The Internet accomplishes a lot of good, especially in politics where opponents can trip up the other side when fake claims or documents are produced.
But that doesn't mean it is a substitute for real reporting.
Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, Washington Post reporters behind uncovering the Watergate scandal during the Nixon administration, were not all that impressed with students in a Yale advanced journalism class - that makes sense, one of them has no degree at all and obviously did pretty well in journalism and the other was a history major.
Woodward said he was shocked by how otherwise savvy students thought technology would have changed everything. "I came as close as I ever have to having an aneurysm," he said, "because the students wrote that, 'Oh, you would just use the Internet" and the details of the scandal would be there. The students imagined, as Woodward put it, "that somehow the Internet was a magic lantern that lit up all events."
"The truth resides with people," said Woodward, meaning "human sources" who disclose confidential information.
Well, that is a little pot calling kettle back, isn't it? They made their career using anonymous sources, controversial at the time, and it led to the next generation using anonymous sources, no sources at all, and sometimes inventing whole stories.
The Internet is not magic, though, they got that part right. Someone wanting to research Watergate in 1972 could not just have Googled Watergate, even if the Internet has existed.
