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Much discussion is taking place on the Net regarding Hugh Hewitt’s excellent discussion of the blogosphere in an O’Reilly interview.
O’REILLY: All of that’s good, right. All of that is good, but I’m telling you there aren’t any rules any more, and that’s what frightens me.
HEWITT: No, but there’s self-correction.
O’REILLY: Look, I operate under rules here, Hugh. If I say something defamatory, I get sued.
HEWITT: Yup.
O’REILLY: If I say something irresponsible, NewsCorp pulls me off the air. It happened to Michael Savage over at MSNBC. Pulled him right off the air —
HEWITT: Yup.
O’REILLY:—all right, after that crazy thing he said. Internet’s not like that. No rules. Last word.
HEWITT: Oh well no, no no. The person who gets pulled off the air is the reader that you lose. If you lose your credibility as Blog discusses, you’ll lose your audience. GM is blogging now.
O’REILLY: No, but you’re not going to lose credibility if you smear people. People like to read smear stuff.
HEWITT: The Vice-Chairman of GM started blogging last week. If he says something wrong, he will lose credibility with his shareholders. All of business is going to start blogging, Bill, because it’s the way to communicate. It’s the way of the future. You can’t throw away your credibility.
O’REILLY: OK, Hugh Hewitt, thanks very much. We appreciate it.
I’d just like to add that if a blogger makes a misstatement of fact, he or she is liable to hear about it immediately in the blog’s comment section; and it’s even possible other bloggers may post about it on their own sites. Those comments and blog posts are immediately widely available for discussion.
So, due to the interactive nature of the Net, blogs are far more subject to receiving correcting feedback, than mainstream media is.
