Much is written about how incredibly dangerous the new media is. Wikipedia contains inaccuracies! MySpace is full of pedophiles! Craigslist is infested with scams! Of course, much of this is perpetuated by the old media, who are hardly without sin. In fact, a recent situation illustrated to me just how the ecology of new media is vastly more healthy.

The story begins with an anonymous article posted to IndyBay, an independent online news source. Here's the long and short of it:

Our job at Tomkins and Scott, my job specifically, was to monitor Craigslist and summarily flag all postings which reflected negatively upon the city in any way. I am going public with this because, after 3 years of being a censor for Craigslist, I believe what we are doing is totally wrong.

I definitely have an axe to grind with the PR industry in general, so this article sucked me right in. Could our vision of online democratic utopia truly be so easily torn asunder by this "Black PR" strategy? Is the emerging global community just the latest playground for powermongers to co-opt and exploit?

But I was quickly reminded that the internet is a fundamentally more diverse and thus more healthy media environment than newspaper or television. The very first comment to the article was:

I'm checking to see if this is for real.

Craig

By the time the article from IndyBay got to Digg, it was already being sorted out. Writes one commenter:

I just googled Tomkins and Scott and found nothing (except this post). One might attribute this to the fact that the company is "underground" because it does "black PR," but the wording of this post is very strange. It really sounds like a 12 year old trying to sound like a 30 year old.

I don't know about the rest of Diggers, but I don't like to go off half-cocked. Dugg nonetheless for a cool conspiracy theory. Also marked as possibly inaccurate. Let's see some proof.

I sure wish someone would have asked me, I asked the guy, and he admitted it's a hoax.

There are people doing really nasty PR stuff, and netvocates and also fls-dci have been accused of very ugly stuff. Check out the investigative journalists at patriotproject.com, look up their work on swiftboaters.

Craig

One way to look at the whole situation is that an untrue story like the original post would never have been published in traditional media. Another is that the article itself was describing how easy it is to fool the new media. But at the end of the day, community feedback took a dishonest article about a dishonest practice and managed to uncover the truth of the situation (i.e. while this particular instance was a hoax, it is describing a real threat). That feedback simply doesn't exist in traditional media. Which is why we get things like half of America believing that Iraq had WMDs and bad math on the cover of Business Week.

In essence what we've seen are sources of increasingly less authority all safeguarding the validity of whatever they exist in contrast to. Craigslist keeps watch on mainstream media, IndyBay keeps watch on Craigslist, Digg keeps watch on IndyBay, and the commenters keep watch on Digg. The truth seems to be a recursive function.