I have to admit, as a professional journalist who blogs both professionally and personally, I'm getting really tired of journalists who spend their column inches, air time or page impressions bashing "citizen journalism" and weblogs. It reminds me of the way my teenager tries to wrest away the game controller from his 'tweener brother, yelling, "Give me that, you're not doing it right!"

I usually find myself somewhat aligned in opinion with my colleague, David Coursey. But yesterday, Coursey railed about the excesses of citizen journalism. "One of the tenets of 'real' journalism is that you don't distribute information that hasn't been checked," he said. "Citizen publishers are under no such obligation, so the information that winds up in blogs and distributed on mailing lists must always be considered suspect, even if sent with the best of intentions."

I feel compelled to respond.

To say that information from any source on the Internet is to be treated skeptically is like saying that pit bulls might bite. It's been pretty well established that anyone with a computer can, and will, create a Web site, post to Usenet or a discussion board, or otherwise pollute the Web and other streams of information with hearsay and libel (that's why my first weblog was subtitled, "Lowering the average quality of Web content daily").

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Information is only as good as its source, and the people using that information have to make a decision for themselves about whether they trust it, and whether to seek corroboration elsewhere before acting on it.

Coursey posits that the lack of any sort of editorial controlling entity in citizen journalism is bad because it allows unconfirmed information to fly into our collective consciousness without any filters or fact-checks or assured means of correction. To support this assertion, he points to a post to David Farber's "Interesting People" (IP) mailing list, suggesting that there may have been censorship of an interview of Katrina survivors by NPR.

The list, moderated by Farber (a distinguished professor of Computer Science and Public Policy at Carnegie Mellon University), also published responses by NPR, by the show that the interview was on (Ira Glass' "This American Life"), and readers of the list.

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Coursey says that the problem here was that an errant post was made in the first place; that the responses and corrections made by others will never carry the weight of the original post, and that the bad information will spread further.

Thing is, this is a problem with all media, be it print, broadcast or Internet. There have been enough recent examples of errant reporting in the absence of fact just out of the disaster in New Orleans to demonstrate that bad news travels faster than good, even if it isn't true. Where are all the corrections in the press about the horror stories that proved not to be true?

But it's even worse than it appears. In the example cited by Coursey, Farber's list did correct the story, and each correction got the same weight as the original story itself. Contrast that to corrections in the established media: they get buried at the bottom of an inside page in small type, or added as a footnote at the end of a broadcast, and are as a result largely ignored. It's very rare that something on the scale of what happened to Dan Rather and his producers over those faked letters about George Bush's military record happens as the result of misinformed reporting.

Next Page: Blog world is self-editing.