Chalk up 7:22 a.m. EST on Tuesday, January 23, 2007, as the moment a milestone was passed. On Time's new blog, Swampland, D.C. Bureau Chief Jay Carney posted a pre-assessment of the State of the Union address comparing President Bush's political position to Bill Clinton's in January of 1995. Like Bush, "President Clinton was in free fall. ... His approval ratings were mired in the 30's, and seemed unlikely to rise."

Moments later, a writer identifying himself as "TomT" pointed out an error in Carney's "nut graf" that would have earned a failing grade for a first-year journalism major: "Clinton's approval rating in January [of 1995] was 47 percent. It was not mired in the 30s." At 9:12, the blogger Atrios, also known as Duncan Black, alerted his readers to the gaffe, and they descended on the Time blog like locusts—and, to mix the Biblical metaphor, served Jay Carney's head up on a charger.

They tabulated several more boneheaded errors: Carney wrote that 1995 was Clinton's first State of the Union "with Newt Gingrich and Bob Dole seated behind him as Speaker and Senate Majority Leader"; but, of course, it is the vice president, not the Senate majority leader, who sits behind the president. He also wrote of Clinton's "recovery... during Monica, in 1999"—but, as a commenter reminded him, "Clinton never had to 'recover' from Monica, unless polls in the high 50s and 60s are something you have to recover from."

Then the commenters unraveled the entire foundation of Carney's argument. He had said that, because "Americans reward presidents who, even in the face of enormous distractions, focus on issues that matter to them. ... Bush won't spend much time tonight talking about surging troops in Iraq or the Global War on Terror." But, as writers identifying themselves as "jjcomet," "dmbeaster," and "Newton Minnow" pointed out, the issue of greatest concern to the nation "is far and away the war in Iraq, at 48% the only issue in double digits." Another made a similar point, shall we say, more qualitatively: "The Iraq War is a DISTRACTION?? Are you serious? Am I wrong or did he compare the Lewinski scandal to Iraq??? What is the matter with you!?!?"

At which Carney snapped back so churlishly ("the left is as full of unthinking Ditto-heads as Limbaugh-land") that, for a moment, it was hard even to remember—why was it, again, that we were supposed to defer to the authority of newsweeklies (and the mainstream press) in the first place? Carney was rude and wrong. The barbaric yawpers of the netroots were rude and right.

All in all, a rough day for Jay Carney. It inaugurated a rough week for those who still wish to uphold a model of cultural authority in which the fact that someone is a professional with a famous name—credentialed by other professionals with famous names—can serve as a reasonable proxy for trustworthiness. It marked one more step in the arrival of our new, more uncomfortable media world—one in which, to judge a piece of writing, we must gauge not the status of the writer, but his or her words themselves, unattached to the author's worldly rank.

That's all right by me. In his brilliant 1990 study The Letters of the Republic: Publication and the Public Sphere in Eighteenth-Century America, literary scholar Michael Warner argues that this is precisely why so many Founding Fathers insisted that public debates be carried out by pseudonym. "Publius," he points out—the pen name under which the newspaper arguments for ratifying the Constitution collected as The Federalist Papers were published—"speaks in the utmost generality of print, denying in his very existence the mediating of particular persons." In other words, it wasn't supposed to matter that the author was the distinguished gentleman Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, or James Madison. You were just supposed to judge according to the words on the page.

Or on the screen. January 23, the day Carney landed on his own petard, was also, as it happens, the first day of testimony in the perjury and obstruction of justice trial of former vice-presidential Chief of Staff Scooter Libby. And some of the distinguished gentlemen and gentleladies of the press have seemed none too pleased that the journalistic pace is being set by the rotating cast of "live bloggers" at Firedoglake (FDL), who, thanks to a press pass secured by Arianna Huffington, have been providing a near-transcript-quality record in real time of the proceedings, interwoven with contextualization by writers more expert in many cases than the cable news legal commentators, wrapped up each afternoon by a video summary.

By phone from her home in Chicago, Christina Siun O'Connell, FDL's part-time press secretary (yes, blogs now have press secretaries; full disclosure: she is also my friend), lists the names of the team, some of whom write under pseudonyms: Pachacutec; TRex; Swopa ("Plame geek extraordinaire"); ERiposte ("who, I think, is male"). The most expert among them, Marcy Wheeler—a former academic from Ann Arbor whose book Anatomy of Deceit was published to coincide with the case by a brand new book imprint, Vaster, established by bloggers (the book is already in a second printing)—has only recently come out of the shadows. (She used to be known as "emptywheel.")

Wheeler's partner at her own site, The Next Hurrah, calls himself Meteor Blades, nothing else. And he used to be a top editor at two major daily newspapers. "We've been beating them," Wheeler notes of The Last Hurrah's coverage of the CIA leak scandal. "The New York Times can't cover the story. They're constitutionally incapable."

She puts it even more bluntly in her book: "[T]he CIA leak case is a story about how our elected representatives exploited the weakness of our media." Part of that weakness was their overweening self-regard. At first, in the eighteenth century, when an anonymous writer launched charges against "gentlemen"—quite often in the rudest language imaginable—it was a scandal "in a social order of deference," Warner writes in Letters of the Republic. But, by striking down deference, pseudonyms forced arguments to be stronger; Warner even argues that the anonymous culture of print is what made republican consciousness possible. Like "jjcomet," "dmbeaster," and "Newton Minnow," our Founding Fathers only had only their words to rely on for their authority. Every day, I find faceless netroots citizens reprising their wisdom, as against gentlemen and gentleladies of the press who sometimes seem more interested saving face than doing sound work.