There are days when I really pity my friend Matt, who has done so much unheralded work behind the scenes as well as out in front, and who sometimes gets sucked into to soon-forgotten but potentially damaging controversies when what he really deserves is a leadership role in the party hierarchy. Full Disclosure: I'm personal friends with some of the people I'm going to talk about here, and not really "unbiased." Which is sort of the point of what most everyone involved is trying to say, I hope.

Backing up, I think we can all agree it's been a long time (if ever) since journalists could accurately claim to maintain "academic" standards in reporting. I'll define "academic" as "ethical, peer-reviewed, critical, and concerned with demonstrable, repeatable truth and full discovery/disclosure," as it pertains to the art and science of reporting. Anyone who disagrees with my premise about the state of modern 'reporting,' just go over to Media Matters and type in the searchbox the name of your (least) favorite media celebrity; the last 8 years have been a treasure trove for regulators (who've gone unused, sadly), comedians, and ethics panel schedulers. Truth has been the most frequent victim, followed to the sacrificial altar of profit and propaganda by ethics, balance, and fairness. Let's don't get started on issues like racism, warmongering, sexism and pro-corporate bias...

Anyway, the whole Lind/Newberry/anyone-else involved-in-this-spat mess raises some interesting questions, separate from those of "who first said what and how" in Matt's post. I'm minded, reading the post and lots and lots of behind the scene emails, communications and previous posts on the topic, to ask: who is a "journalist" these days? How are those people "different" from "bloggers?" What are "credentials?" What is "expertise" and when, if at all, should it be employed, or mandated? I'd like to tackle a few of these because we're at a critical time in the history of the production of information, as the administration changes and revenue streams grow and shrink in various quarters.

In an idea world, there would be consequences for lying, stealing, and being willfully ignorant in the production and dissemination of information presented as "factual news." Opinion would be free, and an option open to all, but also always identified as such. "Public" resources like the airwaves (and as I think should be included, broadband) would be carefully regulated, and public resources would be applied in the production of dead-tree product, such as the nation-wide dissemination of something like The Federal Register, the better for citizens to keep track of the daily business of government. Of course we're a long way from any of that.

But the Founders believed in, and in principle I agree with, the notion of a Free Press. Today, our problem, and at the same time our greatest hope, is what exactly is "The Free Press? This isn't a new topic in the blogosphere, but in the Lind/Newberry/etc case, we've a fine opportunity to look at how that construct is defined, maintained, and understood.

In a nutshell: whom do you trust more, and why?
Unpaid Bloggers? "Online magazine" writers who get a corporate paycheck? Your Aunt Mabel after she's been into the blackberry brandy? Volarus of the Centauri system via the metal in your fillings?

One part of the ongoing Village vs the Blogosphere War that really gets me: it's the easiest thing in the world for a blogger to become "discredited, "but for a Villager, the opposite is mostly true.