I’ve read a few blogs about the CBS News reporting of Texas Air National Guard(TANG) memos concerning President Bush’s service. Having spent a bit of time as a member of the TANG and the Louisiana National Gurad myself, I have some small experience with National Guard and its administrative and personnel policies. Now I was in the guard in the mid-eighties, and procedures were, shall we say, relaxed. But that’s another story.

Here’s my take on why the blogosphere picks up so fast on stories in relation to the mainstream media (MSM). It’s a numbers thing. There are a lot of us. And we’re not journalists who’ve done nothing but journalism all our lives. Blogging is NOT a career. It’s NOT a full-time job. With a few exceptions that I cannot think of at the moment, we all have REAL lives. There are attorneys, professors, veterans, active-duty personnel, technical people in various disciplines including computers and (like me) other technologies, etc.

This means that when something hits the blogosphere, it’s akin to throwing a single foreign phrase into an auditorium of linguists. Somebody out here is going to parse it, and parse it correctly out of a reservoir of specialized knowledge. For instance, in my case, I spent some years in the employ of a major electircal utility, so if somebody were to drop a story about the cause of a major regional blackout, **I** would probably be in a position to determine, as Mark Twain said, “if taffy were being distributed…”

And so it goes. The blogosphere has the wherewithal to bring expertise to bear on any subject from field artillery (One Hand Clapping) to computer system administration (Grouchy Old Cripple) to whatever it is that Kim du Toit does. If a subject comes out among the blogosphere, there are literally thousands of eyes on it, and a more then good chance that one or more pairs of eyes will belong to somebody with specific knowledge as to its content.

On the other hand, the MSM does not employ such expertise at a primary level. Most newsies have been newsies all their lives. Time and time again we’ve seen statements about military hardware and capabilities that are totally absurd to anybody with a smattering of military experience, but most reporters and their handlers haven’t this experience. And it is apparent that they seem to think that the vast audience they command has no more knowledge than they.

Further, it seems that when the MSM does decide to call in “experts” on a story, they call people who will slant the story in the direction it’s already predestined to go. I think that’s why Rather didn’t get good information on those memos. He called in his trained dogs, and they pointed at the game he’d already selected. This, friends, is MAKING news, not reporting news. It is conduct worthy of the old USSR, except in this case, they’re not toeing the government line, they’re willing and eager accomplices to the opposition party in this country.

So, in the best case in this scenario, you’d have to say that the old MSM hasn’t the talent pool necessary to do what a thousand bloggers can do. And in the worst case, that is, IF they do have the resources and chose to ignore them, then the interpretation ascribed is much more sinister…