Roger Simon makes a few good points

Roger Simon, writing in the Huffington Post, makes some valid points regarding Newsweek's "flushing the Koran" story. The standard critique of bloggers is that they are unedited and therefore not to be trusted, and that they lack the experience of hard-nosed reporters and editors in the MSM.

But, Simon, who has written for major media outlets says that he receives far better editing through comments on his posts than he ever did in the MSM. And furthermore, were it not for the scrutiny of bloggers major misrepresentation that have regularly appeared in the MSM would go undetected.

But this is the telling point. The hard nosed reporter and experienced editors at Newsweek produced a story that had catastrophic real-world consequences.

Riots ensued across the Islamic world and people died because of what one reporter wrote, evidently without doing any serious checking. If we lived in a just world this outrage would be the death knell of the unmonitored "anonymous source," which can often be the instrument of a totalitarian, not a free, press.

Unfortunately, we live in a world where "anonymous source" equals scoop equals money. And let's hope this Newsweek story was motivated by greed, because if it was motivated by a "Get Bush" ideology, this lifetime left-liberal who never dreamed of voting for a Republican for President until 2004, thinks their value system is mighty sick.

The idea that somehow reporters and editors in the MSM can be inhumanly objective and put aside their biases and careerist ambitions is, and always has been, absurd; as is the idea that the editorial system corrects for whatever biases might emerge. The blogosphere has destroyed the myth of objectivity and MSM reliability.

Read the post here.