We are now witnessing a comprehensive revolution in the way information is distributed, evaluated, and catapulted into the nation's consciousness. Just ask Eason Jordan.
Until late last week, Jordan was CNN's senior news executive. All that changed when reports came out of Davos, Switzerland and the World Economic Forum, attributing nearly unbelievable comments to the news executive. As reported, Jordan had claimed that American soldiers had targeted certain reporters and journalists in Iraq to be killed.
Within hours, "blogs" had jumped on the story, tracking down the actual source of the comments and catching Jordan in a web of unsustainable denials. By last Friday, the executive simply resigned, explaining that he had "decided to resign in an effort to prevent CNN from being unfairly tarnished by the controversy over conflicting accounts of my most recent remarks regarding the alarming number of journalists killed in Iraq."
Eason Jordan seemed genuinely perplexed as he attempted to deal with the controversy surrounding his comments. Perhaps he should have called Dan Rather, whose downfall was a direct result of information distributed in the blogosphere. Better yet, he should ask Hugh Hewitt, a world-class blogger whose new book, Blog: Understanding the Information Reformation That's Changing Your World, is the single best resource for understanding this new and powerful information revolution.
As Hewitt explains, blog is shorthand for "weblog." Just as the word log refers to a written record of events and analysis, a blog is simply "a diary of sorts maintained on the internet by one or more regular contributors." Hewitt dates the first blog to about 1999. Now, there are more than four million blogs--with several thousand new blogs added each day.
Hewitt's book reads like an adventure narrative, tracing the development of the "blogosphere" [as the information world of blogs is known] from its earliest stages to the radical revolution it has wrought in the way news is disseminated and controlled.
While most revolutions promise to put power in the hands of the people, this information revolution has actually succeeded in democratizing the news and information process. The old information world--identified by Hewitt as "MSM" or "mainstream media"--is in the process of being supplanted by an army of seemingly innumerable bloggers whose ability to get on a story and force major media attention has the political world spinning and news executives biting their nails.
The blogs are now able to force the attention of mainstream media. As Hewitt argues, the major media are often guilty of the journalistic sin of ignoring the obvious. Generally given to the liberal bias characteristic of the cultural elite, the media gatekeepers of the old world of MSM were once able to bury stories and to keep information out of the hands of their captive audiences. No more.
As Hewitt tells the story, the blogs allow interested parties to focus on the details of a story and track down what the mainstream media have chosen to ignore. When the media elite demonstrates its reflex of self protection, the bloggers quickly go into action--forcing the story and revealing media bias. Before long, a "blog swarm" forms. This, Hewitt explains, "is an early indicator of an opinion storm brewing, which, when it breaks, will fundamentally alter the general public's understanding of a person, place, product, or phenomenon."
Senator Trent Lott was one of the first to experience a blog swarm. When, at an event honoring the late senator Strom Thurmond's 100th birthday, Lott appeared to endorse Thurmond's 1948 political platform [on which Thurmond had run for president as a states' rights Democrat], an event largely ignored by the major media exploded in the blogosphere. Before long, bloggers had tracked the story back to earlier comments made by Lott and his previous associations with segregationist politics. The rest, as they say, is history. Senator Lott resigned as Majority Leader of the U.S. Senate, and politicians of both parties took a quick lesson in the information revolution.
