Like most South Dakotans, I’m a Tom Brokaw fan. Unfortunately, our native son has become a bit too defensive about the mistakes of the media dinosaurs.

In response to blogger criticism of CBS, Brokaw recently said at an event for the New Yorker that “What I think is highly inappropriate is what’s going on across the Internet, a kind of political jihad against Dan Rather and CBS News that is quite outrageous.”

Well, why precisely is it “outrageous” to criticize CBS News for using forged documents in a story which could have altered the result of the Presidential race? Brokaw’s “outrage” is misplaced. Instead of using an opportunity to condemn one of his fellows, Brokaw threw in his lot with the dying Old Order. Brokaw’s response is part of a familiar pattern.

Chris Satullo, editorial page editor of the Philadelphia Inquirer, recently wrote that “When journalists go after bloggers, op-ed style, they typically have one thing to say: ‘these bloggers, they’re not real journalists. And they don’t have to meet our standards, so don’t trust them.’”

The editor of the Argus Leader recently said that blogger criticism of the Argus was “crap” and driven by a “violent” internet “cabal” of “yahoos” and “jokers,” who are full of “hatred” and “vitriol” and lacked “guts” because they hid “behind their computer screens” and wouldn’t face him “man to man.” The editor then went on to highlight the importance of debating issues “without calling each other names.” A few weeks later he compared bloggers to Hitler.

Satullo has a better grasp of the duties of journalists and the proper response to blogging: “For any journalist who understands his real job- helping the public life of this nation work well — the rise of citizen comment on the Internet should be something to celebrate.” Satullo adds that “The blogosphere is a dynamic expansion of things newspapers have long done to aid democratic dialogue, from letters to the editor to experiments in civic journalism.”

That some editors are so outraged at public commentary and the expansion of the democratic dialogue should alarm us all. Why should a couple of editors decide for the entire citizenry what is “news?” Why should they define the terms of our politics?

Nick Coleman of the Minneapolis Star Tribune is a defender of the Old Order. He recently said that “most bloggers are not fit to carry a reporter’s notebook.” The problem in Coleman’s argument, however, is becoming more and more obvious all the time-it’s not that difficult to be a reporter.

Hugh Hewitt, a law professor and blogger, said that he’s been a practicing lawyer, a professor, and a reporter, and by far the easiest job was being a reporter. A reporter should try to get all sides of a story and all the relevant facts, which is not exactly a Herculean endeavor. Bloggers can easily do it too, which is perhaps why the Old Media barons are so snippy and defensive.

The key problem is discretion-what angle a reporter chooses to take, which “experts” they quote, or which story they are assigned to write from the myriad of extant choices. Into all this discretion creeps political ideology and political preferences.

For bloggers to criticize these choices is entirely proper. And it makes our democracy better. Despite what Tom Brokaw says.

Jon Lauck is an SDSU history professor and a blogger.

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Since our last discussion about the rise of blogs and the erosion of the mainstream media (MSM, in blogosphere-speak), much has happened.

John Hinderaker, a Watertown native and now a blogger in Minneapolis, made some major news on his blog Powerline.

After Dan Rather reported on 60 Minutes about some memos from the early 1970s which purported to show that President Bush was derelict in his National Guard duties, Hinderaker and other bloggers went to work.

They began to wonder if these bombshell memos were forgeries.

One of the early giveaways was the fact that the font on the memos seemed too contemporary. And the fact that the “th” after certain numbers was superscripted, which very few typewriters – let alone National Guard typewriters – in the early 1970s could do.

Some bloggers designed a blinking exhibit showing the 1970s memos transposed over a similar document created by a word processor.

The alleged memos and the new documents were identical.

Then the dam burst.

First, the widow and son of the National Guardsman who was allegedly the author of the “memos” said there was no way he could or would have written them.

Then the officer’s secretary came forward and said the “memos” were forgeries. Then other major media outlets began to hire document experts who concluded that the “memos” were forgeries.

Then CBS’ own expert, who had a background in typewriter repair, backed off and said he only vouched for the signatures and not for the authenticity of the documents.

In the early stages of the scandal, Dan Rather and CBS dug in their heels and said they were standing by their story.

However, when major institutional forces like the Washington Post and the L.A. Times started whacking CBS, it began a furious internal debate over how to handle the growing scandal.

The irony of CBS and 60 Minutes hunkering down and hiding from the press after so many decades of sending out camera crews to harass some poor sap who was the subject of one of their stories was rich in indeed.

Finally, Rather made a Nixonian comment about how “mistakes were made,” but that they were made in good faith.

But not according to several experts who have now come forward to say that they explicitly warned CBS before it ran the story that the documents were highly questionable.

Instead of listening to the naysaying experts, CBS went with its original source, who said the documents were real (until he recanted later) and ran its story.

Now it’s being reported that the source of the “memos” had dealings with both CBS and the Kerry campaign, which CBS knew about and helped arrange, giving a more sinister tint to the network’s actions.

Whatever the details are that finally emerge, I agree with the media critic Jeff Jarvis who recently wrote:

“It’s bigger than Dan Rather. It’s bigger than CBS. It’s about journalism and Big Media and their relationship with the citizenry and democracy. It’s about sharing authority with the people.”

Exactly.

Whether it’s CBS News or the Argus Leader, citizens need to realize that much of the information they absorb is pre-selected for them by a narrow band of elite opinion-makers. That’s not how democracy is supposed to work.

The Rather scandal should remind us of that once again.

Jon Lauck is an SDSU history professor and a blogger. You can visit his blog at www.daschlevthune.-typad.com.

This year will be remembered as the Year of the Blog. What are blogs? They are personal Web sites updated and maintained by bloggers, or web loggers, who comment on the news, deconstruct the news, and make news, all while providing helpful links to readers.

The blog movement is important because it challenges the Old Order, or the existing media hierarchies, which are rapidly losing credibility. As the demand for more information grows, the more bloggers and criticism of the dinosaur media there will be.

The blog movement is essentially populist. Bloggers seek to circumvent the existing power structure dominated by media monopolies and provide information to news consumers directly. In this way, bloggers emulate the Populists of the 19th century who criticized railroad monopolies and formed their own newspapers to provide information to citizens.

The blog movement has been embraced by both the left and the right. On the left, bloggers like DailyKos made the Howard Dean campaign come alive and have pilloried President Bush and the war in Iraq. Generally, the lefty blogs think there are too many conservative TV commentators and radio shows and that the general media content is too corporate, uncritical and passive.

Many of the righty and non-partisan bloggers have been hammering away at mainstream news coverage (as opposed to commentators, which irk the left) for being excessively anti-war, anti-Bush and pro-Kerry. They have also shown the mainstream news media to simply be lazy and sloppy. Some of the revelations have been quite disturbing. Newspapers, for example, could often persist in doing poor work because as monopolists they had no competition.

The blogger Glenn Reynolds recently noted that Monopolistic or oligopolistic newspapers and broadcast outlets were the result of technology, economies of scale and scope that rewarded consolidation and led to virtually no competition among newspapers and very little among broadcasters. Now that’s changing, as alternative outlets like talk radio, cable television, and, especially, the Internet, have almost completely removed the traditional barriers to entry and allowed competition. But the loss of those barriers isn’t the biggest problem faced by the mainstream media. The biggest problem is that, like most monopolists, they’ve spent so many years enjoying their position and not worrying about quality that they’re left floundering now that the competition is exposing their faults.

There are number of bloggers in South Dakota, including myself, and they have focused their fire on the Sioux Falls Argus Leader. They have uncovered a litany of problems that should be addressed and encountered arrogant resistance to reform. Recently, when a man from Brookings wrote to the editor of the Argus and asked why a story had not run in the paper, he was harshly dismissed for being an idiot, for reading blogs, and for not having his facts straight. The Argus editor insisted the story had run at least twice. In reality, the story had never appeared in the Argus. With blogs, people are now aware of this and other Argus inadequacies.

Blogs have the ability to enhance democracy itself. As the founders said, American democracy was dependent upon a well-educated and well-informed citizenry.

When the citizens are starved for information or given biased information, however, democracy suffers.

It should also be said that the blog movement has in many cases been spearheaded by professors and students.

The nation’s biggest blogger is University of Tennessee law professor Glenn Reynolds. UCLA law professor Eugene Volokh and University of Chicago political science professor Daniel Drezner are close behind.

SDSU students and professors should join in. American democracy will be the better for it.

Jon Lauck is an SDSU history professor and a blogger. You can visit his blog at www.daschlevthune.typad.com.