Bloggers Are Editors
Blog detractors like to point out that bloggers don't have editors and, hence, there are no checks on what we post. True enough. Editors are valuable, and they're often most valuable when they're most annoying. (Not always--sometimes they're just stupid.) Good editors make sure you check the scoop that's "too good to check" and keep you from making stupid mistakes. A good editor needs to know something about everything, and to have a first-class nose for things that just don't smell right.
But even a great editorial team has only a few people assigned to any given story, and those few people necessarily have limited knowledge. What CBS has learned over the past few days is that its editors aren't good enough. Nowadays when stories go public, they get checked by after-the-fact editors with expertise in every field imaginable, and that checking gets published to the entire world via the blogosphere. Bloggers may not have editors, but they serve as editors themselves.
What's so devastating for CBS is that it didn't make an esoteric mistake, requiring rare expertise. It made a boneheaded mistake on a big story. It's my professional opinion that any decent journalist over 30 years old would have immediately suspected a forgery when looking at typeset memos supposedly produced for private files in 1972. In fact, any decent journalist over 30 would have suspected a forgery when looking at typeset memos supposedly produced for private files in 1982. (That year, I paid The Daily Princetonian $20 to cover the film cost of a resume that looked like what you can dash off on Microsoft Word; it was produced on an expensive compositing system by a graphics professional.) That those memos managed to get on national television without a caveat about their reliability suggests a complete breakdown of both journalistic instincts and journalistic process.
You shouldn't need bloggers to catch errors like this. But it helps.