WARNING: Very Long. Also, about blogs, which is a topic we never were terribly interested in before we started blogging. To tell you the truth, we're still not terribly interested in it. But we think we have a decent point to make here.

But click here to skip to the next headline if this stuff bores you.

I.

Five years ago, the newsorganizations' monopoly on the ability to gather and disseminate news also gave them the related, but not wholly connected, power to drive the public debate.

Because they were writing the stories, they also got to decide, on the public's behalf, what stories were important, and which parts of stories were important. Newswriting is more than a bullet-point list of collected facts, of course; "good" newswriters are expected to put facts into what they believe constitutes "context," to fit them into a narrative that changes news from reporter's notes to a story.

Story-- that's the key word. News reports aren't just a collection of data; they have a narrative arc, a plot, a moral, and, more frequently than not, heroes and villains, just like a fictional tale.

Raw data are assembled into a story or narrative by much the same way fiction writers hone in on the essence of the tale they want to tell. Some facts are emphasized; some are de-emphasized. Some facts favorable placement (in the headline, for example) and other facts unfavorable placement (beyond the jump at paragraph thirty-seven).

And of course some stories are afforded great prominence whereas other stories are simply not reported at all.

The ultimate effect of this is, of course, that news-gatherers have been afforded a rather strange privilege: the power to shape, drive, and occasionally manufacture from whole cloth the public debate. Apart from elected officials and political functionary, no other profession in America is so privileged to essentially decide for the nation what is important and what is good in public life; and it isn't precisely obvious why reporters, of all people, should be entrusted with such a prerogative. Nor has it ever been.

If we're casting about for professions to which to entrust such a power, why not give it to medical doctors? They're very well educated and certainly no one can quibble with their general interest in serving the public good. Why not lawyers? Why not teachers? Why not software programmers?

Who chose reporters, precisely, to decide on behalf of America what is important and just? No genuine offense intended to reporters, but, at least as a profession, they hardly strike us as being the smartest or wisest America has to offer. Rather low on the list, truth be told.

Yes, reporters do collect data; but the data-collection function is almost entirely separate from the story-construction function of news story-writing. Witness Rick Berke, who crafted what were by all accounts dynamite stories while frequently having little to do with the actual news-collection.

Reporters and newspaper owners have this power not because anyone sat down and decided they were wise enough to wield it, but simply because of they gathered the facts. They had an advantage no other profession had: proximity to the day's news. Possession is, as they say, nine-tenths of the law.

And, for as long as we know, they've had a monopoly on that power.

Until the rise of the blog.

II.

Now, we're not blog-triumphalists, as many bloggers seem to be. We're blog-skeptics. We acknowledge that blogs many one day constitute a true counterweight to the regular media, but that day is still far off.

That being said, the importance of blogs -- as well as on-line discussion/chat fora -- is, we think, their power to take the same basic data being reported in the media and re-report it, this time with an individual blogger's own preferred narrative, arc, moral, and heroes and villains.

Time and time again, bloggers and on-line commentators read deep into a story -- deep into the thirtieth paragraph, where the reporter buried all the stuff he didn't much want you to see -- and rewrite a new story around that fact. Bloggers take the facts the media discounts as unimportant or inconsistent with their preferred narrative arc and make their own narrative arc, this time elevating the discarded to the essential.

The media looks down on this. Bloggers are unprofessional, they sniff. People who post unline are just spouting half-formed opinions. Uncredentialed.

Perhaps so. We concede that reporters are skilled at gathering actual information. But where the regular media loses us is in its arrogance in insisting that their "judgment" as to what it is important and what is not is somehow superior to anyone else's.

We're happy to have a media skilled at reporting facts to us. As newsjunkies, we enjoy the fruits of these labors each day. But we're not quite sure why it is that, say, Dana Milbank's judgment as to what it is important is any way superior to our own. Surely he's a better reporter than we are; but is he a better spinner of a dramatic story? A better analyst of what is best for America? By whose lights? According to what credential?

Again: Who precisely sat one down one day and voted Dana Milbank as his personal opinion-shaper? We know we didn't. We'd remember if we had.

Blogs are, to a small but increasing extent, challenging the networks' and the New York Times' monopoly: as the "gatekeepers" of information and the wine-stewards of the national discussion. Drudge, the proto-blogger, already decides for most of the wired community (which is to say most of the infophile community of America) what the day's national story will be.

And, increasingly, it is Kaus, Volokh, Reynolds, and Sullivan who help shape the New Conventional Opinion.

Little by little, the function of newsgathering -- surely the legitimate area of expertise of the mainstream media -- is being severed from the related but entirely distinct function of news analysis and agenda-setting.

More and more, bloggers are hijacking the basic raw information contained in media reportage -- "newsjacking," to coin a term -- and creating a new narrative arc putting those facts into a new context -- a context frequently more plausible and insightful than that offered by the major media.

III.

Same facts, different story: a reporter's preferred narrative, bias, and moral are edited out and the essence of the report -- the actual operative facts -- are used anew in the service of a different narrative.

The mainstream media doesn't like this at all. It's creating the story, and thereby influencing public opinion, that's the fun part of reportage. The mechanical dissemination of mere data is the grind. One can't help but think part of their problem with bloggers is bloggers' determination to undo all that agenda and slant they've worked so hard to stuff into the story in the first place.

Is this just the spin of the bloggers? Of course it's spin. Any writer's subjective judgment as to what is important is "spin." But it's different spin, at least. For many years, the pro-abortion, pro-feminist, pro-gay-marriage, anti-gun, anti-business left has had its agenda, its interest, its story well-represented in the media.

Isn't it time for a bit of diversity? Even just a little bit?

It would seem that any innovation that can give readers more of a choice, and also challenge the unearned monopoly of the reporter class over this crucial function, must be a good thing.

As William F. Buckley observed, he'd rather have the country run by the first 100 names in the Cambridge phone book than by the faculty at Harvard University.

And maybe it's just our cranky conservative contrarian politics talking, but we'd rather have the first 100 screen-names on AOL deciding the public debate than our current supremely-objective press corps.

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