Why Blogging is an Important Tool Against Mainstream Media

     Blogs have come a long way since their inception. Certain bloggers in recent years are being recognized as proper journalists, despite not publishing through a mainstream media outlet. Flashback to 2004 when The Washington Post's Howard Kurtz wrote an article titled, "After Blogs Got Hits, CBS Got a Black Eye." Being 12 years since independent bloggers Scott Johnson and Charles Johnson called out the fallacies in 60 Minutes' report on George W. Bush's documents concerning the Air National Guard service, bloggers have changed the way mainstream media is viewed and fact checked. Although the credibility of bloggers has fluctuated through the years, one fact remains constant: Someone needs to call mainstream media out on their crap.

     When the Johnsons took their time to fact check 60 Minutes, they crowd-sourced their material. Charles Johnson gathered citizen journalists and other sources to check the veracity of CBS' story. "We've got a huge pool of highly motivated people who go out there and use the tools to find stuff," Charles Johnson said in the article. "We've got an army of citizen journalists out there."

     CBS was embarrassed to be found out. If not for independent media and bloggers, this sort of work could never have been done. Attention would never have been drawn to CBS' mistakes if Charles Johnson and Scott Johnson did not have a platform to do so. As bloggers are becoming more popular and are being taking more seriously over the years, it's likely that independent journalists will continue to call mainstream media out on their fallacies.