Resolved: This House (OK, this Blog) believes that the collective knowledge of the blogosphere is greater than the collective knowledge of professional journalists regardless of the subject.
For my own part, I noted that I was pretty much in agreement with what poster Al said in comments, but I should note here that I don’t dislike the word ‘blogosphere’.
You are basically noting the difference between a free market and a controlled market.
This is a specific case of this general statement:
“The collective knowledge of a market is greater than the collective knowledge of specialists in that transaction zone.”
That is why attempts to control economic activity end up with such inefficient outcomes. The experts don’t know enough to efficiently deal with complex markets.
Our knowledge may be more in many areas, but not in every one. There are some things that you learn better by covering a beat than by getting a degree or working in a somewhat different area.
And–more importantly–most of us do not do much original reporting (Josh Marshall is the biggest exception I can think of; would love to hear of others), and rely heavily on those that do.
I’d like to make a philosophy-geek comment: This could depend on how you define “collective knowledge,” which is not trivial. If you mean that some blogger somewhere knows it (or has posted it), that’s one thing; if you mean that it’s fairly widely known among bloggers, that’s something much stronger.
For instance, if there’s a widely read blogger–let’s call him Ben Flenolds–who posts something inaccurate, even if many other bloggers know that it’s true, Flenolds’ readers won’t know it, and I’d say it wouldn’t count as collective knowledge of the blogosphere even if lots of bloggers know it.
Love the site, BTW.
I submit that there a number of subjects for which professional journalists have the upper hand.
Efficiently locating free food at junkets, sucking up to in-person guests while savaging them when they’re away, and couching questions in meek terms to avoid losing access, for example.
The collective knowledge of the blogosphere may well always be greater than that of professional journalists.
However, the collective stupidity of the blogosphere is probably greater as well.