Then the bloggers went to work. From the four corners of humanity, experts started deconstructing the "truth" that CBS had presented. Who knew that there are experts who specialize just in the history of IBM selectric typing balls or the kerning capacity of computer printing? (For instance, the carrying of the tail in the letter "y" under the space of the preceding letter, as in the word "my." Typewriters can't do it; computers can.)

 As each of these experts added their information to one blog, other bloggers would monitor it, pass it on, add a new fact, reorganize the analysis and synthesize new information. If new information proved wrong, it was corrected by yet another expert in the blogosphere. Mistakes were cheerfully admitted and instantly corrected. People who had filled out such forms 30 years ago added their analysis. Both technical and historic information constantly came in -- ever-increasing the fullness of understanding on the topic. It was like watching time-lapse photography of a cell dividing and growing. It was as if the very mechanism for establishing truth was a living, pulsating force.

 CBS had one handwriting expert against the bloggers' legions of subspecialists. It was pathetic. CBS couldn't possibly employ enough producers to identify each and every new specialist they needed, track them down, contact them and get their testimony -- at 11 p.m. or 2 a.m.? The bloggers couldn't find them either. The bloggers' advantage is that the experts find the bloggers. There are just millions of smart people all over the world sitting at their computers, ready to join the quest. The bloggers themselves often add powerful analytical capacity to the process. It is like a reporter having a team of high-powered lawyers helping construct the strongest possible line of reasoning to their reports -- paragraph by paragraph.

 The Internet bloggers picked CBS's story as clean as a school of piranhas would pick clean some poor water buffalo that wandered into their river.

 The bloggers have had this capacity for a few years now. We had a pre-taste of it in the Trent Lott affair. But what has made the bloggers now a strategic component of national politics is that their readership now includes many senior reporters, editors and producers in the old media. There are enough self-respecting old media journalists who simply cannot see the cornucopia of valid information on the Internet and then ignore it in their reporting.

 So, instead of the bloggers only reaching the few million of their readers, they are reaching the larger mass public through the old media. The old media is becoming complicit in its own demise, just as some French aristocrats supported the revolution against their own ancient regime.

 Count me a supporter of the revolution. But revolutions are messy affairs, where much of value is lost as well as gained.