Written by: Beck

Stephen Baker has a good article in BusinessWeek Online about the influence of blogs and their impact on freedom of speech, using the recent case of CNN news exec Eason Jordan's resignation as an example.

Does a blogosphere frenzy that helps bring down a CNN news exec for a comment he made mean free speech is in peril? Nope. It's exploding

Read the papers, and you'll think there's a menace growing in American society: the blogosphere. This fast-growing force consists of some 7 million people, all of them writing in online journals called Web logs, or blogs. When these bloggers latch onto a controversy, they can light up the Internet with angry rants -- and bring down powerful people.

Baker rightly understands that the blogosphere depends on the old structure of media power elites as much as they threaten the old fashioned power structures of the mainstream media complex. There's definitely a symbiotic relationship between the two, and if it occasionally results in the destruction of an Eason Jordan or a Jeff Gannon, the media establishment nonetheless comes away stronger for having some dead wood pruned off.

The only problem I had with the article is Baker's incorrect characterization of the Jordan scandal:

He resigned on Feb. 13 after conservative bloggers feasted on a controversial statement he made in late January at the annual World Economic Forum at Davos, Switzerland, about the U.S. military. His allegation -- that coalition soldiers in Iraq mistook journalists for enemies and killed them -- brought down a storm of criticism on him and his network.

Jordan didn't allege that coalition soldiers "mistook journalists." He alleged that there was a administration/military policy of deliberately targeting journalists. Big difference there.