Slashdot Mirror
Misadventures In Online Journalism
An anonymous reader writes "Paul Carr, writing for TechCrunch, has posted his take on some of the flaws inherent to today's fast-paced news ecosystem, where bloggers often get little or no editorial feedback and interesting headlines are passed around faster than ever. His article was inspired by a recent story on ZDNet that accused Yahoo of sharing the names and emails of 200,000 users with the Iranian government; a report that turned out to be false, yet generated a great deal of outrage before it was disproved. Carr writes, 'Trusting the common sense of your writers is all well and good — but when it comes to breaking news, where journalistic adrenaline is at its highest and everyone is paranoid about being scooped by a competitor, that common sense can too easily become the first casualty. Journalists get caught up in the moment; we get excited and we post stupid crap from a foreign language student blog and call it news. And then within half a minute — bloggers being what they are — the news gets repeated and repeated until it becomes fact. Fact that can affect share prices or ruin lives. This is the reality of the blogosphere, where Churchill's remark: that "a lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on" is more true, and more potentially damaging, than at any time in history.'"
I think you mean this:
The (real) press-release:
http://www.dragthing.com/blog/?p=285
NBC taking the above seriously:
http://www.nbcchicago.com/news/tech/5318008-is-Too-Dirty-for-the-iPhone-63149437.html
Trusting the common sense of your writers is all well and good — but when it comes to breaking news, where journalistic adrenaline is at its highest and everyone is paranoid about being scooped by a competitor, that common sense can too easily become the first casualty. Journalists get caught up in the moment; we get excited and we post stupid crap from a foreign language student blog and call it news.
But this seems to say that the poster committed homicide to get the story out. Quick, spread the word!
If it is on the Internet it must be true!
Better late than wrong. Better never than stupid.
Journalists get caught up in the moment; we get excited and we post stupid crap from a foreign language student blog and call it news. And then within half a minute -- bloggers being what they are -- the news gets repeated and repeated until it becomes fact. Fact that can affect share prices or ruin lives.
That doesn't even address how that problem compounds when the news organization in question has a political agenda or has their talking points of the day handed down from political operatives in exile. There's no allegiance to the truth or journalistic integrity. Fact checking is secondary to staying on message, even if the facts get kicked around in the process. No corrections for stories that turn out to be false, no apologies when lives (or countries) are ruined. It's not a news organization, it's a front for propaganda.
I think a news organization promoting itself as say fair and balanced while hiding an agenda behind a veneer of respectability is far greater threat to both individuals and the country than the occasional weekend early release accident.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
Yes, it's a bullshit job. Then again, so is being a programmer, lawyer, salesman, investment banker, teacher.... Everybody thinks every other profession is less valuable than their own.
Not all journalism is good, just like not all programmers are good. But journalism is not a bullshit job. There are some bad ones out there, but the very idea of journalism is reporting, not interpreting, and that is an extremely valuable service. If you would like your information thoroughly researched and verified experimentally then good luck trying to negotiate the real fast-paced world where getting the latest information has strategic value.
This is not a defense of sloppy reporting or for not verifying sources and facts, it's mostly a rebuttal to an incredibly broad and useless generalization about the profession of journalism.
http://www.rootstrikers.org/
No wonder that this sort of article is posted on Techcrunch, those guys clearly have a lot of experience in that regard! ;-)
And no, I do not want to flame, they even use an older Techcrunch story as an example in TFA. They really speak from experience.
"And then within half a minute -- bloggers being what they are -- the news gets repeated and repeated until it becomes fact." So what happens when Reuters sends out inaccurate information? It gets reproduced around the world very quickly and they certainly do make mistakes. As for editorial feedback, large media organisations seem to be far worse at taking any notice of their readers than bloggers are. For example, if you write to the BBC pointing out some howling mistake, you might be really lucky and get a reply. If they correct it at all, they will simply quietly correct it without any visible admission to the readers that a mistake was made.
It is ironic that the summery which blasts the misinformation of bloggers gets quote attribution wrong: "A lie will go round the world while truth is pulling its boots on" is usually attributed to Mark Twain but the quotation was delivered in a sermon titled "Joesph attacked by the archers" in 1855 by C. H. Spurgeon! - Most misinformation I guess. ;-) - http://www.spurgeon.org/sermons/0017.htm
And "journalists" as a whole have YET to excoriate him for passing off as authentic documents in the exact same font as the default of MS Word that were faxed in from a random Kinkos by a nutcase with an ax to grind.
That should tell us all we need to know about journalistic "standards".
Since a real-life big steaming pile of feces from a male cow doesn't try to pass itself off as something better, I'd say calling journalism a "bullshit job" is an insult to bullshit.
I've been a journalist since 1978, and the most important thing I learned was to go back to the source and check my facts. Most bloggers don't check their facts. But don't feel bad. A lot of New York Times reporters don't check their facts either.
Every journalist learns quickly that you hear some shocking story, you call up the accused to check it out, and the story often turns out to be misleading, misinterpreted, wrong or downright lie (think weapons of mass destruction).
I write about medicine. I once did a story on needle exchange programs. http://www.nasw.org/users/nbauman/needlex.htm The scientific evidence seemed overwhelming that needle exchanges saved lives, but a lot of doctors, and politicians, were obstructing them. I spoke to Herbert Kleber, who was supposed to be one of the bad guys who was obstructing them. To my surprise, he had changed his position because of the weight of the scientific evidence. Happens all the time. But I see bloggers attacking people for things they don't actually believe, because they didn't check their facts.
We old guys have been working to develop what you now call the Internet for >60 years. Independent journalists like George Seldes and I.F. Stone used to do a great job, and we were looking forward to the great day when a lone journalist could publish a newsletter without printing and postage costs. It's been good and bad.
The most obvious flaw that I notice in blogs is that most of them -- but not all -- don't check their facts. It's a big game of telephone. Some blogger cuts and pastes a paragraph from another blog, which came from another blog ... which came from the New York Times. I can read the NYT myself. If you want to add value to that story, you can check the NYT's facts, and in my experience, you have a pretty good chance of finding them wrong. Make a fucking phone call to the original source and see if the NYT got it right. Or check out a different source. If you want a lesson in journalism, examine their health care reform coverage.
It's like replicating DNA. A bunch of enzymes copies a stand of DNA, and then another bunch of enzymes checks the duplicated strand to make sure it's copied right. If you don't have error-checking enzymes, you wind up with (sometimes disastrous) mistakes.
There are a lot of blogs that are written by people who have such a good command of the facts, have such expertise, that they're not likely to make mistakes -- they've already checked out the facts, for their academic work or their books, like Juan Cole and Glen Greenwald.
But most journalists aren't experts. They have to check their facts with the experts. That's the game. No matter how smart I am, I interview and quote somebody who knows more than me.
The best Internet journalism that I follow is http://www.democracynow.org/ Notice how Democracy Now interviews people on the other side all the time.
A blogger who does nothing more than copy a story from a major news source like the NYT, or, even worse, from a blogger who wouldn't meet the reliable source standards of Wikipedia, is just adding noise, not useful information.
If you want to add useful information to the Internet, you're not going to find it on the Internet, obviously. Call up an expert and get some new information. And then call up an expert who disagrees with him, to make sure he hasn't given you a sales job.
---
Blog Marketting Feed @ Feed Distiller
That's why I only trust Slashdot to bring me tech journalism of the highest integrity.
This guy's the limit!
Ever hear the saying "Tell a lie often enough and it will become true?" That's what TFA is talking about.
It's not that it actually -is- true, it's obviously not. But people believe and act on the lie as if it were true, so it might as well be as far as anybody but those who know the truth is concerned. Retractions are often met with skepticism, making getting the truth out much more difficult.
It's like in the office, if someone starts a rumor that Suzie has been giving the boss a little "extra service" after hours, and neither Suzie nor the boss hear about it until after it has spread around the whole company, it is too late to stop it. There likely isn't any solid proof one way or another, and anyway the truth does not spread like a lie does. You don't get a wildfire of "Did you hear Suzie really hasn't been doing anything with the boss?" spreading around, it just doesn't happen. So at the very least the lie has damaged Suzie's reputation the most in our culture, but if it goes far enough Management could decide to fire one or both of them based on the rumor.
Sensationalist journalism is simply the office rumor magnified a thousand times, with the potential for destructin a thousand times greater.
It would be really great if people just regarded everything they heard with a nice big dose of skepticism. "Yahoo released 200,000 people's identity info? Says who?" That would be a great start, because when it turns out it's some guy with a blog, who got his info from some kid with a blog in another country, the credibility starts to drop and people stop believing it.
Security is mostly a superstition... Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. - Helen Keller
News orgs and blogger sites are often rated on how long they take to break a story. Instead of focusing on the content, they are focused on getting the latest infonugget out to as many eyeballs as possible. That just seems wrong. The old adage about "it's easier to print a bogus story now and a correction later than wait for confirmation" applies more and more to the news media.
Yahoo, always a favorite punching bag, got roasted over the Iranian story and it turns out to be FALSE? Outrageous. What can they do? Sue some blog site? Go after people spreading the bogus story? They would end up throwing good money away chasing ghosts.
This isn't the first time either. There are bogus press releases announcing a new product or detrimental story about a company. The company's stock tanks...then someone does some basic research behind the PR to discover that it is 100% bogus.
If we can't trust the newsmedia to deliver facts, who can we trust? Joe Blogger?
A journalist is a researcher with an additional goal: to provide the general public with the results. Nothing more, nothing less.
I think the biggest problem that you (and many others) are experiencing is that you (and they) expect journalists to report to your biases, rather than the public's, or their own. For example, there are a great many people out there who want to hear about the investigations into terrorist activities, but to a smaller minority, this is perceived as fearmongering to sell papers. Yes, it is superficially to sell papers, but there fear was there first, and it's the public who want that fear addressed.
If your biases aren't mainstream enough, then journalism is just going to seem like a bunch of bullshit.
You know, there is a difference between trolling and pointing out the flaws in your reasoning. Just saying.
peer-weighted reputation...
Peer-weighted reputation, like "web of trust" systems, won't work if the "peers" are anonymous. Otherwise, we get link farms and similar forms of bulk spamming.
Even without anonymity, imagine Rush's "dittoheads" as a source of authority for news.
I've been a journalist since 1978, and the most important thing I learned was to go back to the source and check my facts. Most bloggers don't check their facts. But don't feel bad. A lot of New York Times reporters don't check their facts either.
And there you have it. The only difference between a blogger and a journalist is the organization backing up the latter.
Journals, or dailies if you will, are nothing more than web logs. They have no more moral value, inherent, by virtue of being printed on paper rather than displayed on a screen. If a blogger does his research, names his sources, and stays honest, he's a journalist just as much as an employee of a major metropolitan newspaper.
We just need a few bloggers to gain respectability through sustained effort.
You can't take the sky from me...
A journalist is a researcher with an additional goal: to provide the general public with the results. Nothing more, nothing less.
I think the biggest problem that you (and many others) are experiencing is that you (and they) expect journalists to report to your biases, rather than the public's, or their own. For example, there are a great many people out there who want to hear about the investigations into terrorist activities, but to a smaller minority, this is perceived as fearmongering to sell papers. Yes, it is superficially to sell papers, but there fear was there first, and it's the public who want that fear addressed.
If your biases aren't mainstream enough, then journalism is just going to seem like a bunch of bullshit.
You know the biggest problem is that you make, just like Concerned Onlooker up there when he says "Everybody thinks every other profession is less valuable than their own", childish assumptions of people other than yourself. I don't want jounalists to report anything of even remote bias, I want a report to be a report and not a fairytale. Why do you assume that I want to hear what makes me smile? Is it that hard for you to imagine that some people just want to know the plain fucking truth?
If Jimmy, 5, falls down the fucking well I want the head line to say "Jimmy, 5, falls down the well" and not "WELLS SLAUGHTERING OUR CHILDREN, GOVERNMENT IGNORING". There is little room for sense, and more often people, like yourself and Onlooker, draw conclusions based on assumptions which were never justified. This leads to what? That's right -- misunderstandings. And that is what you just did -- misunderstood me.
I am the lawn!
Oh the irony. Slashdot posts a story about bloggers not checking their stories and says:
"This is the reality of the blogosphere, where Churchill's remark: that "a lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on" is more true, and more potentially damaging, than at any time in history.'"
It looks like you didn't check your reference, like the bloggers you accuse.
It seems that the original quote was by British Prime Minister Jim Callaghan in the 1970s, not Winston Churchill, and he said "boots" not "pants".
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/3288907.stm
In the UK "pants" means "underwear" and not "trousers" as in the USA. Was Callaghan taking a quote from Churchill talking about underwear? I don't know. I'd welcome further reference hunting....
You forgot all of Fox news. And maybe Robert Novak.
http://www.rootstrikers.org/
It's not useless. What passes for journalism nowadays is rehashing wire feeds and making reports that are editorial in nature. Perception shaping is where the profession is, and always was. It's just that they have been dropping the facade with increasing rapidity, or the quality of graduates is declining.
Journalism is about lickspittle flacks following Obama around. It's about telling us what and how to think. It's a bunch of Judith Millers and Jeff Gannons all scrambling over each other to lick the pus infested butthole of the people in power, in hopes of getting another paycheck. And as they are realizing their model is irrelevant, and the people they wanted to sell dead trees to aren't interested in their rehashed, editorial thought shaping, they are begging to be put on the dole so society won't crumble when they are gone! That's fucking audacity.
I am agnostic, and the only news source I even slightly trust these days is the CSM. They seem to realize that reportage is important, and we can make the editorials up in our mind. Other news I get over shortwave radio and the internet, but I don't really trust it. However I would trust Pravda over the New York Times any day.
Yes, there are some journalists who try their damnedest to report what they see, and attempt to do so with integrity. But they are mostly working for bullshit artists of the first rate.
Isn't this every journalists job description?
Yes and no. Journalists in major (US) media outlets write the stories their editors tell them to write, and they write them from the perspective their editors tell them to as well. Senior editors, in turn, are pressured by accounting to cater to the perspective of major advertisers. Nothing new here.
In most newspapers land use and autos are the primary advertising, so, it should be no surprise that these two special interest groups are treated favorably by local print media. These hidden agendas are evident, for example, in the San Francisco Chronicle's full-time support for real-estate development. You'll never read a letter to the editor criticizing any development in the SF Chron (since Herb Caen died, and his column was edited before printing on many occasions). The San Jose Mercury News is just as biased with regards to automobiles. They pan mass transit and pump road construction at every opportunity.
For these reasons I no longer read either paper, not even their Sunday editions. I figure that if they apply such biases for direct advertisers they probably favor other special interests for other (monitarized) incentives.
With regards to fact checking, it is incidents like this that make it possible to distinguish between reliable and unreliable news sources. The quantity and quality of false reporting drives my search for quality and accuracy in blogs, print, and podcasts (forget anything video-based, that's a lost cause). It will all work out in the end as discerning readers will end up with a list of RSS feeds that are both more accurate and less biased than any of the traditional, commercial news sources (including NPR, which has no competent tech reports thanks to Microsoft's "sponsorship").
Here is a recent example; the 128-bit Windows troll by Barry Collins at PC Pro.
There has never been a "Robert Morgan" working at Microsoft Research. The Google cache version of the LinkedIn profile cited in the article states that he attended "Glendale University." A modicum of effort researching this will reveal that Glendale University is an unaccredited online degree supplier that sells you a "degree" for "what you already know."
In other words, that 128-bit Windows story was a complete and total troll. Anybody who even attempted to do any fact-checking would have discovered this within 30 seconds. I still don't see an admission of error and an apology from the PC Pro or the Slashdot editors appended to the article.
A quick intertubes search reveals this quote is well over 150 years old and is really more of a proverb than a quote.
But yeah, the OP did abuse is pretty badly.
"It is seldom that liberty of any kind is lost all at once." -David Hume
The best Internet journalism that I follow is http://www.democracynow.org/ Notice how Democracy Now interviews people on the other side all the time.
Don't forget the Columbia Review of Journalism, http://www.cjr.org/
Yes, but that requires work and thinking, and no one wants to do either of those anymore. Too little time anyway what with the kid's soccer practice and music lessons, and getting some time in at the gym and don't forget those new sitcoms on tv, after putting in a 50-60 hour work week. We're a nation of people who can't form a thought deeper than a two minute soundbite and you expect them to actually do research and weigh facts and report in a blog both sides of an issue? Good luck with that.
WWJD?
JWRTFM!
The most important thing any journalist can do is declare the source of the article, i.e. identify that it is from an eye-witness, or a source article (by name or link) so interested people can go back to the source if the writer is not the originator of the "fact". This would really flatten out the delivery tree because any journalist could then go back to the first textual copy of the story and short out all of the bad bits that were added in between.
.. Blub falls right in the middle of the abstractness continuum. -- Paul Graham
And this is why the print will never die. Hooray for editors!
right...
"Any preoccupation with ideas of what is right or wrong in conduct shows an arrested intellectual development. (Wilde)"
Wasn't it actually Hannibal Lecter who said that?
I am sure that there are many other solipsists out there.
When getting it first is more important than getting it right.
RLH
A journalist's favorite site is a hardcore lefty news organization. Nice. And how dare you impugn the honor of the New York Times, all their stories are fact-checked. At least, that's what I was angrily told last time I dared to question the veracity of the Grey Lady on slashdot.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
two minute soundbite
140 characters, the triumph of humanity
If the vast majority of journalists are bad, produce poor work and actively damage serious discourse in our society, why should we care if there are a few diamonds in the rough?
Journalism is a bullshit job. They deal in bullshit, write bullshit, reprint bullshit, make up bullshit, bullshit about bullshit, and generally do an awful job at what they ostensibly claim to be doing. The reality is that most bloggers are at least on par with journalistic mainstream because what most journalists produce a) isn't very difficult to write and b) isn't of a very high standard.
This is nothing like programmers or actors or teachers or even lawyers. Each of these professions produces something of quantifiable worth; computer code, a performance, educated students, a legal representation. What do journalists produce? Reports? I can have PR men do that? Opinion? I can ask people on a park bench for more insight and expect to get it. Investigative journalism? Don't make me laugh.
The journalist is a jack of all trades and a master of none. Even the best their profession can produce can do little better investigation or writing than can be had from high school students and bloggers. What do good journalists go on to become? Editors. Writers. PR men. Wine reviewers. There is no journalistic gold standard, no technical training, no solid scale of merit. Journalists need no qualifications, and gain none over the course of their careers. Their skills are as nebulous as their results.
Journalism is the quintessential bullshit profession.
Now I'm sympathetic to the idea of professional and valuable journalists. But they are essentially a myth, or are so diluted that they may as well be. Journalists are not the fourth estate so lauded in political discourse. Where they are not removed from politics entirely, they can be found in intimate familiarity with those in power. In both cases, they wield significant power in an of themselves, and are frequently found abusing it. Lives, industries and indeed free countries have all been destroyed under the pen of journalists. Few have ever been created by them. That job lies with the pamphleteer, the writer, the philosopher and perhaps now the blogger.
There is a theory of journalism. But there is the practice of journalism. We are better off without the latter.
May the Maths Be with you!
What you fail to grasp is that bloggers aren't mere journalists, they very often are experts in a particular field - ScienceBlogs being a good example, but just one of many - and they can tell where and how the blessed New York Times got it wrong (which is pretty much always, on any subject of even moderate complexity) without having to call anyone.
They are your fact checkers.
Levitt Institute, Hungry Beast.
http://www.tvtonight.com.au/2009/09/hungry-beast-pranks-7pm-project-and-a-few-others-too.html
Uh, OK. I assume that you are referring to my hypothesis about people's problems with journalists? Consider this research. ;)
Yeah, but then you miss out on reading about issues with any contention or controversy behind them. The bias is non-removable in most cases.
I hypothesise (since you don't like the word "assume") that you (involuntarily) prefer to hear things more in line with your own biases. Of course, there's no way for me to determine from this short encounter what exactly that entails, but you're starting to give me a picture...
Yeah, but what if the government is ignoring it? If wells are that dangerous, then surely the government should be paying attention, right? Otherwise something is going wrong in the system.
Now, of course, you probably think that presumably one kid falling down one well shouldn't cause a government to lose sleep, but there are plenty who disagree with you. The very omission of such details like government response would be biased against their own interests.
You assume that I drew assumptions about you, and that I generated a misunderstanding? Well, I suppose your assumption is not entirely unjustified, but carefully reading my would tell you that I wasn't taking it as a foregone conclusion; it's a hypothesis, and I am still testing it. Still, if you're calling people on assumptions, you should probably watch yourself first.
You know, there is a difference between trolling and pointing out the flaws in your reasoning. Just saying.
It seems that if you are involved in, or know a great deal about, any topic published in the newspaper, it's obvious to you just how badly the newspaper got it wrong.
Now, imagine about things you aren't involved in or know about. Yeah.
Those documents were never proven to be forgeries, and they were vetted by CBS, for content. If those memos were faked, they faked the truth. This is nothing more than another pathetic argument of convenience from Republicans, who invent a standard that applies to one person they don't like at one time (like Gore's taking credit for his role in creating the Internet) but never apply to anyone else.
Like you know, all the media sources that xeroxed the Bush Administration's claims of WMD's and ties between Iraq and Al Queda.
Journalism is bullshit, journalists cannot be trusted and they never report the truth unless the truth means monetary gain.
Without journalists like Woodward and Bernstein, the Watergate scandal would have gone largely unnoticed and swept under the rug. It was primarily they who uncovered the conspiracy aspect of it:
A journalist named Sam Bannath uncovered a corruption scandal in Cambodia which resulted in the prime minister ordering investigations.
Several reporters were arrested for uncovering another scandal. Reporting government corruption in an environment where you're likely to be arrested doesn't sound like "bias" or "profiteering" to me.
It was journalists who brought Jack Abramoff's cons to the public's attention.
Journalism as a profession is not "bullshit", and there are many more stories of journalists doing work like the above. The shitty journalists are the ones toiling away at sensationalist "news" outlets like Fox, and it doesn't help that with 24-hour news channels and the web, media outlets are expected to churn out headlines nonstop, which generally leads to low-quality nonsense, often senstationalist as you put it, just to remain competetive. But that is a function of the employer, not of journalism as a trade.
mirrorshades radio -- darkwave, industrial, futurepop, ebm.
This was already picked apart. The authors did not control for the risk faced by the gun owners. People are more likely to be armed if they are likely to be attacked. http://reason.com/blog/2009/10/05/why-skydivers-would-be-better
What you fail to grasp is that bloggers aren't mere journalists, they very often are experts in a particular field - ScienceBlogs being a good example
I thought I pointed that out. I gave the examples of Juan Cole and Glen Greenwald.
Blogs by experts are fine. I'm just defining the role of a journalist -- someone who isn't necessarily an expert on the subject at hand but knows how to round up experts.
Doctor A is an expert who believes in treating a disease with surgery. Doctor B is an expert who believes in treating a disease with medication. My job as a journalist is to get Dr. A to explain why he believes in surgery, get Dr. B. to explain why he believes in medication, and get each of them to explain why they disagree with the other guy. In my story I can wind up with a broader perspective than you might get from a blog by Dr. A or Dr. B.
Take prostate cancer. Some doctors believe you should operate routinely (which leaves the patient impotent about half the time). Other doctors (especially in Europe) believe it's rational to do without surgery in a large percentage of cases. I've written a lot of stories lining up the arguments for both positions and trying to lay it out in a way that helps you figure out who's right.
If a blogger is going to give the arguments on all sides, then he's doing what a journalist does (or a good scientist), and more power to him. Conversely, the journalists in the news sections of journals like Science, Nature, etc. usually have some expertise of their own. Some of the journalists who write for the New York Times have MDs or PhDs.
And there you have it. The only difference between a blogger and a journalist is the organization backing up the latter.
Journals, or dailies if you will, are nothing more than web logs. They have no more moral value, inherent, by virtue of being printed on paper rather than displayed on a screen.
A blogger is just as entitled to a police press pass and the protection of the First Amendment as a reporter from a metropolitan newspaper, but I've done both and there are a hell of a lot of advantages to working for a news organization. If I'm writing a biotechnology story, I could walk down the hall and talk to somebody who understood finance.
The major newspapers, like the New York Times and the Wall Street Joural (pre-Murdoch, anyway) are able to let a reporter take six months off for intensive investigation of an important story -- like those New York Times stories that traced contaminated drugs like heparin from the U.S. back to China. An independent blogger can do great stuff, but how many bloggers can fly to China to see first-hand how they make heparin there, if that's where the story leads?
And don't forget the legal department in case you get sued for libel.
I thought those were counter-examples. If you're presenting Cole and Greenwald examples of the sort of fact-checking you're after, then journalism's problems run much deeper than you think.
But that's just a false perspective taught to you in journalism school. There are always (at least) two sides to the story, but much of the time, one of those sides is dead wrong. When you're discussing evolution, you don't need to talk to an intelligent design proponent. When you're discussing medicine, you don't need to talk to chiropractors or homeopaths. When you're discussing vaccination, you don't need to talk to Jenny McCarthy.
Dr A and Dr B might both have valid points of view. But they can present their points of view themselves. We don't need a journalist to intermediate and get all the facts wrong on both sides.
We do need reporters, still. Journalists, not so much.
The press are already manipulated for political gain on occasion. This system would make it worse because it would allow a rumor to gain authenticity. Remember the most recent rumor about death panels in the health care debate? Imagine that misinformation being splashed across the front page of the NYT. Enough people believed the lie it would have happened in this situation.
Facts are not a democracy, though a lot of people seem to think they are. You see this all the time in evolution debates where someone will cite a poll about how few people believe evolution is true as evidence that evolution is false.
And it has also been leading to (or becoming a ruse for) wars.
The largest prime factor of my UID is 263267.
I just checked http://scienceblogs.com/ and picked a story in a field that I follow. I will be forever grateful to Ed Yong for comparing wrapped DNA to dried raman noodles http://scienceblogs.com/notrocketscience/2009/10/what_is_the_difference_between_the_human_genome_and_a_pair_of.php?utm_source=sbhomepage&utm_medium=link&utm_content=channellink
However, Yong is a science writer and journalist, not a scientist. He writes for New Scientist and Nature. He got his story by interviewing the Harvard researcher (rather than from the BBC report). My point is, that's what bloggers, journalists, reporters, anybody should do if they want to produce useful science information.
There's a process in science for finding the truth (which is a good model of the process of finding the truth in other disciplines). The process is not to get a really smart guy who can tell you the truth. The process (as Feynmann described it) is to take an idea, examine it skeptically, have people from diverse viewpoints challenge it, and see how well the idea holds up. Science journalism follows and facilitates that process. It doesn't matter to me whether you do it on a blog, a daily metropolitan newspaper, or the news section of Nature.
People who don't understand and don't follow this process are not going to write useful blogs.
To return to my original point, if you want to contribute information to the Internet rather than noise, one of the important steps is to check your facts. It sounds trivial but many bloggers (like TFA for this Slashdot story) don't understand this.
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
The "traditional" news agencies get just as little editorial oversight, these days.
+++OK ATH