by William Powers

Six Billion Harriets

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Listen to Harriet Miers's leading media opponents—conservative pundits—and you hear one main objection to the nominee: her yawning credential gap. Miers, they argue, has not punched the tickets one must punch to qualify for the Supreme Court. She's never been a judge, never distinguished herself as a constitutional thinker. Unlike the ultracredentialed John Roberts, she's basically an average-Jane lawyer who's held a few plum jobs, most crucially her current one in the White House.

Syndicated columnist Charles Krauthammer argued that Miers's name should be withdrawn because she is, quite simply, a nobody: "There are 1,084,504 lawyers in the United States. What distinguishes Harriet Miers from any of them, other than her connection with the president?"

George Will wrote that President Bush "has neither the inclination nor the ability to make sophisticated judgments about competing approaches to construing the Constitution.... There is no reason to believe that Miers's nomination resulted from the president's careful consultation with people capable of such judgments. If 100 such people had been asked to list 100 individuals who have given evidence of the reflectiveness and excellence requisite in a justice, Miers's name probably would not have appeared in any of the 10,000 places on those lists."

Noting that those who support Miers point to her real-world experience, New York Times columnist John Tierney ran the argument by Boston University law professor Randy Barnett. "If real-world experience is the best qualification for the Supreme Court, then presidents can appoint anyone they want," Barnett said. "Why do you even need to be a lawyer? There are millions of people outside the Beltway with real-world experience."

Should nobodies have power? The question is relevant, not just for the narrow reason we happen to be asking it right now, the Miers contretemps. Credentialism is at issue all over the place in society, and nowhere more so than in the news business.

The institution that is effectively running the Miers debate—the journalism establishment—has long been run by people who got to the top by acquiring the right credentials. The senior media jobs that are the analogues of a spot on the Supreme Court (anchor, editor, columnist) have always gone to our John Roberts equivalents: those who doggedly climbed the professional ladder. Average Janes (and Joes) have never been allowed to fill those roles. After all, what do they know about the news? The justification for the system was so obvious, it was never seriously questioned.

Until recently. Throughout the media, the traditional ways of assigning authority are under assault from every side. One of the most sacred tenets of traditional journalism—that ours is a craft best performed by professionals, implicitly certified by the jobs they fill and the titles they hold—is suddenly on shaky ground.

Old-fashioned job titles like "staff writer" and "network correspondent" are starting to feel Paleolithic. "Citizen journalism" and "user-generated news" are all the rage. There are influential Web sites devoted to the topic, most prominently PressThink.org, a blog run by New York University journalism professor Jay Rosen, who writes about "decertifying" the press. True, we haven't heard as much about bloggers as we were hearing a year ago, when they were briefly the No. 1 vogue topic in American popular culture.

But don't let the shifting winds of media fashion fool you. Harriet Miers will be confirmed or not; and either way, she will instantly vanish from the cultural radar screen. But the media's struggle with credentialism, which some view as a twilight struggle, has only just begun.

"We don't own the news any more," Richard Sambrook, a senior executive of the BBC, told the assembled media types at a recent conference on citizen journalism in New York City. The Associated Press, in its story on the event, noted that Sambrook "likened the increasing use of user-generated news material to a sports game in which the crowd was not only invading the field but also seeking to participate in the game, fundamentally changing the sport."

The question is how fundamentally. If she becomes a Supreme Court justice, Harriet Miers is unlikely to revolutionize the judicial branch. The advent of "open-source" news has more radical possibilities. The most wild-eyed barricadists say that this rebellion will end as a total takeover, with consumers owning and directing the news, much as the users of Wikipedia.org, the popular online encyclopedia, write and revise the content themselves.

So far, the media establishment's own experiments along these lines have not been promising. During his recently ended stint as editorial and opinion editor of the Los Angeles Times, Michael Kinsley launched a "wikitorial" site where some of the paper's editorials were posted in such a way that readers could comment on and rewrite them. The paper closed down the experiment after two days, citing "inappropriate" content, including pornography, that had been posted.

In a world without credentials, is such anarchy inevitable? What will the media look like if everyone with a keyboard, including your nutbag neighbor who never turns off C-SPAN, is an editor? Or, like a democratic political system, will the new media universe establish its own internal checks and balances and, thanks to all those Harriet journalists, actually improve itself?

They're tough questions. And, alas, there will be no confirmation hearings on this nominee.