AIN'T THEY CUTE?

The New York Times newspaper (as Jimmy Breslin calls it) officially pooh-poohs the blogosphere's concern over the election results. We can all rest easy now:

But while the widely read universe of Web logs was often blamed for the swift propagation of faulty analyses, the blogosphere, as it has come to be known, spread the rumors so fast that experts were soon able to debunk them, rather than allowing them to linger and feed conspiracy theories. Within days of the first rumors of a stolen election, in fact, the most popular theories were being proved wrong - though many were still reluctant to let them go.

***
But rebuttals to the Florida fraud hypothesis were just as quick. Three political scientists, from Cornell, Harvard and Stanford, pointed out, in an e-mail message to a Web site that carried the news of Ms. Dopp's findings, that many of those Democratic counties in Florida have a long tradition of voting Republican in presidential elections. And while Ms. Dopp says that she and dozens of other researchers will continue to analyze the Florida vote, the suggestion of a link between certain types of voting machines and the vote split in Florida has, at least for now, little concrete support.

These people are missing the point, and I don't think they will ever get it. It's simply this:

Rumors have more weight than the mainstream media because the media has been so consistently poor at doing its job. Period. We don't trust them to put their own immediate interests over that of our democracy.

Did anyone in the media bother to raise and then debunk these election-fraud theories? Not as far as I know. Probably didn't even occur to them to question the "official" version.

Has anyone in the media consistently and strongly challenged anything about the Bush administration - or have they simply taken everything at face value?

While "journalists" are doing their best to dismiss or even attack bloggers, it simply doesn't occur to them to worry about their own credibility. Hence, Jeff Gerth, Judy Miller, Bob Woodward, et al.

Physician, heal thyself.
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