by the political bloggers without comment and reflection on how, exactly, many mainstream news media got caught with their pants down.

In Monday's MediaDailyNews column, George Simpson asked about what separates bloggers from mainstream journalists and opinion writers. He opined that a professional news background serves professional opinion writers by teaching them about their own great responsibility to the public and the potential to do harm with words. But the biggest question he asked was right in the headline - "If you don't trust Peter Jennings, are you going to trust a blogger?"

The key word in that question was "trust." And as information flows more freely from person to person, thanks to the Internet and interactive communication in general, trust in the mainstream news media is eroding. As Simpson pointed out in his column, reporters at major newspapers are make up stories, circulation directors fabricate numbers, and you don't seem to hear kids say they want to be the next Woodward or Bernstein much anymore.

The popularity of blogging is due, in part, to a public distrust of the news media. A democracy like we have in the U.S. can't function properly if its citizens do not have the most accurate information they can get. If the right information doesn't find its way to the average citizen, the natural evolution of things moves us toward new media and mechanisms that can bring about accuracy, completeness of information, and most of all, trust.

What we're seeing with political and news blogs is a new form of newsgathering that is decentralized and that serves a vital interest in the context of a democracy. In his famous dissent in Abrams v. U.S., Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes described a "marketplace of ideas" in which ideas are vetted and the cream of the crop rises to the top. The political and news blogging community is simply an electronic manifestation of that concept. Ideas and insight are shared across blogs, gaining popularity if deemed credible and torn apart if suspect. Rarely do the mainstream media pick up stories and ideas from blogs until they've already traveled through cyberspace, being vetted by opinion leaders and others who will cross-check facts, attempt to ferret out bias and introduce fresh thinking to these ideas along the way.

This is a new world of uncertainty, where the credibility lent to a news story by publication in an established news venue simply doesn't cut the mustard anymore. That's why political and news blogs are thriving. It makes terrific sense to be asking "who do you trust?" in this context, but it's also very important to realize that blogs are starting to fill a void left open by the mainstream press.

At the core of this is transparency, which builds trust between bloggers and their audiences. Most news bloggers would ridicule the situation I described at the opening of this column. When they make mistakes, they leave them up for the world to see and don't delete them from the public eye by removing inaccuracies altogether. Most often, a factual inaccuracy is corrected by striking through the inaccurate text and having a healthy discussion about how the blogger got it wrong. This builds trust instead of eroding it.

While blogs carve out their niche in the realm of news media, advertisers and marketers can benefit tremendously. The blogosphere, as it is called, is filled with influential opinion leaders. By adding blogs to your media campaign, you can tap into these influentials through advertising and sponsorship and see a nice return for a comparatively light spend. Enjoy it while it lasts. Blogs won't be a cheap media buy forever, especially after our society fully embraces them as a critically important part of political communication and discourse.