February17, 2007: Many bloggers are up in arms over a new Department of Defense program that assigns small teams of troops to monitor blogs and report, to the authors of those blogs, errors of fact. Sounds simple enough. For example, the three man team at CENTCOM (which covers American military operations in the Middle East and Afghanistan) spots a lot of paranoid fantasies on blogs, which are easily refuted by just suggesting that the blogger try and confirm it. The CENTCOM team helps by directing bloggers to web sites where they can get eye witness reports from troops, journalists or local civilians. Many leftist and anti-war bloggers consider all this another form of government propaganda. Truth tends to be trampled by beliefs based on faith. But the truth squad is having success with a lot of bloggers, who just pick up sensationalist falsehoods, and are unaware that there are news and military sites where they can get more accurate eyewitness reports. Over a century ago, the mass media became infamous for preferring the more newsworthy version of events, over the more accurate one. Old, successful, habits die hard.