Editor’s note (April 2026): This article is part of the Blog Herald’s editorial archives. Originally published in February 2005, it has been revised and updated to ensure accuracy and relevance for today’s readers.
In early 2005, something changed in the uneasy relationship between professional journalism and the blogosphere. CNN news chief Eason Jordan has resigned after bloggers fueled his controversial remarks at the World Economic Forum.
Dan Rather had already been forced to retire after conservative bloggers exposed his use of controversial documents. Jeff Gannon, the White House correspondent with shady credentials, has been unmasked by left-leaning blogs. In each case, accountability came not from the editors, but from the people at the keyboards.
The response from the establishment media was swift and obvious. The director of the World Association of Newspapers accused the bloggers of McCarthyism. The managing editor of the Columbia Journalism Review website called them “spitting idiots” who formed a lynch mob. As Duncan Riley writes What made this backlash remarkable at the Blog Herald at the time was hypocrisy, not hostility. Old media has spent decades chasing politicians, celebrities and public figures from their positions. Now faced with the same scrutiny of a distributed audience without editors or salaries, they called it mob rule.
Two decades later, that original confrontation seems less like a culture war skirmish and more like a preview of everything that followed.
Neither party has solved the accountability problem
The 2005 debate revolved around a simple question: who should hold the power accountable? Establishment media argued that editors, institutional credibility, and professional training were prerequisites for legitimate scrutiny. Bloggers have demonstrated time and time again that a distributed focus can uncover things that the press corps collectively ignores.
Both sides had a point – and both missed something.
The criticism of bloggers by the old media was not entirely wrong. Speed without verification, outrage without evidence, and stacks based on partial data are real problems. They remain real problems today, not just on blogs, but on an exponentially larger scale on every social platform. Crowd dynamics, the Columbia Journalism Review warned in 2005, are now a standard feature of public life.
But the old media’s defense of its record was equally empty. Those editors who claim to hold journalism accountable have spent years seeking consent, protecting powerful sources and suppressing unfavorable stories. Eason Jordan’s resignation was particularly ironic: CNN’s own institutional wariness, its reluctance to cover uncomfortable truths about the powerful figures it depends on for access, was a failure to which his outspoken remarks at Davos seemed a gesture.
The blogosphere has not created an accountability problem. This exposed the accountability gap that already existed.
What the “battle blogging” was really about
Riley’s original work established something that media historians have since documented more thoroughly: hostility from establishment institutions was not primarily about standards. It was about the reader and the income attracts the reader.
By 2005, blog traffic was already significantly eroding print and cable audiences. The economic model that sustained major newsrooms—general mass readership sold to advertisers—began to disintegrate. When CNN anchors and newspaper editors attacked bloggers as irresponsible amateurs, they were doing something journalists often and rarely admit: protecting a professional monopoly.
It’s worth sitting with because it ties directly into the dynamics that have been building since then. The creative economy that the blog ushered in has now created a landscape where individual newsletters, podcasts, and YouTube channels regularly surpass legacy publications in both audience size and readership. Pew Research data shows that trust in traditional news institutions has declined sharply and consistently over the past decade, with audiences increasingly turning to independent voices — precisely the distributed, editor-less model that the Columbia Journalism Review dismissed as illegitimate in 2005.
The old media did not win the blogging war. It was gradually abandoned as the economy fell under everyone’s feet.
Platform addiction has changed everything—but not in the way anyone expected
If the old media’s attack on blogging backfired, the bloggers’ victory was not what it seemed. The independence that made early blogging a threat to institutional journalism—self-publishing, direct audience relations, lack of gatekeepers—has been significantly eroded by the platforms that have replaced the old infrastructure.
Early bloggers had their own URLs, archives, reader relationships. The distributed web that made the Eason Jordan story possible was truly decentralized: anyone with a hosting account could post, link, and find. What has replaced this infrastructure—social media algorithms, platform-mediated discovery, monetization systems that require platform approval—has created a new set of gatekeepers with far more power than the editors the old media once championed.
The dynamic of accountability has not disappeared. If anything, social platforms have expanded it beyond what 2005 bloggers could handle. But the conditions under which creators work have become significantly more dangerous. A blogger who broke a story in 2005 and angered CNN can continue to publish. Today, a creator using YouTube’s algorithm or Meta’s content policies can lose their entire audience overnight, with no complaint process and no editor to push back on their behalf.
In 2005, old media executives who complained about crowd dynamics were wrong about who organized the crowd. They were not wrong that the masses were dangerous.
What independent creators can take away from this
The episode chronicled by Duncan Riley in 2005 is worth considering not as nostalgia but as an example of how institutional power responds to disruption. The pattern—dismiss a new entrant, question its legitimacy, apply standards selectively—has been repeated in every wave of media change since then. It reverberated when podcasting challenged radio, when newsletters challenged magazines, and when TikTok began to eat into entertainment budgets that TV thought were permanent.
The lesson is not that institutions are always wrong and independent voices are always right. The Rather and Jordan episodes were really complicated; The bloggers who ran these stories were not neutral actors, and the accountability they practiced was politically selective. What they demonstrate is that distributed attention, consistently applied, can reveal what institutional prudence has buried.
The more pressing issue for bloggers and independent publishers today is not legitimacy—that debate has long been resolved. It’s a structure: how to build relationships with audiences and a publishing infrastructure that’s completely independent of the platform’s goodwill. The old media executives of 2005 could not have imagined that the Internet would create a new class of gatekeepers at least as powerful as they advocated. In 2026, independent creators shouldn’t make the same mistake with the platforms they currently rely on.
The old media lost the fight to blogging. The circumstances of that victory are still being debated.
