Daily Kos reminds us (as if we could forget) that this is the year of the YouTube campaign video. The latest, hottest video, “in a very peculiar YouTube moment,” goes back twelve years and belies Hillary Clinton’s memory of Bosnian sniper fire:

This time, the problem for the candidate isn’t something she just said that ended up on YouTube, it’s that what she said is easily refuted by watching video available for everyone to see on YouTube.

It’s another reminder that the Internet is changing the nature of journalism — taking battles to the blogosphere, lifting the classless Drudges of the net to the level of “serious” journalists, making quick celebrities of pudgy John McCain supporters, bringing America right into Obama’s church, and panicking newspaper journalists.

In the Wall Street Journal today, Lee Gomes asks if the web deserves its power to influence politics. He thinks the web has its good points (diversity, the democratization of expression) and its disadvantages: “There is a danger that our politics might be shaped by insignificant events that assume an importance merely by having been caught on tape.”

This democratization of expression is key, as Eric Alterman’s thoughtful essay in the latest New Yorker shows. Alterman says the 1920s saw a similar intellectual debate on the tension between “knowledge-based elites” (like today’s print-based snobs) and advocates of “democratic education” (today’s Internet upstarts). The blogosphere’s big bang makes “genuinely democratic discourse” possible.

But this discourse brings with it democracy’s perennial problem: Equality lends itself to mediocrity, and democracy devolves to the lowest common dumb denominator. Alterman predicts, “And so we are about to enter a fractured, chaotic world of news, characterized by superior community conversation but a decidedly diminished level of first-rate journalism.”

Gene Weingarten discovered this when he recklessly volunteered to expose himself to 24 straight hours of newspaper, TV, radio, and Internet punditry. His witty Washington Post account says it all:

There are too many voices, competing too hard, fighting for attention, ranting, redundant, random. The dissemination of fact and opinion is no longer the sole province of people and institutions with the money to buy network monopolies or ink by the ton. … Now, all is out of control. Everyone with a computer is a potential pundit; anyone with a video camera can be on a screen.

“Balance” is supposed to be a good word, but it can be bogus.

If I were to write an article about you, and asked a dozen people what you were like, and if I happened to know that some of those people were lying about you, I’m sure you would not appreciate it if I included those liars’ testimonies in my piece side by side with other testimonies, on the supposed justification that I was providing “balance” by letting everyone have a say.

Or even (less malevolently than slothfully) if I were too lazy to go out and find the best witnesses I could about a person or a story or an event, contenting myself instead to scare up any old dozen witnesses — in order to scoop a story or meet my editor’s deadline — would I not be acting deceitfully? Ten times zero is still zero.

A fact checker for the political watchdog website politifact.com says the media have been “scared into a sense of false balance.”

Our unhappy cultural confluence of a ratcheted-up news machine, on the one hand, and a postmodernism that largely rejects the old-fashioned notion of “the truth” in preference for the relativistic notion of “my truth” and “your truth,” is heading us for a train wreck. It has become “the norm…to quote person A’s and person B’s account of what transpired, balancing various subjective views in the oft-vain hope that objective truth would emerge” (Journalism & Humility, Marvin Olasky).

I do not envy journalists. Theirs is the thankless job of providing information in a fashion “timely” and “accurate,” marching orders at cross purposes with each other. There is no simple solution, only the abiding challenge to courage.

Was Brokeback Mountain actor Heath Ledger’s naked body scattered ’round with sleeping pills? Did he die in Mary-Kate Olsen’s New York apartment? No and no. But that didn’t stop certain media websites from reporting those snippets as facts. Did those sites, the New York Times notably among them, get the Ledger story wrong?

No. An NYPD spokesman got his story mixed up. But by the time he got it unmixed, reporters had already fired the “news” digitally around the world.

Such are the dangers of “speed reporting” in the Internet age, according to Editor & Publisher and a Los Angeles Times entertainment blog:

But here’s the problem…Journalists have generally had hours - not minutes or seconds - to craft a story from the blast wave of facts and factoids that comes in the wake of a bombshell. What people are seeing now is an old-fashioned process - reporting - as it unfolds in real time. If the public wants its information as raw and immediate as possible, it’ll have to get used to a few missteps along the way, and maybe even approach breaking stories with a bit of skepticism, like a good reporter would.

Conservative/liberal media bias aside, how skeptical are you of news outlets’ basic reporting of facts? Have changes in news delivery caused you to take a “wait and see” attitude about what is true and what is not? Would you prefer faulty “up to the minute” news that gets tweaked as time goes by, or that reporters verify the facts before breaking a story?

The holiday season was a kind of news ceasefire. Notwithstanding the awkward intrusion of reality afforded by the assassination of Pakistan’s Bhutto, the airwaves managed to soothe us with soft news, such as NPR radio’s extensive rhapsody to the potato.

But we’re off and running again at the top of January with mayhem in Kenya — and proof once more that if nations didn’t have each other to fight, then the tribes within each nation would fight each other. And if the tribes didn’t have each other to fight, then the members of a family would fight each other.

Good thing there’s no such thing as sin.

You wonder, though, considering the state of things, how the news outlets get along without that particular lexical item — “sin.” Think of how these emporiums of word-smithing unnecessarily hamstring themselves in editorial analysis by their quaintly obstinate refusal to add to their journalistic stock in trade the most perfect word ever coined for capturing all the nuances of the terrible actions they will be reporting in 2008 — “sin.”

Explanations like “poverty” or “discontent” or “frustration” or “long simmering tensions” or “internecine strife” or “tribal divisions” are all well and good, but just don’t cut it when describing why a wealthy politician extorts bribes, or why a Kenyan mob would douse with gasoline and set afire a church full of women and children.

Last week, Hillary Clinton demonstrated her clout when it comes to controlling the press, or at least GQ. In a “memo” to Sen. Clinton, Jon Friedman at MarketWatch accuses the Democratic presidential hopeful of “playing a dangerous game with the media”:

Pretty smooth, Senator, but watch it. Don’t get any ideas about trying it again.

You see, that kind of stuff may work at GQ, which can be loosely regarded as a fashion magazine stuffed with some words. But if you think you can pull the same stunt with other self-respecting media organizations, you might not be so lucky.

We’ll see. …