The expenses scandal has been seen largely as a win for old media. The Telegraph, the argument runs, had the money to buy up the information, and then had the time, the money and the staff to properly investigate this information, and released it in such a way as to benefit the public. Only professional journalists, many insist, have the resources to make something like this happen, and it is a sign that whilst the internet has taken much of the political discussion away from the old media outlets, they still have their place in the world. The blogosphere, so they say, just isn’t capable of handling a scandal like this.

The Telegraph, though, has hardly been a shining example of journalistic integrity – the newspaper is now facing criticism not only for recklessly misunderstanding the nature of many claims, but also for releasing them in a politically biased manner. There’s been suggestion that Ed Balls and Yvette Cooper may have been saved the embarrassment of a front page splash by their friendship with Telgraph editor Will Lewis, for instance, and accusations that The Telegraph have repeatedly accused MPs of claiming for items on expenses which actually only appeared on receipts alongside legitimate expenses claims – that’s the real story behind many of the ‘nappies, tampons and dog food’ revelations. Several Tory MPs are unhappy to be accused of ‘flipping’ their main residence when in fact they simply moved house. Lib Dem MPs have similar issues with misrepresentation of their claims. The overall picture seems to be that The Telegraph has milked this story for all it’s worth, without really applying too much in the way of journalistic standards to its reporting at all.

But hey, The Telegraph actually broke the story, didn’t it? I mean, they paid for the information – we wouldn’t know about this if it wasn’t for them! Well, true, but here’s a quick thought experiment: what if, rather than selling details of MPs expenses to The Daily Telegraph for some six figure sum, our enterprising mole within the Fees Office had simply published them all on Wikileaks?

I would argue, in fact, that not only would the story have been just as damaging for the politicians involved, but there would have been less misinformation in the public domain, there would have been more pressure on the worst offenders, and less damage would have been done to our political system by the saga. Why? Well, quite a few reasons, actually.

First of all, bloggers have shown themselves time and again to be more than adequate handlers of statistical information. Mark Reckons, for instance, recently posted some very fine analysis (and followed it up with even more fine analysis) which suggests that MPs with the safest seats are the most likely to be making dodgy expense claims. I didn’t see that in The Telegraph. The web is actually particularly well suited toward facts and numbers. It seems unlikely that nobody would have done the legwork to provide the kind of breakdowns that The Telegraph included on its pages, and quite probably that there would have been much, much more information available than there is now.

Another reason is that when bloggers get things wrong, they tend to be good at making it quite clear that they were incorrect – normally by updating their original post with correct information, or writing a new post to explain the facts, or sometimes allowing space for the wronged to make a rebuttal. Mainstream newspapers rarely take such approach, instead using a suitably hidden ‘Corrections and Clarifications’ column which they know very few people read anyway.

Most importantly, however, if the information had come out through Wikileaks and been freely available to all, it would be verifiable. We’ve had to take The Telegraph’s word on many of their expenses stories – and several times they’ve proved themselves undeserving of such trust. Nobody on the blogosphere would have got away with accusing MPs of making claims they didn’t make for very long, when we could simply go and check the receipts ourselves.

All in all, I don’t think mainstream media should be feeling particularly smug about the way this scandal has been handled by the ‘professionals’. Nothing about The Telegraph’s handling of ‘snoutgate’ has done anything to show that the mainstream media is inherently better at dealing with this kind of thing than the blogs. In fact, quite the reverse. And when, over the next few years, the blogosphere begins to become the de facto outlet for this kind of leaked information, the mainstream newspapers are going to lose their last, tiny, justification for continuing to exist.

And, you know what? You heard it here first.