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And for fact checking - with those same tens of thousands of forum participants having expertise in a variety of fields and professions, you can find no better fact checking source for finding out a GI hostage was really a GI Joe.

That's a huge hurdle for the MSM to overcome. They may be able to stick 15 producers on a story. All of whom are professional journalists likely to have only a surface knowledge of the subject they are covering.

But FR -- and the aggregation of smaller sites and blogs out there -- possess tens of thousands of people who may be subject matter experts in a particular story. While it may seem "suspicious" to some outsider that a particular Freeper picked up on something so quickly, it shouldn't be the least bit surprising that a Freeper found an error quickly. Because there inevitably are groing to be some Freepers who are going to know that subject cold.

Even for "honest" members of the MSM, this presents a huge problem. Especially when you consider how modern technology like PhotoPhop, scanners, etc, makes it easier to create a convincing hoax. Being first with a scoop is a legitimate goal for a news outlet, but they have to balance that against not getting taken in by a scam. But because they lack the virtually infinite pool of fact checkers available to a place like FR, they're not going to be able to submit it to the same scrutiny as us. That makes it almost inevitable that they are going to be busted.

I don't mean to excuse a lot of the tripe they put out there, though. It's obvious that their biases sometimes affect the scrutiny to which they put various stories. Virtually all of them came out and denounced the SBVT almost immediately. They had a presumption that what they were saying was false, until proven otherwise. OTOH, CBS took the exact opposite tack with Dubya, going so far as to claim that he had to prove that the underlying "sense" of the documents were false even if the documents themselves admittedly were inaccurate. They clearly manufactured their own problem.

Anyway, I think its interesting to see how the blogosphere and websites are affecting stories reported by the MSM. They've got to be a lot more cautious than they've been in the past, or they're going to end up with a lot of egg on their faces a lot more often.