Since the dawn of the blogosphere, holier-than-thou journalistic colleagues of mine who think much too highly of our distinguished yet flawed profession have ridiculed blogs as the breeding ground of rumors, lies, innuendo and hoaxes. They all need a history lesson.

The New York Sun provided a good one today in an amusing piece about how that storied newspaper manufactured a myth about moon creatures 175 years ago to boost circulation:

The stories, often attributed to a plot hatched in our circulation department, reported not only that astronomers, gazing through a new type of telescope based in South Africa, had discovered life on the moon but that they had seen swarms of flying lunar man-bats. …

[T]he reports referred to the discovery of what the editor called “vast forests and fields of poppies and lunar animals.” Summarized he: “First to be sighted was a herd of quadrupeds and then an animal that the Sun said ‘would be classified on earth as a monster,’ a bluish-gray thing about the size of a goat but with a single horn in the center of its head.” …

Dr. John Herschel, the operator of the telescope, and his team spied what Mr. Goodman calls ‘four flocks of large winged creatures.’ The creatures were seen ‘descending in a slow, even motion from the cliffs to the plain, where they landed and, their wings disappearing behind them, began walking, erect and dignified, toward a nearby forest.’”

The moral of the story is that there is nothing new under the journalistic sun. Misinformation and disinformation may spread more rapidly and flourish longer these days as a result of blogs, Twitter, Facebook and other new media tools, but the media are just the means to an age-old end.

Blogs don’t deceive people; people deceive people. Every blogger should memorize that motto, bookmark the Sun’s quasi-correction of its 175-year-old lunar man-bats story and play it as the trump card the next time some uppity journalist decides to bash blogs.