… it’s become a futile exercise in frustration to watch and try to make sense of how mainstream information (let’s call it “justifications we run past the audiences to see if they’ll believe this one”) creates news and public awareness, which is then used to guide domestic and foreign policy.
Sure, there’s lots of personal opinion and invective and sloppy thinking and writing on blogs (including this one as a good example). There’s also lots of expertise, clear and hard-headed thinking and excellent analysis on blog.
This post by Somerby, found on the Atrios blog, sets out an interesting perspective. It reminds me of status and positional power relationships … much like the mainstream media assuming that because they’re there, they’re entitled to be higher-up on the organizational chart of the news industry.
Have you ever been in a position in an organization where you were smarter and/or more competent than your boss ?
So how about it? Is there something “exceptional about the blogs” when it comes to slander, misstatement and error? Is it true that newspapers “have done the same thing?” As the discussion progressed, Andrew Sullivan seemed to say that blogs do have a special problem in this area; Shafer kept insisting that they didn’t.
But at no point in the eleven-minute discussion did any panelist state the obvious—that we have seen, in our recent history, exceptional waves of group misstatement driven by the mainstream media! In particular, as everyone knows (and knows not to say), Campaign 2000 was a two-year orgy of spin and misstatement about Candidate Gore—a slander campaign that was endlessly driven by the Washington Post and the New York Times. Nothing even remotely like it has ever arisen from the web (Matt Drudge excluded).
But in an eleven-minute attempt to decide if the web has a special problem with slander, none of the panelists—nobody; no one—bothered to state this obvious fact about the coverage of Election 2000, an election which changed our political history.
Go ahead—watch or read this part of the discussion, and marvel at the way our recent history has been disappeared by mainstream and “liberal” pundits. Indeed, how thoroughly have our mainstream pundits managed to bury this part of our past?
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April 8, 2005 at 8:52 am
Anonymous
“Have you ever been in a position in an organization where you were smarter and/or more competent than your boss ? ”
I couldn’t possibly comment!
