In next week's New Yorker -- online today -- Eric Alterman discusses the decline and eventual demise of the daily newspaper. Toward the end, he sums things up like this:

"...it is impossible not to wonder what will become of not just news but democracy itself, in a world in which we can no longer depend on newspapers to invest their unmatched resources and professional pride in helping the rest of us to learn, however imperfectly, what we need to know."

His essay is accompanied by a cartoon showing another pundit, literally strangling a figure made of newsprint, captioned "Arianna Huffington questions newspapers' 'veneer of unassailable trustworthiness.'"

Among other things in his 6,000 words or so, Alterman describes Huffington's rise in the blogosphere with her critique of The New York Times coverage of America's decision to invade of Iraq...

But the article also mention that a contributor to Huffington Post spread false reports during the Hurricane Katrina crisis that some people were "eating corpses to survive." Huffington ordered a retraction. "The alacrity with which the correction took place was admirable," Alterman says, "but it was not fast enough to prevent the false information from being repeated elsewhere."

The moral seems to be that professional journalists, with traditions of group decision-making and fact checking, are less likely to be taken in by rumors and hoaxes, that their trustworthiness should be deeper than veneer.

That's what makes this week's news from California especially disturbing: At The Los Angeles Times, editor Russ Stanton and Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Chuck Philips, among others, have had to issue an apology for being taken in by false documents... after the http://www.thesmokinggun.com/ analyzed copies of the material and flagged the paper's error.

Fortunately, in this new pro-am journalism world, the newspaper had posted the material on its Web site, where watchdog bloggers could do the after-the-fact fact-checking. For what it's worth (irony?), the original story had been the hit of the year for latimes.com, attracting nearly 1 million readers, according to the Associated Press.

SmokingGun: Big Phat Liar

Assorted follow-up stories:

• Editor & Publisher: 'LA Times' Fall on 'Puffy' Story Reveals New Scrutiny Of Online Documents
• New York Times blogs about LA in 'The Lede'
• New York magazine gets ironic about an LA Times review of "The Wire."
  
• Reader comments on the story at LAT quickly broke 350
  

From my "better role models" department:

1:14:17 PM  #