Well, well, well. It seems that Eason Jordan, an executive with CNN, has officially resigned over comments he made at a panel discussion in Switzerland. (Much more here, here, here, here, and heck, just about any blog you visit.) It’s pretty clear that the powerful blog storm which resulted from his ill-advised (some would say treasonous) remarks is the direct cause of his resignation.

It has become abundantly clear over the last year that the blogosphere and similar web sites now wield incredible power. The Swift Vets and POWs For Truth campaign was organized around their web site and was the single largest factor which prevented John Kerry from winning the election. The blog storm over the 60 Minutes story based around fabricated memos not only exposed the memos as frauds, but also destroyed and overshadowed the original story. It also lead to firings at CBS and a loss of influence for Dan Rather. Similar effects are being felt in newspapers offices around the country and in the halls of government as the internet allows nearly instantaneous dissemination of information and coordination on a national scale.

These results are entirely commendable because they are based on the pursuit of truth. Those who have been brought low claimed to be proclaiming the truth, but the light of the blogosphere exposed their claims for the lies that they are.

For nearly a century, the mainstream media — newspaper conglomerates, radio and more recently, television — has held a virtual monopoly on the dissemination of information. The resulting attitudes, sloppiness and shallowness has made the media giants easy targets for the quicker, more diversified, less centralized, more interactive and vocal internet based media. I am sure that bloggers everywhere are feeling flush with power and success. I’ve already been reading statements pondering which journalist will be taken down next.

But is attacking journalists all there is? Is merely exposing lies enough? Heck, are we even exposing all the lies being spread? I don’t think so.

One of the internet’s biggest strengths is to go into depth on a topic. To dig beyond the surface appearance and sound bites of a story. To dig down to the “story behind the story” to where the truth lies. To provide easy access to original sources which can confirm or deny the validity of a statement. And to do so with more breadth and authority than any form of communications in history.

I am concerned that this strength is being frittered away on a mere show of strength against the mainstream media. The blogosphere has been flogging the Eason Jordan story hard for the past week. It was nearly all I saw on various news and politics oriented blogs while other issues went almost completely ignored.

There is one example which has been bugging me. Just before the Easongate story started making the rounds of the blogs, the media attack on Dr. Dobson was the hot topic. I am aware of exactly one blogger, David Huntwork, who immediately went to the We Are Family Foundation website and honestly checked on Dr. Dobson’s actual concerns. Shortly after his article appeared, the pages which demonstrated the truth of Dr. Dobson’s concerns began to disappear from the WAFF website.

Mere days before Eason stuck his foot in his mouth, Dr. Dobson released a lengthy response to the controversy detailing his concerns. But by that time, the proof that his concerns were legitimate had disappeared from the WAFF web site. A good number of bloggers reproduced or commented on Dr. Dobson’s statement. However, as far as I am aware, only two bloggers actually bothered to do the research to find what had been removed from the WAFF site: Emily E. and myself. (Emily had better success than I did.) I’m aware of only two christian/conservative bloggers who had been critical of Dr. Dobson who even posted a retraction. For the most part, evidence that Dr. Dobson was telling the truth was largely ignored by the blogosphere. I think this was largely due to the Eason Jordon story which was just starting to gather strength.

The result is that the media’s sliming of Dr. Dobson appears to have been a raging success, just as Dr. John Mark Reynolds warned us it would be. The slander about him was widespread, the evidence of his integrity was not.

So in the last two weeks, the score is Mainstream Media: 1, Blogosphere: 1. If all the blogosphere does is destroy people, then we are doing nothing but creating a vacuum; one which may not be filled with a truth-teller, especially if we allow them to go down in flames due to our lack of support.

“Now when the unclean spirit goes out of a man, it passes through waterless places, seeking rest, and does not find it. Then it says, ‘I will return to my house from which I came’; and when it comes, it finds it unoccupied, swept, and put in order. Then it goes, and takes along with it seven other spirits more wicked than itself, and they go in and live there; and the last state of that man becomes worse than the first.”

(Matt. 12:43-45, NASB)

The MSM is currently an easy target because their lies are easily exposed. But unless we make the truth known, the lies we expose will only be replaced with more lies which are harder to expose. (Imagine forged documents from the ‘70’s without a superscripted ‘th’.) We must make the truth known or we will eventually be overwhelmed by the sheer volume of lies that can be told.

So is the blogosphere as a whole interesting in pursuing Truth with a capital ‘T’? Or are we more interested in Power, the ability to attack enemies? From this chair, it appears to be the latter.

Here is my challenge to bloggers: Focus more on promoting truth than on exposing lies. If you find someone promoting the truth, you do not necessarily have to make a comment. Simply pointing to someone who tells the truth in an excellent fashion is far better than ignoring the truth completely because you don’t have time to comment. If the blogosphere is to surpass the mass media and be a positive influence on the world, we must take advantage if our ability to bring breadth and depth to bear while maintaining a slavish devotion to truth and integrity. If we do not maintain our integrity, then we will be no better than those very journalists we condemn.

Update: Rony Abovitz, the man who first posted the Eason Jordon story, expresses similar concerns.