If we saw anything from the Shirley Sherrod incident, it's the danger of allowing people who don't understand fact checking to lead national opinion. Bloggers have their role, which is to stir things up, but when the NAACP and the USDA take as gospel their "investigation" of something, and act immediately, we get what we have just got. Those people who were genuinely snookered will now be backing up, and claiming that it wasn't their fault. People like Fox News will be making excuses like they had nothing to do with it.
The truth is that the blogosphere has scared everybody in power to the degree that they feel obligated to respond quickly. This is what the social media people tell companies. When criticized in the evening, have a response on Facebook by midnight. Don't wait until the morning.
Responsible journalism, as practiced still by the Washington Post and some others, checks facts and gets as full a story as possible, or at least indicates that all the facts are not yet in. If they go down and we're left with the raving lunatics of the Internet, God help us.
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