The Blogosphere Rising
By Sara Pentz

In a recent news report people were asked what they would do without the Internet. Most said they would not be able to ‘survive;’ some said they would ‘die.’ While certainly they used hyperbole to describe their distress at that thought, their sentiments were a small indication of how the Internet is becoming more of a major influence in our everyday lives.

Evidence of this comes from the rise of the Internet blog. A blog is basically a journal that is available on the web. The activity of updating a blog is called blogging and someone who keeps a blog is a blogger. Therefore, the term blogosphere is the space on the Internet where one can read or write blogs.

Events happen that underscore this inescapable trend toward blogging on the blogosphere. For example, the recent discrediting of CBS’s “60 Minutes Wednesday’ report, about faked National Guard memos used to impugn the character of President George W. Bush, represents a glowing example of this paradigm shift.

Here was an example of a mainstream media outlet presenting a dishonest report to the American people where facts, research and contradictory testimony would not allow the CBS team to waver from its political agenda; where partisans with an ax to grind carried the thrust of the story. Worse than that, the CBS team had to—in some way—understand the deception, because the thesis was openly rejected in advance of the report by a number of noted experts. It was an ugly example of dishonesty in journalism too often repeated in today’s mainstream media.

But the jig was up when, only a few hours after the report aired, a legion of legitimate legal and political experts showed up on the web to expose the deception. In one of the great moments in Internet history, a collage of remote souls collectively did what CBS News had failed to do. They sought the truth. They were specialists in a multitude of areas such as documents, handwriting, copy machines, typewriters, computers, software programs, typefaces, military technology and Texas National Guard history. Together, within less than two days, they sank the CBS report, countering it with documented data in a manner never before witnessed—to which by the way CBS thumbed its nose.

It was a technological feat that suddenly gave the blogosphere official credibility and celebrity. While it is certainly known how fast the Internet can give access to and deliver information, this kind of counter attack had never before been displayed with such speedy and devastating results. The revelations emerging throughout the sphere were forcing the mainstream to address the incident—albeit with its usual unwillingness.

Writing esoterically about the explosion of the blogosphere, University of Dallas professor Frederick Turner of TechCenterStation.com, explains: “What we saw was an extraordinary example of what chaos and complexity theorists call spontaneous self-organization. Out of a highly communicative but apparently chaotic medium…a perfectly-matched team of specialists had self-assembled out of the ether.” He adds, “The dazzling speed and monstrous bandwidth of the information flow had crossed some kind of threshold, in which thousands of minds could act as…an intelligence with not merely cognitive, but moral characteristics.”

The power of the blogosphere had coalesced morality—truth, justice, responsibility—and overpowered the mainstream media with its force. Just as basic research, fact checking and critical editing has begun to erode in newspapers, magazines, and TV news around the world, these basic journalistic endeavors found a solid and impeccably obvious place on the Internet.

A new journalism was emerging—a journalism with smarts as well as courage. This is the kind of courage that takes responsibility for actions and behavior in the face of hard moral choices. Here lies the bravery to distill information with independent thinking and without biased editing. It is the free and plucky thinking that is so absent in other spheres where hack redundancy has found its ground.

This was, then, a supreme and sublime reallocation of power. The blogosphere was rising up to take over where the mainstream media had failed. Bloggers began to understand the magnitude of their importance. They had thrust aside the media elite and taken over the role of the arbiter of truth. And the very act became a nod to the new journalism that is going to quickly permeate the culture. No longer can the media elite falsify, fake, lie and cheat with impunity because they will be ‘outed’ by bloggers around the world.

Perhaps, that is why these media elitists fear, despise and ridicule bloggers. In the midst of CBS attempts to cover up the faked memo report, a quote by one senior CBSer united the bloggers. He attacked and attempted to ridicule them by pejoratively calling them, “…some guys sitting in their living rooms in their pajamas.” The insult was a bomb; backfiring as only it could into the laps of the arrogant. The quote whizzed through the blogosphere tap-dancing from website to website; careening through chat rooms and strings; and into the words of think-tank pundits—all at a speed of this new lightening-fast technology. As it did, the insult was caricatured in cartoons, jokes and puns. The bloggers loved it. They had found their identity and gloried in it. They laughed at the pettiness of the elites because it was all so untrue.

From Townhall.com John Leo writes, “Dan Rather associated them (bloggers) with rumor and propaganda. This seems to mean that many in the mainstream press still don’t understand bloggers…the kind of self-made journalists who make their case with hyperlinks to primary sources and other data. Arguments without authority count for nothing, and softheaded analyses and hoaxes are quickly exposed. As RealClear Politics.com said, it’s a fast-moving, “very transparent, self-correcting environment ultimately based on facts.”

Here’s a succinct comment from Brent Bozell, President of Media Research Center. “The conservative counterculture buzzes daily about the misinformation the liberal media tries to feed the people. Media accountability to their audience is now coming directly from the audience.”

It seems inevitable that these stalwart bloggers will gain more and more respectability—while marching in their formal tuxedos to the cadence of the truthseeker. The more they each come forward with non-partisan information, the more they will inflate their ranks and sink the mainstream Liberally-biased media.

Bloggers will multiply exponentially with respect to the masses of people who write honestly with facts, objectivity and the truth. And the blogosphere will rise just like the phoenix—that mythical bird, a symbol of virtue, power and prosperity, that flies far ahead in the lead scanning the landscape and distant space with its intense and perfect vision. And, like the legendary phoenix, the blogosphere will lead the dawn of a new and brighter day.