The Newsweek story is another black eye, obviously for journalism. But beyond Michael Isikoff’s dubious ‘source’ is a larger issue of how dangerous –and tragic– information can be in the Internet-everywhere world. The ‘crime’ here is how in the heightened competitive environment, the media decides to run stories that cannot be verified –until after the fact.

There’s a blog angle here. I wrote some months back (in an article titled ‘Big Blogger is watching you”) that scrutiny is a good by-product of this everyone’s-a-journalist era. The mainstream media have got away with many things, because of its once-passive audience. Now the audience is more attentive, but paradoxically less credulous when it comes to news. As for credibility, Isikoff, almost a year ago asked the same question of Michael Moore. That was about film, albeit documentary.

Jay Rosen notes that journalists need to recognize how ‘facts’ can have dire consequences. The consequences, apart from the rioting as a reaction to the news of a holy book being flushed down a toilet, is the death of credibility. Rosen calls it:

Big Journalism’s loss of monopoly position in news and commentary

Anyone involved in brand management can see the writing on the wall, since all forms of communication become as powerful and incendiary as ‘news.’ No one wants to be the next Dan Rather or Jayson Blair to tarnish the corporate brand, even as the ‘monopoly position’ shifts from the center to the periphery.