Smears in cyberspace: blogs and media ethics.

• Author: Young, Cathy

SOMETIMES IN JOURNALISM, the medium is the story. So it is with the ongoing saga of The Blogs vs. The Mainstream Media, endlessly flogged and blogged in the old and new media alike. The story is always the same: Periodically, a mainstream newspaper or magazine will run a "barbarians at the gate" story about blogs as purveyors of misinformation, calumny, and digital mob rule, and the Web will respond by summoning the unquiet ghost of disgraced New York Times reporter Jayson Blair and scoffing at the mainstream media's obvious fear of competition.

A new chapter in the blog wars unfolded in October after a mysterious incident at the University of Oklahoma's campus in Norman, Oklahoma. On October I an engineering student, 21-year-old Joel Hinrichs, blew himself up with a homemade bomb while sitting on a bench 100 yards from the campus football stadium, during a game attended by 85,000 people. Within days there was rampant speculation in the local media and on the Internet that Hinrichs was a would-be terrorist who had originally planned to blow himself up inside the stadium.

The police had flagged Hinrichs earlier for trying to buy ammonium nitrate at a feed store, and this brought the FBI and the federal Counter-Terrorism Task Force into the investigation. But when the FBI almost immediately said that there was no evidence of terrorism, some hypervigilant observers concluded that something was being swept under the rug.

Rumors mushroomed: Hinrichs' bomb supposedly was studded with nails (not true); he supposedly had attended a mosque in Norman (unsubstantiated); "jihadist" literature and a one-way ticket to Algeria supposedly were found in his apartment (not true); he supposedly had tried to enter the football stadium twice but had run away when a security guard tried to search his backpack (the stadium's surveillance cameras showed no such thing). True but innocuous facts--that Hinrichs had a Pakistani roommate, for instance, or that he had lived a block away from the mosque--became more dots to connect.

For about two weeks, a small group of conservative bloggers led by Michelle Malkin pushed the "Jihad in Oklahoma" story and suggested that the national media weren't covering it for fear of touching the politically incorrect subject of Islamic terrorism. When the national media finally noticed, though, they debunked the rumors. On October 13, The Wall Street Journal ran an article titled "Student's Suicide Sets Off Explosion of Theories by...