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So I hope he'll not mind if I take just a step back, momentarily, not all the way to Engbergland understand, but from the religious leitmotif. Os Guiness, the Anglo-Virginian theologian, writes that all great leaps in ethical progress, in authentic liberation, were summoned by the monotheistic impulse. Does that mean the Blogosphere? Much of this development involves, not so much the affairs of God, man, and state that preoccupy Hugh Hewitt, but personal journaling of the therapeutic and schoolgirl-diarist sort -- and, yes, sexual networking. Are we all about to work out our own salvation in front of God and everybody? Maybe so.

HUGH CONTRIBUTES USEFULLY to the meta-narrative, hitting all the familiar markers: how the bloggers caught on to Jayson Blair's fabrications at the New York Times and then brought down Executive Editor Howell Raines; how, along with the Swift Boaters, the bloggers corrected John Kerry's Vietnam misrepresentations when the mainstream media wouldn't; how Dan Rather went down. Hugh takes all that as Gospel. My old friend, Times columnist David Brooks (I'm blessed to know them both), tells me Raines's departure had little to do with Blogospheric pressure. That may well be true, Raines being impervious to anything real.

Certainly Hugh will have the last laugh over the bloggers' condescending critics. Engberg, for instance, lost it when he noticed the Election Day blogtricity regarding exit polls. Still playing Gotcha! Journalism, he lectured them on how oldtimers in the profession (he hates, just hates, it when Andrew Sullivan explains why his craft is not a profession) know the unreliability of exit polls. What Engberg did not catch was how reports of the Kerry lead -- scary if you were a right-wing blogger, elation if you were a lefty -- corrected themselves instantaneously around the Blogosphere, indeed well before most polling places closed.

If there's misplaced faith in Hugh's book, it's all in credentialism. He loves the idea that experts -- scholars, lawyers like him, people with lots of academic years behind them -- are blogging and setting the media straight. Far better, that, than all us generalist journalists (say that five times fast) writing on stuff about which we know little. It's a refrain of Hugh's. In a previous book of advice for young Christians, he actually told them they were wasting their time if they didn't matriculate at the top universities, such as his beloved Harvard. No, he did. When Bill Buckley famously quipped that he'd rather be governed by the first 200 names in the Boston directory than by the entire faculty of Harvard, Hugh was, well, preparing to go to Harvard. Hugh needs an anti-credentialist epiphany, and soon.

To be sure, one of the beauties of the Blogosphere is that it welcomes correction faster than the Old Media ever did, and that correction happily comes from people who know things. More beautiful still: How the Blogosphere turns journalism over to Everyman. Like Hugh.

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