Editor’s note (April 2026): This article is part of Blog Herald’s editorial archive. Originally published in February 2005, it has been reviewed and updated to ensure accuracy and relevance for today’s readers.
In early 2005, something shifted in the uneasy relationship between professional journalism and the blogosphere. CNN’s news chief Eason Jordan resigned after bloggers amplified controversial remarks he’d made at the World Economic Forum.
Dan Rather had already been pushed to retire after conservative bloggers exposed his use of disputed documents. Jeff Gannon, a White House correspondent with murky credentials, was unmasked by left-leaning blogs. In each case, the accountability came not from newsrooms, but from people at keyboards.
The response from establishment media was swift — and revealing. A director of the World Association of Newspapers accused bloggers of McCarthyism. The managing editor of the Columbia Journalism Review’s website called them “salivating morons” forming a lynch mob. As Duncan Riley wrote in Blog Herald at the time, what made this backlash remarkable wasn’t the hostility — it was the hypocrisy. Old media had spent decades hounding politicians, celebrities, and public figures from their positions. Now, facing the same scrutiny from a distributed audience with no editors and no payroll, they called it mob rule.
Two decades on, that original confrontation looks less like a culture war skirmish and more like a preview of everything that followed.
The accountability problem neither side solved
The 2005 debate hinged on a simple question: who gets to hold power to account? Establishment media argued that editors, institutional credibility, and professional training were prerequisites for legitimate scrutiny. Bloggers demonstrated, repeatedly, that distributed attention could surface things the press corps had collectively chosen to ignore.
Both sides had a point — and both missed something.
Old media’s critique of bloggers wasn’t entirely wrong. Speed without verification, outrage without evidence, and pile-ons based on partial information are real problems. They remain real problems today, playing out not just on blogs but across every social platform at exponentially greater scale. The mob dynamic the Columbia Journalism Review warned about in 2005 is now a standard feature of public life.
But old media’s defence of its own record was equally hollow. The same newsrooms claiming that editors made journalism responsible had spent years manufacturing consent, protecting powerful sources, and burying inconvenient stories. The Eason Jordan resignation was particularly ironic: CNN’s own institutional caution, its reluctance to cover uncomfortable truths about the powerful figures it depended on for access, was precisely the failure his offhand remarks at Davos appeared to gesture at.
The blogosphere didn’t create accountability problems. It exposed the accountability gap that already existed.
What the “war on blogging” was really about
Riley’s original piece identified something that media historians have since documented more thoroughly: the hostility from establishment outlets wasn’t primarily about standards. It was about readership, and the revenue readership attracts.
By 2005, blog traffic was already meaningfully eroding print and cable audiences. The economic model that sustained large newsrooms — aggregated mass readership sold to advertisers — was beginning to fracture. When CNN anchors and newspaper editors attacked bloggers as irresponsible amateurs, they were doing something journalists do often and rarely acknowledge: protecting a professional monopoly.
This is worth sitting with, because it maps directly onto dynamics that have only intensified since. The creator economy that blogging inaugurated has now produced a landscape where individual newsletters, podcasts, and YouTube channels routinely outperform legacy outlets in both audience size and reader trust. Pew Research data shows trust in traditional news institutions has declined sharply and consistently over the past decade, while audiences increasingly turn to independent voices — exactly the distributed, editor-free model that the Columbia Journalism Review dismissed as illegitimate in 2005.
The war on blogging wasn’t won by old media. It was gradually abandoned as the economics shifted beneath everyone’s feet.
Platform dependency changed everything — but not the way anyone expected
If old media’s attack on blogging backfired, bloggers’ victory wasn’t quite what it looked like either. The independence that made early blogging threatening to institutional journalism — self-publishing, direct audience relationships, no gatekeepers — has been substantially eroded by the platforms that replaced the old infrastructure.
Early bloggers owned their URLs, their archives, their reader relationships. The distributed web that made the Eason Jordan story possible was genuinely decentralised: anyone with a hosting account could publish, link, and be found. What replaced that infrastructure — social media algorithms, platform-mediated discovery, monetisation systems that require platform approval — has created a new set of gatekeepers with considerably more power than the editors old media once defended.
The accountability dynamic hasn’t disappeared. If anything, social platforms have amplified it far beyond what 2005-era bloggers could manage. But the conditions under which creators work have become substantially more precarious. A blogger in 2005 who broke a story and angered CNN could keep publishing. A creator today who runs afoul of YouTube’s algorithm or Meta’s content policies can lose their entire audience overnight, with no appeal process and no editor to push back on their behalf.
The old media executives who complained about mob dynamics in 2005 were wrong about who was forming the mob. They weren’t wrong that mobs are dangerous.
What independent creators can take from this
The episode Duncan Riley chronicled in 2005 is worth revisiting not as nostalgia but as a case study in how institutional power responds to disruption. The pattern — dismiss the new entrant, question its legitimacy, invoke standards selectively — has repeated across every wave of media change since. It played out again when podcasting challenged radio, when newsletters challenged magazines, and when TikTok began eating entertainment budgets that television assumed were permanent.
The lesson isn’t that institutions are always wrong and independent voices always right. The Rather and Jordan episodes were genuinely complicated; the bloggers who drove those stories weren’t neutral actors, and the accountability they applied was politically selective. What they did demonstrate is that distributed attention, applied consistently, can surface what institutional caution buries.
For bloggers and independent publishers today, the more pressing challenge isn’t legitimacy — that argument was settled long ago. It’s structural: how to build audience relationships and publishing infrastructure that don’t depend entirely on platform goodwill. The old media executives of 2005 couldn’t imagine that the web would produce a new class of gatekeepers at least as powerful as the ones they defended. Independent creators in 2026 shouldn’t make the same mistake about the platforms they currently rely on.
Old media lost its war on blogging. The terms of that victory are still being negotiated.
