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There are a bunch of bloggers online who think their job is to fact-check the media. That's fine. Everyone makes mistakes. But who's fact-checking the fact-checkers?

As this excellent piece on The New Republic's The Plank shows, bloggers don't always get it right, either:

This is the story of how some bloggers on the right tried to undermine a popular government program, disparage a Baltimore family, and discredit the mainstream media -- and how it ended up validating all three in the process.

It's a story that starts earlier this month, after Congress had passed a substantial expansion of the State Children's Health Insurance Program (S-CHIP). As readers of this space know--skip down to the break if you can recite chapter and verse on S-CHIP already--the program's purpose is to make sure low-income children get health insurance. But it doesn't target the poorest of the poor, since the most destitute children already qualify for Medicaid. Rather, it focuses on those children in families too wealthy to qualify for Medicaid but still too poor or otherwise unable to buy insurance on their own.

Give the whole thing a read. It's worth it.

Scott Adams has a fascinating entry on his Dilbert Blog about the future of newspapers.

I was with him on the technology front (though I think he's overestimating the end of the print newspaper by a generation or so).

But I hope he's way off on this vision of the future of news:

"So I see printed newspapers lasting until you upgrade your phone two more times. But the newspaper business can thrive online if it changes how it gathers and edits content. And clearly there will be massive amounts of consolidation. There won't be 3,000 newspapers online. There might be a dozen. And local news will come from hometown bloggers who self-syndicate to all of the newspapers."

Newspapers do need to change how we gather and edit content. But turning over the news-gathering function to hordes of bloggers would be a horrible mistake, unless bloggers as a whole take a quantum leap in quality, reliability and accuracy.

Jerry Fuhrman, former Roanoke Times columnist, thought we missed the mark with today's editorial calling for White House aides to testify publicly and under oath about the politically motivated firings of eight US attorneys.

In his From On High blog, Jerry wrote:

We don't need to go through all that, fellas. Let me explain it to you in a few crisp words:

Moving on ...

The Justice Department is an executive office branch. That doesn't mean Congress doesn't have the right - and the duty - to investigate attempts to oust prosecutors who weren't found to be sufficiently loyal "Bushies."

As 19th Century British philosopher John Stuart Mill wrote, the most vital function of the legislature isn't making laws, but "to watch and control the government; to throw the light of publicity on its acts; to compel a full exposition and justification of all of them which any one considers questionable; to censure them if found condemnable."

That includes the White House.

Alton over at "I'm Not Emeril" had this to say about polls that show 70 percent of the American people question the Iraq war:

I really don't have a problem when folks ask me how it feels to be in the small 30% who support President Bush and the troops.

I reconcile it with the fact that the other 70% knows the names of every contestant and judge on American Idol, but can't name their own two Senators and their Representative.

I really thought Alton was better than that. I'm in the 70 percent that think this war is a tragic error, and I can name both senators, my representative and most the rest in the state, and the entire U.S. Supreme Court.

And I can only name a couple of the contestants on American Idol. I can name all the judges, though, I have to admit.

It may be comforting in some weird way to think that the 70 percent of the American population that disagrees with you are all ignorant rubes.

But it isn't true.

For an interesting take on the transportation committee's progress, check out Not Larry Sabato's blog.

Our friend and weekly columnist, Jerry Fuhrman, had a strange criticism of Gov. Tim Kaine over at his From On High blog. He quoted a story about Kaine's proposal to use half-a-billion dollars of the state surplus for one-time transportation needs, then he criticized Kaine for, well, for not shifting surplus dollars to transportation.

That left me scratching my head. I left the following comment for him:

Read more »

I used to work across the hall from Don Surber back in my days at the Charleston Gazette. I worked for the liberal morning paper. He was an editorial writer for the conservative afternoon Daily Mail. We'd trade good-natured barbs every once in awhile. After I moved to Roanoke, I found his blog. So now we continue to trade good-natured barbs occasionally.

But I agreed with what he had to say in this post:

Scott Johnson at the Powerline blog asked the musical question, “Is your newspaper America’s worst?” Good question. I would like to see which town suffers the most pedestrian civic-booster newspaper in the country.

Instead, all that is listed are big-city newspapers that dare to be liberal on their editorial pages.

Surber's main conclusion - "Isn’t it childish (and dangerous) to read only things with which we agree?" - is one I couldn't agree with more. Judging from my e-mails, many readers of The Roanoke Times only want to read opinions that mirror their own. Our editorials offend them not because of poor writing or inadequate research (our editorials suffer neither malady), but merely because the reader takes an opposing point of view. That's kind of sad.