Wired News has a very positive take on the role of blogs in the CBS memos scandal. Adam L. Penenberg makes a good point about CBS's denial of bloggers' power to fact check Dan Rather's arse.

The CBS apologist was asked about the role bloggers played in propelling the story to national scandal, he dismissed them as little more than journalist-wannabes, sitting in their underwear in front of their PCs, typing whatever thoughts/opinions/rants they had between trips to the refrigerator.

My first thought was if bloggers had no credibility then why was this guy on my television, defending CBS?

Even more interesting is his view on what it means for the big media reporting and journalism in general.

They function as a vast, ad-hoc quality-control department, reflecting the entire political spectrum. Suddenly readers can (and do) subject reporters to unprecedented levels of scrutiny. Facts are analyzed and checked against their sources, quotes deconstructed, grammar parsed - all of this done in public view.

This isn't the first time that blogs have kept an issue alive. The first blog-driven controversy caused the fall of Trent Lott when bloggers located quotes from previous speeches that many believed were racist. Another led to The New York Times op-ed page instituting a policy on corrections for its columnists.

Whether a blog leans left, right or sideways, as a collective force they are working to keep reporters honest. Journalists may not like their methods - having your work sliced and diced in public is no fun - but the end result may be better-quality news.

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