Jon Margolis, former chief political reporter for the Chicago Tribune and the author of "The Last Innocent Year: America in 1964," lives in northeastern Vermont, where he writes and teaches.

The New Media strikes again.

Should someone strike back? Because at least for us old media types, this latest incursion of the blogosphere into the presidential campaign raises questions that are at least as disturbing as they are interesting.

On Monday, four days after John McCain presented Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin as his running mate, their campaign announced that Palin’s 17-year-old daughter, Bristol, was five months pregnant.

Bristol’s pregnancy was revealed because it disproved – or at least seemed to disprove – allegations that she was already a mother. Here enters the blogosphere. The campaign made Bristol’s pregnancy public to refute online stories suggesting that the teenager, not her mother, actually gave birth to 5-month-old Trig, Todd and Sarah Palin’s fifth child, or so they said.

A woman could not give birth on April 18 and be five months pregnant on August 31. That put an end, or should have, to the bizarre allegation that Gov. Palin had tried to cover up her daughter’s pregnancy by faking one of her own.

How about putting a start, though, to the discussion of why that allegation saw the light of day to begin with? This is not like the first time the New Media played a role in a presidential campaign – the right-wing blogosphere’s 2004 challenge to the integrity of the documents CBS News used in its account of George W. Bush’s military service.

First of all, the conservative bloggers, for all their shrillness and over-statement (not to mention, could someone teach those guys how to write a declarative English sentence?) were more right than wrong. Besides, the dispute was about whether Bush had fulfilled a legal obligation, not about his intimate behavior.

In this case, the blogger – from the left-side of the political spectrum – was almost surely wrong. And he (assuming that the anonymous ArcXIX is a he) was not talking about Palin’s public activities; he was making an allegation that was not merely distasteful but incredible on its face, something that sounded like a plot twist in a particularly bad Southern Gothic novel.

Yet there it was, on the widely read (for a blog) Daily Kos, for all the world to see. In fairness to ArkXIX, he did mention a few facts that raise some questions about baby Trig’s parenthood: Bristol had gone away for a few months shortly before the birth; Sarah Palin took her sweet time coming home from Texas after her labor pains supposedly began; the hospital’s online records do not seem to mention Trig’s birth.

But questions are not conclusions, a complication that did not seem to bother ArcXIX. “Well, Sarah, I’m calling you a liar. And not even a good one,” he declared, as if he had closed the case. “Trig Paxson Van Palin is not your son. He is your grandson. The sooner you come forward with this revelation to the public, the better.”

Here’s where the New Media and us old media guys have something of a problem. A generation ago, there was a rule – never formally written down but generally understood. It said: You do not put derogatory information about a person into the public realm unless you know that it is true.

Non-derogatory info was OK. You could write that Sen. Jones is thinking about mounting a presidential campaign. You could even base that story on those anonymous sources now so roundly condemned by reformers, or killjoys as they are sometimes known. But if you wanted to write that Sen. Jones was keeping a mistress in a condo in Adams-Morgan while his wife and three children were  home in Bethesda, you had better be damn sure about Jones and his cutie-pie. And then you’d have a long discussion with your editor about whether it mattered.

To put it bluntly, not long ago, had this story about Palin’s alleged duplicity gotten into the paper, the reporter who wrote it and the editor or editors who cleared it would have been fired.

Clearly those rules no longer apply, and maybe they are outmoded. Andrew Sullivan, the former editor of the New Republic – no mean credential – used his blog, the Daily Dish, to challenge the McCain campaign to respond to ArcXIX’s allegations. And he was not, he insisted, trying to “smear” Palin.

“The job of a press,” Sullivan wrote,  “is to ask questions which have a basis in fact … I have claimed nothing. I am asking the McCain campaign to resolve a factual question which they must already have covered in the vetting process. After all, this baby was a centerpiece of the public case for Palin made by the Republicans. They made it an issue – and therefore it is legitimate to ask questions about it. That's all.”

And blogger Mickey Kaus, an author of some repute, argues that the excesses of the blogosphere are acceptable because the system self-corrects.

In this case, Kaus said, “ a) bloggers actually read the web sites of the other side, in order to attack them; b) bloggers defend themselves against such attacks; and c) the Web makes learning from the other side extremely easy. ... In this case, viciously partisan Kos bloggers seem to have investigated and knocked down (some information) that many of them would have dearly liked to be true. What’s wrong with that?”

Very interesting. Sullivan and Kaus are both saying that the processes that used to go on in the newsroom does – and should – now go on out in the open. Under the new rules, it seems, when a reporter (who can now be anybody with Internet access) hears a rumor about a politician, his or her next move is not to check it out, but to unveil it to the world. Let the world check it out. And as Kaus said, some of the refutation of ArcXIX’s allegations came from other “diarists” on the Kos site, which is not a news organization but an online community of Democratic activists.

It’s all very transparent and democratic. Furthermore, it may be inevitable. The technology and the culture allow this to happen, and so it will happen. We live in a world where what can be done will be done. And why not? Who elected professional journalists to monopolize information? We old media fogies are merely the anachronistic, elite “gatekeepers” miffed about losing our privileged position.

There is something to that, but whatever the pluses and the inevitability of the new rules, I will risk being labeled a fogy to note that something is lost in the transformation. Not everything that is done because it can be done is desirable. For this contention, I have a two-word proof: artificial turf. A “gatekeeper” is often someone who knows what he or she is talking about. Or someone who has standards. Or taste.

Again, the subject matter matters. Few would argue about putting into the public realm without fully checking it out another bit of information about Palin – her connection with the fringe Alaska Independence Party. That’s just politics. Putting it out there to be confirmed, refuted or refined doesn’t hurt anyone. That cannot be said about claiming that she secretly faked a pregnancy to cover up her daughter’s.

Which brings up another loss. The dominant mood in political journalism is to cover campaigns as soap opera. How else explain the wretchedly excessive attention paid throughout the Democratic convention to the great cosmic question of whether one Clintonian nose or another was out of joint? As a result, the merely political gets submerged by the personal.

Consider that in announcing Bristol’s pregnancy, McCain’s aides made sure to tell reporters that “Bristol Palin made the decision on her own to keep the baby.”

That is a pro-choice statement. Come to think of it, the pro-choicers might well adopt “made the decision on her own” as their new motto. But it is a statement from two candidates – McCain and Palin – whose declared policy preference would abolish that choice. Were her mother and her running-mate to have their way, Bristol Palin would have been forbidden to make that decision on her own. In all the tumult over the pregnancy and the alleged deception, this inconsistency has been given short shrift in the coverage.

One more bit of old-fogyism, this one transcending journalism. There is a place for the anonymous commentator. If a pseudonym was good enough for Charles Dickens, it is good enough for us ordinary mortals. But, again, it depends on the subject matter. Making this kind of allegation behind the curtain of a phony name is (talk about old-fashioned, obsolete, values) both cowardly and dishonorable. Even the New Media champions ought to be bothered by that.