In the Bad Old Days...

...if the MSM reported that something happened, then it happened. If they reported that someone said something, they said it. It didn't matter what actually happened; only those actually involved knew that, and for the other 99.9%, all we had to go on was the word of the MSM.

Things are different now. When the MSM misreport the news, actual eyewitnesses, people who were there and know differently, can tell us exactly what happened. And not just the MSM; bloggers are renowned for fact-checking each other, and when the story spread about the AP photo of a black looter, and the AFP photo of a lighter-skinned couple salvaging stuff they'd found floating in the water, the photographer who took the AFP picture, and wrote the caption, was able to to give his side of the story. Similarly, last week when the AP tried to claim that the President's "teleconference" with some soldiers in Iraq was "staged", one of those soldiers contributed his own eyewitness report.