It just occurred to me that there is at least one way in which webloggers can take the credibility high ground vis a vis "traditional media," particularly of the dead-trees variety. When the NYT or WaPo makes an error (even assuming that you can get them to admit it), they will publish an erratum, perhaps days later, in small print, in some area of the paper usually unrelated to the original crime.

When bloggers screw up (or at least when I do), the erratum becomes part of the post, for posterity. For instance, in my post of a couple posts back, in which I mistakenly confused Bill Jones for Bill Lockyer, while I corrected the original post, I also now have an erratum describing the original error and what I did to fix it. It will remain there until the bits have decayed off the server (or until, in a fit of new media hubris and desire to emulate the professional journalists, I delete it and send it down the memory hole...)

Newspapers might have more credibility if it didn't seem so much like pulling unanaesthetized teeth to get them to admit fallibility...

[Update at 1:12 PM PST]

Apropos the above comments, I see that Opinion Journal has picked up on The Nation's screwup in the Bush/Enron story, as I pointed out on Thursday (advantage, Transterrestrial!).

And note that The Nation didn't issue an errata. First they just tried to change the offending paragraph, hoping nobody would notice, then, when they realized that it was flawed beyond editorial repair, they simply deleted the entire article. As I said, down the memory hole...