Blogs go mainstream, and an update
It's taken a week, but CBS News Concludes It Was Misled on National Guard Memos, Network Officials Say. The article points out that a " document specialist who inspected the records for CBS News and said last week that she had raised concerns about their authenticity with CBS News producers, confirmed a report in Newsweek that a producer had told her that the source of the documents said they had been obtained anonymously and through the mail." If it weren't for blogs, the CBS memos possibly would never have been shown to be fake.

Yesterday Jeff Jarvis, who is a journalist, points out in hsi blog the five items of the blog reformation:
• Big Media has owned the printing press for centuries – but now the people have the power of the press
• News becomes a conversation
• Citizens’ media challenges the authority of Big Media – and establishes the authority of the audience
• Big media is about institutions, while citizens’ media is about people
• This isn’t a competition

The press is catching on. Just this morning the NY Post has op-ed articles by John Hinderaker, Scott Johnson & Edward Morrissey on Kerry's activities as Antiwar Activist, where they ask,

Why has Kerry been unable to point to any evidence that he resigned from VVAW prior to the Kansas City meeting? If Kerry was there, why didn't he tell the authorities that some members were plotting political assassinations?

and The Mysteries Of John Kerry's War Record, with focus on "Christmas in Cambodia, First Combat . . . Maybe, False Memories Of Fighting Together", and "One Medal, Three Citations".

Arthur, who's now become a syndrome,

the syndrome in question being, I gather, a condition of supposedly unfounded and unrealistic optimism that things in Iraq might not actually be all going to hell in a basket

points out that

To say that the mainstream media will not be publishing a compilation of good news stories out of Iraq because "experienced foreign correspondents on the ground underst[and] that the news [is] not, in fact, very good" is tantamount to saying that the media, instead of performing their task of providing us with all the facts, has instead decided to skip one step and assumed the responsibility of making our minds for us

and he continues his series on good news from the war zones. Today's is in the WSJ and at his blog, Chrenkoff.

The presidential campaign in Afghanistan has officially commenced on September 7. Perhaps it would have been more symbolic had it started two days later, but the very fact that a country which for a quarter of a century has been successively ravaged by the Soviet occupation, a bloody civil war, and a theocratic dictatorship is now embarking on its very own democratic journey is an achievement in itself and a cause enough for celebration.

The good news includes the recontruction of the "giant world-famous Buddha statutes destroyed by the iconoclastic Taliban", the "200,000 Afghans have returned home from Pakistan, bringing the total for repatriations from that country to 2.2 million since 2002", and others, including a link to a photo essay on women doing something that would have brought them the death penalty four years ago.

This is the fourth installment of Arthur's Good News from Afghanistan series. What's interesting is that all of the information Arthur posts has been in the public domain, ignored by the news broadcasts. As Jeff Jarvis said, "Big Media has the reporters, resources, access, and experience. Citizens’ media complements Big Media with fact-checking and challenges and with new sources of news, information, and diverse viewpoints. Together, they will improve news".
That they do.
Update Dan doesn't continue vouching for [the documents] journalistically.