Checks and balances

Glenn Reynolds on Richard Posner of The New York Times:

The charge by mainstream journalists that blogging lacks checks and balances is obtuse. The blogosphere has more checks and balances than the conventional media; only they are different.

This is very true. The blogosphere can almost be considered a self-policing system. Sure, people can write whatever they want, but those that try to skew facts are quickly forgotten about. The boys on top know that they have a serious audience, many of them fellow bloggers with serious credentials (I've mentioned before that folks like Josh Marshall and Garrett Graff have degrees from Harvard, Princeton, Brown, etc.). I'm more likely to take their word on something than some correspondent with a communications degree from Emerson. And that's the truth.