Newsweek makes this blog look uninterested in the Jayson Blair affair. Alter makes a good point:
I hate to admit it, but Matt Drudge put it well a few weeks ago when he said: “The statue of Peter Jennings has been pulled down.” The whole authority structure of mass media is being undermined by the ability of news consumers to move from passive to active, from accepting everything they read in the Times to searching and finding http://www.I-know-I-read-it-somewhere-on-the-Internet-so-it-must-be-true.com.
Or checking in with bloggers for fresh angles and info. But I don’t see how the Blair affair shows this particularly strongly. What the web has done is show how the media operates; bloggers have helped point out that, say, the increasingly left-liberal slant of the Times is a conscious decision by a single man. We’ve pulled the curtain back at Oz. But we certainly didn’t create the Blair scandal, which would have broken regardless of the Internet. All we did is make the reading public less shocked by what goes on inside the Times: we lowballed expectations. Which, in some ways, alleviates Howell’s problem, rather than intensifies it.
The Dish 