Unlike face-to-face, ‘offline’ social networks, online social networks lend themselves to easy group formation. The looser, more extensive social ties that result then lead to the delivery of more diverse — and ultimately more trustworthy and credible — news and information.

Business reporters ‘embedded’ on Wall Street — as enamored of titans of commerce as their Pentagon press peers were with Donald Rumsfeld — are now piling bad information on top of no information.

Will emerging media — including ‘viral’ emails, blogs, social networks like Facebook and MySpace, and other new platforms such as YouTube and Twitter — help solve journalism’s trust-and-credibility problem?

In 1995, after producing a successful weekly TV program about apartheid in South Africa, we broadcast an edition of a new series that explored revolutionary ideas about human rights, such as those then being formulated by a visionary at Harvard named Jonathan Mann.