We’ve been talking about it on IM; here’s my effort at taking this discussion to the blogs at large.

I believe there was a time, a little more than a year ago, when the Mainstream Media was starting to get genuinely afraid of blogs. The Rather thing was the titanic battle that demonstrated how blogs could fact-check skewed or outright false reporting; the Eason Jordan’s resignation after his infamous comments in Davos demonstrated that the blogs could keep a story alive, even when the mainstream media had, almost without exception, decided the story wasn’t news and wasn’t worth attention.

This was a good thing. I think few media critics want the big newspapers, television networks, newsweeklies, national radio networks, etc. destroyed or out of business; we just want better media. One that doesn’t talk down to its audience, that owned up to its mistakes quicker and less begrudgingly; that doesn’t just reflect one perspective, that doesn’t treat two parties differently or at the very least gives up the disbelieved claim to “objectivity” and just strives for the simpler goal of “fairness.” The competition from blogs brought the possibility that the MSM might just shape up, in order to avoid losing audience.

During the whole Eason Jordan thing, I (and many others) had called for that videotape to be released, so we could see just what Jordan had said. Some other bloggers skipped that step and went straight to demanding Jordan’s resignation, leading some to label the blogs as a lynch mob.

That label was once very unfair. But I’m not so sure that it isn’t, bit by bit, becoming more valid.

The vociferous criticism of Christian Science Monitor reporter Jill Carroll from too many corners of the blogosphere vividly demonstrated a downside to this new form of media. To review, Carroll was abducted, held three months and seen in several released videos crying and apparently begging for her life. Carroll issued a statement full of praise for her captors before returning to the protection of U.S. forces, prompting some bloggers erupt with a torrent of scathing hatred. I won’t cite the examples again; they’re not hard to find. Some sites that I like and respect, like RedState and Little Green Footballs, had sensible reactions from contributors, but much nastier, and unfair speculation, on the part of commenters. On the flimsiest of evidence, some wrote that Carroll was in cahoots with those who abducted her and threatened her life.

She disavowed the statement a day later, stating, “fearing retribution from my captors, I did not speak freely. Out of fear I said I wasn’t threatened. In fact, I was threatened many times.”

Blogging is cheap, easy, and makes a writer’s words accessible to anyone with a web browser. It is hailed as a democratization of media. No longer does one need to be hired by a media company to write and comment, and there are no longer editors limiting what anyone could or should say.

In the bad old days, an individual who wasn’t employed as a writer had the option of writing a letter to the editor – a letter that had no guarantee of ever appearing in the paper’s pages. With blogs, enthusiasts proclaimed, those unpublished letters to the editor are now out there for all the world to see.

Well, maybe some of those letters to the editor were unpublished for a reason.

The mainstream media has a lot of flaws - arrogance, bias, groupthink, short-term memories and attention spans, a temptation to focus on the simple and tabloidy instead of the complicated and important. But by and large, the very process of having editors - and fear of libel and slander suits, perhaps - makes newspapers, radio, and television act a smidgen more responsibly. And, for that matter, civilly. Your morning paper is just not going to showcase the oh-yeah-so’s-your-mother tone, the nastiness, or the conspiracy theories that you see in the blogosphere. (Or at least I hope it doesn’t.)

The mainstream media will have little reason to fear blogs, if enough blogs continue the growing trend of denounce-with-spittle-flicking-fury-first-and-get-the-answers-later. Some readers out there will make distinctions between blogs; others will look at the high-profile worst of the lot and say, “to hell with them.”

The Pajamahadeen have gone from fact-checking Dan Rather to speculating that Jill Carroll faked her tears on her hostage tape.

Cam says: I went through this stage about a year ago, where I basically decided that “blogging” had jumped the shark. No longer were people blogging because they had something a great story, or insightful commentary. Now they were blogging because they wanted to get on tv like the Powerline guys. I grieved for what the blogs had become, and what they used to be.

But now I’ve moved on, from grief to acceptance. The blogosphere has truly become the online counterpart to what we find on tv. Everything from meaningful and insightful commentary, news stories you won’t find anywhere else, to lurid tabloid trash and Olbermann-esque commentary that does nothing to maintain a civil tone. And I’m fine with that.

There will always be an audience for people who fly off the handle. Look at Michael Savage. It’s not surprising to me that we have bloggers with his mentality, and it doesn’t surprise me that they’ve found an audience. But just as I never listen to Michael Savage, I don’t read those blogs. They’re really not my cup of tea.