James Pinkerton at Newsday, on the “citizen journalists” of the blogosphere: The day CBS News got ‘blogged’ down.

…without the documents and the leverage they provided, CBS might not have had a primetime-worthy story at all. But in addition to being too-hungry for a Bush-bashing story and probably reckless - a story that’s “too good to check” is not a good story - CBS never saw the blog-lash coming.

But if the bloggers have power, it’s because they form a robust intellectual marketplace, in which assertions must prove themselves before a jury of cyber-peers. In the words of James T. Smith, of critical-thinker.blogspot.com, “The blogosphere is the people.” To be sure, the marketplace can make mistakes, but on the whole, like democracy itself, the more folks participating, the better the functioning.

But this democratization of the media is bad news - for those who liked it the old way, the top-down way.

In other words, the “elites dispensing wisdom from on high” way.

Another point that no one seems to want to raise very much: how many other news stories have been based upon falsified sources? Taking a page from the media’s Abu Ghraib handbook, is it possible that responsibility for this goes all the way to the top?