Slashdot Mirror
Wonkette and the Ethics of Online Journalism
Decaffeinated Jedi writes "The New York Times offers up a thought-provoking article ('First With the Scoop, if Not the Truth' - free reg. req.) on Ana Marie Cox, proprietor of the popular inside-the-beltway gossip blog Wonkette. Known for her site's 'gossipy, raunchy, potty-mouthed' coverage of Washington politics, site owner Nick Denton is quoted in the article as saying, 'I think it's implicit in the way that a Web site is produced that our standards of accuracy are lower. Besides, immediacy is more important than accuracy, and humor is more important than accuracy.' Needless to say, such a statement raises some interesting questions about the growing influence of blogs and other non-traditional online news sources. That being said, does the nature of the World Wide Web in fact give sites like Wonkette, Drudge, or even Slashdot a free pass on accuracy if it means the difference between getting the scoop or not?"
By chasing a chimera of of objectivity they can't meet -- and one the public would happily tell them matters more inside the newsroom than outside of it -- traditional newspapers have gotten further and further away from writing in a manner that readers can relate to.
This matters a lot because it's at the root of the "gotcha" journalism most local broadcasts engage in, it's one of the big factors behind the decline in newspaper readership and (most importantly), it's pissing away the trust that the U.S. model of press freedom spent 200-odd years building up.
The funny thing: Newspapers know this, but they're trapped by the by the same bundling mentality that's choking innovation in the telco market.
Disclaimer: I was a journalist for a bunch o' years and made these same observations then, too. Not a good way to make friends with the publisher's office.
The point: Most readers will trade off accuracy for someone who's openly in their philosophical or political corner. Another segment will trade off accuracy for immediacy. If you're both passionate and immediate, of course you're going to be a formidable thread to old-school media.
"It was a summer's tale: Just a boy, his Linux, and a head full of dreams..."
That being said, does the nature of the World Wide Web in fact give sites like Wonkette, Drudge, or even Slashdot a free pass on accuracy if it means the difference between getting the scoop or not?"
This really is a nonsensical spin on this story, and also the wrong question to be asking. Wonkette, Drudge, and even Slashdot can put whatever the heck they want to online. It is up to the reader to decide, based on multiple criteria, whether or not they believe/trust/put stock in the information's deliverer.
If you as reader use no criteria as filters, if you blindly believe any site, info, data, gossip, or especially scoop, you deserve what you get. That goes for both the online world and the offline.
That said, it's amusing how little humans change despite this new technology we're all enjoying. Gossip columnists and gossips in general have always been with us, have always been attractive to us, and no doubt will always be, even when we're beaming our thoughts at each other telepathically in our lifepods in orbit around the Sedna refuelling station.
I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser gate.
to see a questionning about the ethic of journalism in a country where all the mass media are controled by the politcs.
This woman sounds like a capital... (insert word that I don't want to say). People should always try to be as accurate as they can be, and the fact that she doesn't care astounds me. It's ridiculous because anyone, for example in politics, should strive to spread the truth and not lies. Truth that is damning is fine, but lies are terrible, and getting the scoop on a true story is a small reward when the majority of the information coming from your loud mouth is false.
How is it a 'scoop' if the news/story/whatever is innacurate? I could scoop ALL the major news sources just by making up crap stories featuring the right players. I don't see any way to call this (or relate this) to journalism.
Does anyone know why linking to a NYT article from here you get to the "Need to register" page, but when you search for the article in Google news, you can get right to the article? Not that I'm complaining, because I can go through Google without having to register. Does Google have some sort of agreement?
I can see Nick Denton counting his AdSense monies right now...
I always hit Drudge first thing when I log on in the morning. I don't necessarily trust everything he says or posts, but if something big happened, I know it will be there. Then I can check more reputable sites to see if there is any truth to it. So for me, sites like Drudge have a lot of value, even if they aren't always accurate.
Because they've never had a problem with journalistic ethics.
Speaking only of Slashdot, I'll just say... so far.
Although in the case of Slashdot, I think it's not so much about getting a scoop as posting a dupe
I kid, I kid! In truth I love you all!
Opinions on the Twiddler2 hand-held keyboard?
The thing with an Online medium, is that anyone can publish, and for relatively low cost. There is simply no way to make sure that every small-time publisher has all their facts straight. Hell, look at the Times itself. How long did it take them to catch Jason Blair, and he was just making it up as he went along.
This is where you're going to run into some good old fashioned biological competition. The sites that print the truth all the time, will be better trusted than those that just spew out garbage.
And, then as now, the humor/pundit sites that tell everyone what they should be thinking with no regard to honesty, truth, or provability, will be the best read.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
Slashdot is at least as accurate as the old media. Often, they are twice as accurate as the old media. Occasionally they are thrice, or even more times, as accurate as the old media.
im sure they appreciate it
I'm not even sure where to start.
An people wonder why news no longer reports news. Reporting as a profession has been going down hill rapidly the last 5 years. It's gotten to the point where news is 95% lies. Every now and then, a reporter works their ass off and gets 35% right. Since reporters rarely have full control and the editor usually change things. Of course people should think critically. Though every now and then it's great fun to post flamebait and trolls.
When you buy a newspaper, you generally make an actual investment in that news source (a quarter, a dollar, whatever). You expect it to be more accurate because it costs money, because there are fewer, and they have less space.
On the web, it's different. If one news source is regularly not accurate, it's VERY easy to switch to something else. Your choices are almost unlimited, and you have the ability to easily see multiple sources. Is Drudge 100%? No, but he does often bring you the important news stories first, and I'm okay with that tradeoff as long as his accuracy rate isn't completely horrible.
Let's see, fired from her previous employer, spreading completely unsubstantiated rumor as fact, and talking nonsense in general...
sounds like she's looking for a job at the Enquirer, Times or Star.
Food not Bombs is a nice platitude but it breaks down when you notice that the Bombees are usually well fed
With the scandel they had a few years ago with the reporter that would make up stories.
"Music is everybody's possession. It's only publishers who think that people own it." - John Lennon.
When I was studying journalism in college, the answer was, "Speed is more important, provided you are accurate." In other words, you have to get the scoop and get it right.
Well, that was the answer that was spoken out loud. The truth is really that speed is far more important that accuracy, no matter what medium you're talking about. We have an insatiable appetite for news and information, and we would prefer to know that SOMETHING, ANYTHING, is going on right now, and you can fill us in on details as they become available.
Now, there is the nagging suspicion that if one is continuously inaccurate, one's viewership/readership will suffer. Bloggers have to overcome this obstacle as much as more traditional media.
Of course, if you're always the last one to break the story, it doesn't matter how accurate you are...nobody will be reading you to find out.
--- Where's my car, and why are these grass stains on my pants?
I find it humorous in the extreme that the New York Times is whining about other people putting forth an agenda, a big story, or humor before accuracy.
Regardless of their political beliefs, I would hope that any reader of the New York Times, the LA Times, or the overwhelming majority of big-time newspapers have a certain... political agenda... behind them.
The New York Times, for instance, has a tendancy to write with a pronounced liberal slant in any article that relates directly to politics.
In many other articles, any careful reader can spot a certain angle... a certain group or person that we are meant to side with.
Go grab a copy of the paper, and read looking for bias. you'll find it.
Irony
The difference between Slashdot and Wonkette is that Wonkette unabashedly embraces the fact that Wonkette.com is a rumor mill and kaffeeklatsch, whereas Slashdot tries to pass it's rumormongering and hearsay off as real reporting.
Obliteracy: Words with explosions
I'll give this topic some actual thought and maybe post an update later...
You were 80% angel, 10% demon. The rest was hard to explain. - Over The Rhine
"Math in a song is good."-Linford
You MUST be new here.
Now that that joke's out of the way, I don't think online sites get any more of a free ride when it comes to accuracy. For example, look at the following incidents in the traditional "old media":
When it comes down to it, the Web is just as (un)reliable a source for information as anything else.
Overrated / Underrated : Moderation
As always, it depends on how your site visitors react to the knowledge of what you do. When you want the latest scoop, you go to the 'scoop sites'. When you want detailed, substantiated information, you go to authoritative sources! For example, I have struggled a bit with this issue on my weblog and I eventually decided to go for what I enjoy writing, cold as it may be for some people. the kind of visitors I need will come. Be yourself
Communication at fast-forward speeds should make scoop-ism less important, not more. Who cares if you first hear about a story on Drudge or whatever if you're sure to see it linked from Metafilter, Slashdot, K5, et al within the hour? With a million different sites spewing news as fast as it gets made, accuracy should be the distinguishing mark, not speed.
Besides, immediacy is more important than accuracy, and humor is more important than accuracy.'
Thus, if you make a funny first post without reading the article, you will get +5 in seconds.
"If you think you have things under control, you're not going fast enough." --Mario Andretti
Cox is quoted in the article as saying, 'I think it's implicit in the way that a Web site is produced that our standards of accuracy are lower. Besides, immediacy is more important than accuracy, and humor is more important than accuracy.'
... ah screw it.
That quote was credited to Nick Denton, the publisher of Wonkette who recruited Ms. Cox to write for the site. Ms. Cox did not say that.
Really now, if you're going to accuse somebody of having low standards for accuracy
Slashdot never gets the scopp!
"immediacy is more important than accuracy"
That sums up about half of what is wrong with our news today. The other have is:
"entertainment is more important than information"
Gah. That's a scary, scary attitude. Thank goodness pbs/npr, bbc and newspapers still exist.
"I object to doing things that computers can do." -- Olin Shivers, lispers.org
even plain reports of actual events supposedly devoid of bias can be terribly skewed regardless of the reporters intentions. For example, a newspaper makes a big deal about someone's whisperings about how "JFK was a homosexual" (just a dumb example) and prints in the headlines: "WHY JFK WAS NOT A HOMOSEXUAL" or even "WAS JFK A HOMOSEXUAL?". Either way, you've brought up the issue and implanted the idea, so you've already implied that he *was* a homosexual. It's like a Maclean's issue I saw that had on its cover: "Should Christians convert Muslims? Is this what the world needs now?". Well shit, you've already taken the side of the Christians by your phrasing and just by bringing up the idea. They'd *NEVER* print "Should Muslims convert Christians? Is this what the world needs now?"
My point of all this is that all sources of news: blogs, tv, newspapers, everywhere should be held up to the same level of scrutiny by the listener/reader. It is the news source's responsibility to be accurate, but that's impossible in practise to enforce, as shown by my examples above. It's far more effective to educate the populace to become critical thinkers. It's stupid for them to evaluate the dependability of a news source by some "dependability rating" than their own minds.
The two most interesting things about that godawful site are:
1) There's now a large enough of an incestuous core of "new media" types that well-connected individuals can instantly jump to prominence over far superior alternatives who don't know the old gang from Wired. Just like there's no getting rid of Andy Rooney, there will be no getting rid of the folks from Suck or Salon.
2) The nerdy guys who dominate the online world are absolute suckers for any woman who will talk about sex.
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
. . . that horrible graphics will immediately discredit any political website? Matt Drudge's site has consistently looked worse than horrible since it first went up. This horrible Steve-Madden OMG girl atop "Wonkette's" site isn't much better. What's with this people?
Monster Zero is the reason we cannot live on the surface, but must live forever live underground like this.
I think this is interesting.
Accuracy is important for a good reputation, and in this world of overwhelming choice, it is a valuable commodity.
Nobody is going to want an always wrong news source.
However people have short memories, and don't really check facts.
I think the traditional news media has little competition, there are a few big papers available everywhere, and they have their particular market. Very hard for a new player to get in there.
Online there is a lot more competition, and they have access to the same distribution channels. If a superior competitor comes up, they can win.
Google is currently ruling the online search because they do it right. News sites will be the same.
Responsiblity, the 'media' has a responsiblity, but sometimes they shirk it, and hopefully the public will accept this less.
When it is possible for even a popular news source to be ditched this may change.
Or we might get news media that just spouts popular opinion to stay "in power", then everyone will be scared to speak the truth.
Almost everything he reports is linked to somewhere else. He sometimes posts headlines without stories (which he adds when they become available online), and only rarely posts his own newsflashes.
Taken one blog at a time, or one post at a time, the web might be less reliable than old media outlets like the NYT or CNN, but taken all together the web is far more accurate than old media. The NYT regularly gets the facts wrong, seldom corrects its mistakes, and never corrects them in a place that you are likely to see. Reputable blogs on the other hand do a very good job of correcting their own mistakes, and if they don't then you can be pretty sure that other bloggers will do it for them.
Why has /. broken a story?
Got me to thinking how the NY Times will print just about anything these days. A news site operating under the creed, "immediacy is more important than accuracy, and humor is more important than accuracy" has a free pass on accuracy because obviously, IT'S NOT A NEWS SITE!
Sure, we can look at how such sites are used and how they affect readers' opinions on certain issues, but not every mention of current affairs is 'news'. What's next? An expose on The Daily Show? Op-Ed pieces on how MAD fold-ins distort the issues?
If the Times is really concerned about standards of accuracy, I'm sure there is plenty of work to do in house.
The TV networks, newspapers, magazines, and cable news channals appear to me to have no accuracy and always biased....i see no reason why the internet should be any different.
My opinion is that TV charmed the baby boomers at a very young age (much like the internet is doing or has done to gen x) into beliveing and trusting network news. This created a perseption that news and reporters are inpartial perfesionals dedicated to reporting the truth (what a lie that is) You see before the internet and before TV there was two or more news papers in every town and if you wanted you could get more then on and compare. well the internet has replaced this and is simply exposing the fact that no news or reporting is unbiased or even accurate.
Hey did any one notice the great space coaster referance "no news"
"Becouse no gnews is good gnews for gary gnu and the no gnews for gary gnu gnews show!"
I think it's arrogant and ignorant to impose your values and standards on someone else's free speech. Would you like these sites to conform to your litmus test for accuracy?
I think you're full of shit.
You mean that everything I have read online is NOT true? Please excuse me, I must go question everything I have ever read and hold dear as truth. The internet never lies!! Don't let it be slandered! Please give to the National Foundation for a More Honest Internet (NFMHI) or the next words you read could be inaccurate.
-----
the New York Times care about accuracy?
Hell no.
I disagree fundamentally with just about everything mentioned there. A website, if it is even pretending to be a "news site", absolutely must be accurate. You cannot simply roll dice to determine a story if you want to keep a consistent reader base. Being first means nothing if you are totally wrong.
As for humor trumping accuracy, this too is patently absurd. It's funny to laugh at George Bush mangling a quote in a headline, but what if (and believe me, it's a stretch for me to defend W. here) the President never said it?
Let's jump forward about five years. The President of the United States has just given a press conference. Some yutz with a long-range microphone and a web-enabled palm pilot sits about 500 yards away from the White House Lawn, watching the President get off the podium. Under his breath, Mr. President mutters, "God, I just bombed that Cuba issue."
The guy with the long mike hears "God, I just bombed [indistinct] Cuba [indistinct]." Twenty-four hours later, Miami is in ruins and nobody knows why, until they check out a web site that claims that the U.S. has nuked Havana.
Information mutates so rapidly on the Web, with everyone adding their own bias to the "facts" they receive. It's like the old 'telephone' game everybody used to play in kindergarten-- pass the message along and see how it changes four or five kids down the line.
Accuracy is important in any medium. With the web, however, it's evolved to a point where nobody can really believe anything unless a) the source is reputable or b) it comes from multiple sources. Publishing false or inaccurate information undermines a), and with b) there can be nobody who "breaks the news first".
I don't really consider the web to be a primary source of "real world" news-- sure, I read four or five gaming sites every day to keep up on the industry, but that's different from something like, say, global thermonuclear war. For something like that I will always turn to traditional media such as radio, print, or television. (I consider the web sites of the traditional news media to be a pseudo-extension of those publications; they still require verification from "outside" but are generally more trusted than the average web site.)
Bottom line: A blog is not and can never be an implicitly "trusted" news source. Not even my own. Especially not my own.
"Why Subscribe?" Good question...
I think it's interesting your take on that statement, but I see something different at work.
Slashdot does not produce or report news. So, just as the editorial section of a newspaper, by default, gets to say whatever the editor wants to say, regardless of fact or spin - the same is true for a blog.
If newsforge (slashdot's sister site) tries to run opinions and not facts - then we'd have a question to be had.
Is a newspaper the place to run opinion fodder? Well, that's up for debate. So far the only legal remedy to printed lies is to file a libel suit. And the criteria for libel is the same regardless of the medium (unless you are doing a parody).
Kinetic stupidity has a new brand leader: Allen Zadr.
Lets don our tinfoil hats now...
Anyone that believes sites like the drudge, slashdot et al at face value is no better than...
Anyone that believes CNN, Fox "News" and any other reliable "news" source at face value.
It's up to the individual to sift through the information and form their OWN OPINION.
There have been several high profile cases recently (NY Times springs to mind) where reporters have been pulling facts out of their arses with no verification of their facts or anything. Then there are the multitudes of stories that get pulled from the main stream because of political pressure, shareholder interests etc.
Every news article is published by someone who has an agenda. It's just the size of the agenda that differs.
I for one welcome any other opinions or news stories from people that were either there or know people that were. It gives me more choice and a broader exposure to the actual story which allows me to make a much more informed decision as to what I do or do not believe.
Journalism is journalism and an opinion is an opinion, no matter the source. As an aside, has anyone heard of a search engine just for news articles that is as up to date as the news is? The real problem with independant reporting is that it's too hard to actually find the well written pieces to begin with.
John the Kiwi
that was LAST YEAR!!!!
brilliant:
... 'I think it's implicit in the way that a Web site is produced that our standards of accuracy are lower, he said. "Besides, immediacy is more important than accuracy, and humor is more important than accuracy."'
you say ''Cox is quoted in the article as saying, 'I think it's implicit in the way that a Web site is produced that our standards of accuracy are lower. Besides, immediacy is more important than accuracy, and humor is more important than accuracy.'''
No she ISN'T
From the article
'The rules of the blogosphere demand displaying corrections quickly and prominently, said Mr. Denton [the publisher of wonkette]
http://milkshake.dexy.org
Journalism is a craft which mixes observation, investigation, analysis, scientific description, creative description, and a careful balancing of conflicting information and viewpoints. It leads to a certain kind of information -- journalistic information -- which has a very important place in the world.
... and so on.
There are other kinds of information: gossip, rumors, speculation, argumentation, analysis from a particular viewpoint, the presentation of interesting information which favors timeliness over verifiability, research, balance, and even accuracy. Like Slashdot, for example. This kind of information also has a place in the world, and it's also a very important place. And the list goes on: there is scientific research, which is not the same as philosophy, which is not the same as intuitive speculation
I wouldn't want to live in a world without this variety of types of information.
The problem comes when people confuse these many different kinds of information. Slashdot, for example, is not journalism. It is great and fun and sometimes idiotic but often useful -- it's just simply not journalism.
So, as daeley rightly points out: let the reader beware! Judge your information and the sources of that information. Be a wise reader. And to that I'd add: let the writer beware as well. Know what kind of information you are presenting, and present it well.
The watch phrase for the consumer of anything purporting to be journalism, online or offline, is "let the buyer beware". One person's accurate reporting is another's biased bird cage liner. You neglect to use your critical filter at your own peril.
Slashdot's inaccurate summary about accuracy on the web.
This, of course, assumes that there were any standards in pace at the beginning, something I am not so sure about.
In some European countries newspaper subscritopns are down and still falling. I believe people are getting fed up by cheap entertainment.
I don't really get most of the anti-Drudge bias out there. Why does everyone always want to dismiss his site so quickly? Yeah, sometimes he posts stories that aren't covered elsewhere, but those usually seem based on hearsay from "a source" and can generally be lumped into the category of gossip.
Everything else he posts -- meaning the vast majority -- is just his own headline linked to a story from a major news-gathering organization. Why does everyone want to knock Drudge for "not being a real journalist," or whatever, when most of "his" stuff comes from the Washington Post, New York Times, CNN, BBC, etc.? Yeah, he likes to put a spin on things, but it's done in a pretty innocuous way, IMHO.
Breakfast served all day!
...even at the RNC Where they're certain that we'll find those Iraqui WMDs, even if we have to plant them ourselves.
Oh, go on, check out my job.
Wonkette has provided ammunition to her current and future enemies. In order for a public figure or a public official to win a suit for libel, the plaintiff must prove either that the alleged statement was published "with knowledge that the [information] was false" or that it was published "with reckless disregard of whether it was false or not." Wonkette has just provided all future plaintiffs with evidence that she publishes statements with reckless disregard of whether they are true or false.
Only Women Bleed (Sex, Sharia remix)
I certainly can't understand why anyone would willingly get their information from an inaccruate source, and then use that information to either form opinions or attempt to advance their views.
You are assuming that the arguer values accurate information. In the fundamentalist vs. evolution debate the fundamentalists value their world view over accuracy.
SteveM
The New York Times offers up a thought-provoking article ('First With the Scoop, if Not the Truth' -
At first I thought the article was going to be about the NYT itself, but no, they're just pointing at others who don't have much less journalistic integrity than themselves.
(This may be reduntant)
What online journalism - by big and small - is really doing is erasing the edotiorial controls (and trust) that have been the currency of newspapers since they first started.
It is now up to the reader to double-source and check the creditibily of information that is passed their way.
The only way to prevent this obvious trend from seriously damaging and polarizing a society is to start teaching pupils to be critical of media and information from a very early stage. (Not just to place journos on par with lawyers, but to double-check information before passing it on as fact to others or taking it for a fact)
This means to be critical of sources and their angles -- and to try to see the interest outlets have in spinning information their way.
I believe Europeans have come a lot longer in this.
is the fake "Stephen King is dead" trolls.
I thought ESPN sacked you! How's the rehab going, beeotch?!!! Can I score some Oxy off you?
No such story appeared on Drudge. It's a long running Slashdot joke.
I wouldn't say Drudge, Wonkette or others are getting a free pass.
... and don't mind it coming from a singular, unedited point of view, so long as it is entertaining and has some semblance of intellectual honesty.
At least once a week, some form of the "old media" takes it to the blogosphere.
The fact is, there are people who want a quick, short, snarky read
--- have you healed your church website?
Sadly, for a large share of the US ADMINISTRATION , the sites that agree with their preconcieved notions will be the better trusted ones.
This is horrific, not insightful.
I am not an expert on every single field on this planet. Nor can I expect to live long enough to know of all fields there are. I therefore have to find a reasonable reliable source of news that I can trust for news I myself cannot deem the quality of.
Just look at this place: gonzo moderation tends to mod up anything that passes for fun yet truly insightful gems lie buried at +2.
Newspapers pretend to be honest but are not and that is why I no longer subscribe to any. Moreover, whenever I read an article on a subject I know anything about I can see it is wrong, not just a little wrong but totally wrong. What then about the topics I do not know in depth??
In the end I now only reløy on The Economist and Usenet News posters that I have found reliable over time.
What we need then is an IMDb for all kinds of media with distributed killfilters to moderate/eliminate unreliable journalists. Expect future newspapers to be rather thin.
Ever since they've been suppressing "First Post"s, people have been forced to start their own blogs.
Anyone who uses the words "Wonkette" and "journalism" or "integrity" or "accuracy" in the same sentence (other than one like this) must have lost their mind with their money in the dot bomb crash.
Once again, the NYT shows us just how foolish it is to mix drugs and newspaper publishing.
Imagine Slashdot posting a story about journalism ethics. After all these times I've seen "RTFA" because the synopsis was wrong.
"Derp de derp."
I grew up in Egypt, where the most reputable media is government owned and mostly toes the government line, and the opposition media is disposed to exaggerations, personal attacks, and plain inaccuracies. Ironically, this results in a news consumer who understands that he is "reading through a prism" of biases and always attempts to reconstruct 'the truth' (whatever that is) from fragmented and biased accounts. Nobody really accepts anything the media reports at face value.
Unfortunately, I'd say the majority of US news consumers are blissfully unaware of the fact that whatever they're reading or watching is not 'the truth', but some person's account of the truth, no matter how dedicated that person/reporter is to objectivity. My Firefox multi-tab "home page" includes both the NYT and the Wash. Post, and it's incredibly enlightning to see how the two papers *differ* in their headlines covering the same important stories. I don't say this to accuse either paper of bias, but to point out that bias is inevitable.
The US news consumer does have a real advantage: he has *access* to a wide variety of uncensored news sources and opinions in English, and it *is* possible to reconstruct a reasonable version of what's going on by polling a few different sources. I wonder how many people actually avail themseleves of this incredible opportunity.
Imposing Libertarian views on everyone online since 1992.
'...immediacy is more important than accuracy, and humor is more important than accuracy.'
She's right--if she's discussing her website. I'm sure "The Onion" editorial staff would say something similar, if asked. On the other hand, I would hope to hear differently from cnn.com and nyt.com staff.
If the original submission is entirely off-topic for SlashDot, how could a post pointing this out be off-topic?
Isn't that a paradox? The submission should not be here. SlashDot still needs a way to mod the people who post the submissions themselves.
Until then, sometimes ya gotta sacrifice those karma points to make a statement.
I disagree, this has everything to do with this audience. After all: "garbage in, garbage out" is a well known expression in these quarters. And I am swimming in newspaper garbage.
Slashdot always gets the scoop... and then they get it again a week later!
Yeah, I don't put much faith in blogs as news either- they are biased (as is my own The Rupertzone. But that's the point. On the other hand, Drudge, who definately leans to the right, gives the scoop much faster than the New York Times, ABC News, CNN, Washington Post, you name it. These places aren't happy that most web users go to The Drudge Report more often to get the latest breaking news. I've never seen anything posted inaccurately on Drudge's web site. This isn't to say it doesn't happen- I am sure it has.
The established press, or "big media" (Libs like to put the word "big" in front of things to make it sound worse) doesn't like it that individuals have the ability to spread their news and commentary to the worlds just as simply as they can. The more media giants slam sites like Drudge and private blogs, the more they validate the worth of such sites.
[FromTheMorning]
Journalistic, personal, professional or otherwise, If you blow off responsibility and ethics for the fun you can have at someone elses cost, you are worthless. Personal worth is something that needs to be earned by seeking truth, even in humor. If I crack some sarcastic comment about linux kernel developers and my whole basis is incorrect, the joke is not funny and I am not taken seriously. My worth is absent. So for those sites that post stories as something to discuss, and the whole basis for the story is false, they are worthless. It's pretty easy to figure out. It's what's wrong with most everything, people act on a purely emotional gut level to every tiny bit of information they come accross and never bother to check their facts or ask even the most basic of critical questions. It's not a question of can a publish publish it, of course they _can_ publish it. And it certainly is not a question of can a reader get ahold of it, as clearly they do. It's a personal task for each individual to take through the whole process. Publishers _should_ be asking if they have enough proof, or if they are about to spread lies. Readers _should_ be able to ask themselves, how inflamatory was this? Does it seem reasonalbe? are there sources I could double check on this information?
Critical thinking people, try it out.
I'm sure there are those that would endeavor to discover how to subvert such a system to play to their own agenda.
I am so tired of hearing about this. Is the New York Times a liberal paper? Yes, so what?. Does the reporting and editorial content in the Times reflect its liberalism? No. It is the conservatives that you need to worry about, because they let their bias show in their work.
Example, at the begining of Clinton's and W. Bush's first terms, each administration set up a committee to look for solutions to issues that were percieved by each administration to be of utmost importance. Both committees met in secret, and very little information was given to the public about how decisions were made by the committee. The New York Times published several editorials condemning each adminstration. The Wall Street Journal (a conservative paper) published several editorials critical of the Clinton administration, and only one editorial that was critical of the Bush administration.
Just think about the subtle way media displays bias, I was watching Good Morning America a few weeks ago, and they had footage of a cop who was on a routine traffic stop, and was nearly hit by a drunk driver(he was standing in the doorway of his cruiser and the door got knocked off) So, how is that bias? Well, the police department released that tape, (which shows the danger of police work) to the media, and made the officer available for interviews. Does a police department do the same thing when an officer is caught doing something bad on tape? The media let the police control these stories and the effect is (rightly or wrongly) the news has a pro-police bent. Another example of bias would be during the first gulf war all of the footage from the cameras on smart bombs.
Lastly,
When I was a kid(15), watching He-Man and the Masters of the Universe ( the original), a commercial came on that warned of the liberal media bias in our country. Why on earth would conservatives choose to run that spot during a cartoon geared towards kids?
My other sig is extremely clever...
The correction, a month later on page 73, below the car ads, says that Senator Smith was actually on a farm when a goat ate the tail lamp off of his Mini Cooper.
The lawyer says, who can I sue for libel? And the paper says they have the right to protect their source.
Bottom line, an institution is only as credible as it's accuracy through yesterday. Every time they get it wrong, they loose credibility and they loose readership and advertisers.
On the other hand, the "Weekly World News" is still the nation's highest selling paper. But if they have something to say that's true nobody will believe it. They thrive on that in the opposite direction. But nobody likes it when you can't tell truth from bull-tar.
Another interesting tid-bit. When the National Enquirer actually breaks a real story (those damned cameras sometimes pick up real news), they usually sell it to the Miami Herald. Why? It's newsworthy - It's not about a relationship - no need to sully the reality of the news by putting it in the Enquirer.
Kinetic stupidity has a new brand leader: Allen Zadr.
I clearly remember Drudge reporting how one of the most beloved TV sitcom fathers had passed away.
Show me that smile again....
In the future, I would want to not be isolated from my friends in the Space Station.
Come on, she's funny as hell. Or at least was in her Suck days.
sulli
RTFJ.
Wonkette is essentially a poster on slashdot who gets +5 Funny in every post. (She and her colleagues used to do it all the time on suck.com.)
Intelligent Design: because MATH is HARD.
It's funny, but I don't think the medium (necessarily) dictates how trustworthy a site is, but rather the site's standards reflect its trustworthiness.
As you mentioned, the New York Times wasn't very careful about catching that guy who just made up his stories. Forbes is another publication that has failed to exercise reasonable editorial control over their writers (*cough*Daniel Lyons*cough*) who was allowed to publish some lame attempt at character assassination. Ironically, it was directed at PJ of Groklaw fame who had chided him for just parroting press releases from SCO instead of doing research. Surprise, surprise, his article was also weak and poorly researched. He cited trolls as a source, for crying out loud (worse, by trolls I mean the obscene & idiotic ones, not merely those who try to make opposing views into flamebait). Frankly, I feel that Forbes does some of the shoddiest research ever. You could skip them entierly and just read the PR Newswire directly.
But I grant you, Slashdot itself is pretty much just a rumor mill most of the time, yet we (hopefully) all know by now to take the stories here with a grain of salt, as the articles are generally a bit sensational.
There are only a handful of sources online that I trust all that much, frankly. I like Google news for giving me a broad overview of the news (since I can get stories from many sources, I can usually filter out much of the bias). The Christian Science Monitor may have been started by Mary Baker Eddie's odd little sect, but it's a rather good newspaper because it was founded to have high journalistic ethics, since the church who founded it disliked the sensational pieces about their sect.
Last but not least, I appreaciate Groklaw. Not only has PJ sit on some stories until she could get a second source for confirmation (as good journalists are supposed to do...), but she links to all the PDFs and other documents so that no one, not even SCO, has to take her word for it.
Journalism is a craft which mixes observation, investigation, analysis, scientific description, creative description, and a careful balancing of conflicting information and viewpoints.
That's because reporting has fallen out of favor. Bloggers tend to do a lot of 'analysis' and relatively little reporting. Unfortunately, the major news outlets are producing more analysis at the expense of reporting (or they're combining the two.)
Perhaps reporters should go back to reporting, and let the bloggers handle the journaling.
One man's -1 Flamebait is another man's +5 Funny.
Of course! If it isn't accurate immediately, you simply refine it and post it again in a couple of weeks. Once you've had about 4 dupes, you should be getting pretty darned accurate...
I won't even get started on any editoral abuse conspiracy theories...
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
If /. had that function, would have left this one at -1, troll.
does the nature of the World Wide Web in fact give sites like Wonkette, Drudge, or even Slashdot a free pass on accuracy if it means the difference between getting the scoop or not?"
Absolutely not, and how brain-dead does a person have to be to even ask that question, let alone have it posted with an article?
The only need is to have a clear delination between news and entertainment. A blog is entertainment, based on the premise of the concept. It's social commentary--sometimes at it's finest but much more often at it's worst. Even blogs from well-known journalists are commentary despite whatever amount of informative content, if for no other reason, because they are simply the viewpoint of single person.
Nobody gets a pass. If they report doo doo, I don't read 'em. If their political slant is so extreme that it affect the truth of what they say, they line the parrot cage. Drudge has his slant of course, but it doesn't prevent him from printing the truth. If GW Bush pulls a Clinton with an intern, Drudge will print it first, with a red light on it.
Drudge puts his corrections up front and in bold, and I don't see too many of them. The NY Slimes puts theirs in a back corner of page six, and there's a bunch every day. I don't read the Slimes.
Bottom line, if I want to find out what's going on in the world I read a bunch of sites, Drudge first among them. If I want to know what the Democratic Party of the USA is pushing today, I'll read the New York Times.
Blogs are good for pointing things out that you may have missed, not so good for origional reporting. Read many, apply bullshit meter to all.
In the era of Rolling News, Being the first with the scoop is important. In the UK we have 2 major 24/7 channels, News24 (BBC), and Sky News (Murdoch). Sky is usually first with the breaking news, and it drives the News24 editors mad. However their braking news involved stuff like this
1:07: "BREAKING NEWS: Bin Laden Captured"
1:09: "BREAKING NEWS: Bin Laden *not* Captured"
News24 generally waits for a higher standard of conformation before going onair with breaking news, but it's not infalliable.
The BBC also have another rolling news channel, BBC World, which is broadcast everywhere but the UK. Due to its audience it is essential it's accurate. It isn't always accurate, but it's the most accurate, and slowest, rolling news stations I know. It waits for 2 independent sources before breaking a story.
Look, you go to cnn.com or New York Times web site, you expect accuracy and journalistic ethics. But if you go to any site that isn't part of mainstream journalism you need to take what's said with a grain of salt. I think anyone who has been on the net for more than a year and hasn't figured that out, isn't going to figure it out.
I honestly don't care if blogs or sites like Slashdot or even Groklaw or whatever, doesn't follow the same ethical standards that mainstream journalism should. Sometimes I want the formality and other times I don't. It's sometimes fun to get humorous takes on the news, even if it's not as accurate.
They all serve their own purposes and as long as people can figure that out, I don't see a problem with it at all.
Wikipedia's NPOV policy, "neutral point of view," is a great way to handle this. If the story comes in, and you aren't sure it's factual but want to get it out real quick, report WHO said WHAT. That way you are only reporting sure facts. "A nameless caller claims that JFK Jr.'s plane has been recovered by the Coast Guard" is a fact if said caller is on the line with you, even if you aren't sure that his statement, "JFK Jr.'s plane has been recovered by the Coast Guard" is factual or not.
This has the benefit that it encourages people to think critically and allows them to make their own appraisal of the trustworthiness of the information and its source.
Secession is the right of all sentient beings.
I think most of the news we are subject to these days is inaccurate in some way. I really don't care if any of it is accurate at all, I tend to take most news with a grain of salt because there's no telling how many times a company or organization can change their mind about something before we finally see the outcome.
Say ATI puts out a press release stating they are suddenly releasing a line of cards that is 5 generations away because of a sudden technological breakthrough. Some might believe them, some may not. But ATI could change their mind again and again before they finally come out and say it was a fluke and they actually can't produce cards that awesome.
Rarely is the question asked: Is our children learning?
I used to poke by Yahoo news or CNN each day. I started to dislike the way CNN covered some things. Not liberal or conservative, but rather omissions of information reflecting both sides of the spectrum. Basically, poor writing.
So, I switched to Google News. Suddenly, what was "hot" was decided by the number of online sources writing about it. I started reading online periodicals I never hit before, like channelasia.com and reuters. Story accuracy and viewpoint was nicely indexed and facts could be cross-checked.
Now, I only use Google news. It creates the counterbalancing effect to sites that specialize in scoops and poor fact checking. If a story breaks, you immediately can read through 15 different viewpoints on it.
This is the power of the net, the pluralism of news sources. No single entity without indexing technology can achieve what Google has. With one swoop of the web spider, Google has acted as a counterbalance to large corporate media empires sucking up the number of radio and tv outlets. Fight so that it doesn't get regulated away.
Much like The Enquirer's news is not the same as that of The New York Times (your choice to which you prefer), not all web-based news providers are the same.
Some focus on humor and amusement, some on getting news out fast, and some on getting the facts as straight as possible (Groklaw is one of the better current examples of the latter, but many of the good hardware review sites also fall into this category.)
Blogging is not journalism. If anyone takes anything they read on the blogs or other individual vanity site that has no established tenets of honest, ethical treatment of information blindly as "fact", they are insane.
"Slashdot does not produce or report news."
So Slashdot enjoys the duplicate-story and kill-the-website freepasses?
That's exactly why I usually disagree with many /. moderators. The recent poll on income level really shows too. It would certainly seem that most /. readers/modders are unemployed or are college students.
/. to exist and to display opinion, but I think it would serve everyone well if demographics were clearly stated (anonymously).
/.
/. would know what the natural bias was. This would be useful for any other non-traditional media source as well.
Both groups historically are liberal. That is why a comment against Bush is modded up, and a comment against any liberal (esp Clinton) is modded down.
I think it's fine for a place like
Each account should have settings for political alignment (liberal, independent, conservative, other), income level, age, and even gender. The breakdown should be in a chart on the side of
Then at least people who weren't familiar with
UC Berkeley student modders do your worst, I'm wearing my flamesuit.
.sigs are for post^Hers.
Ana Marie Cox was also one of the key people at the long dearly-departed Suck.
...and audience metrics killed it.
Ever since the advent of both online news and realtime cable ratings journalism has been on its way out. Being that all of our news outlets are businesses [not that I'd prefer state run media], there is no slant, there is no editorial voice. All there is is the publishing of whatever they think will get the most ad views. Fox News wasn't designed as a neocon cirlcejerk, it evolved into that as the heads of the network watched the ratings needle rise and fall, and that's all that matters. Matt Drudge broke one important story almost a decade ago but his histrionic style and willingness to print anything means that his readers keep returning. And you can bet that he keeps a better watch on his server logs than the veracity of his sources.
Now with the ease of publishing online any can be an authority as long as they have enough people reading their sites. I'm not making a value judgment about it as it has both good and bad sides but I think the average media consumer believes in the credibility of having an audience.
Long ago the FCC gave spectrum to the broadcast networks with the mission that they existed to inform as well as entertain. TV news only exists because way back when the networks were obligated to do so. Now the 'inform' part is out the window and our news media is just another form of entertainment.
I personally get my news from the main wires through My Yahoo or from Google News, at least with Google you can find several stories on each topic.
"The news is just a TV show, get past it"
- Dilated Peoples, [i]Proper Propaganda[/i]
The crap that journalists and their "expert sources" came up with was unbelievable. In general the print media was the best and the least sensational. Obviously the worst was TV. Those guys were interested in flash and could only count on holding a viewers attention for 9 seconds.
This was all pre-web, but I imagine a typical plane crash results in any number of fantastic conspiracy theories, alien abduction speculation etc.
The bottom line is to read/view/hear your news with a critical mind.
One modern invention that I find disturbing is news making the news. Tom Brokaw reporting on what someone said on Larry King or some other non-sense. There is little investment in investigative reporting anymore. That requires lots of research and phone calls...who has time for that any more. Pick up someone elses story, put your spin on it and join the herd seems to be the SOP.
When the people fear their government, there is tyranny; when the government fears the people, there is liberty.
Because it's pretty funny--
Of course, it probably should have a more explicit and obvious disclaimer. I've always been a big fan of the one at the bottom of appleturns.com:
"""
DISCLAIMER: AtAT is not a news site any more than "Inside Edition" is a "real" news show. We make "Dawson's Creek" look like "60 Minutes." We engage in rampant guesswork, wild speculation, and pure fabrication for the entertainment of our viewers. Sure, everything here is "inspired by actual events," but so was "Amityville II: The Possession." So lighten up.
"""
but you have to make sure you're speaking the same opinions as those around you. That's one reason I LIKE Slashdot
It seems that you are advocating the concept of Slashthink, something that many people naively deny exists here. None the less it indeed exists and right now you are a proponent of it. So, I must ask, how will you feel when Slashthink turns against you or when you grow up and your views start to deviate from the Slashthink prattle?
I've never been afraid of different or opposing view points. What scares me is when those opposing view points are being stiffled by a system that encourages groupthink, rather like Slashdot or today's "fair and ballanced(TM)" media.
Think about this: You'll probably agree that the world is mostly populated by morons, except you of course (Many/most Slashdotters think this). So, what do you do when the groupthink of all those morons in the world turns against YOU?
What she really means is that she'd rather get the attention she seeks, than be ignored for being staid & boring like plain old PBS.
Tom Stoppard said it best - most conflicts are NOT about rights vs wrongs....most conflicts are about rights vs rights.
There are different truths. Its "truthful" to say that messing with stem cells amounts to playing God. Its also "truthful" to assert that stem cells may hold the promise to cure for diseases that don't have any right now.
Its "truthful" to say abortion kills. Its also "truthful" to assert a mother's rights over her foetus.
Nietzche asserted that perspectivism was more dear to him than absolutism ( the notion that there are certain absolute truths). Perspectivism asks of the philosopher to adopt "changing truths" as a manifesto, rather than search for "the truth", since there isn't really any such objective truth - it depends on the observer, his circumstances, his senses & powers of observation ( just as an ant or a bee with widely differing sense of sight & smell would see the world very differently than a human, similarly a black man would see certain truths differently than a white man, certain notions are truthful to catholics but not muslims, & so on... )
Those who argue for "objective truth & accuracy" bestow much more power to man than he really has. Most events are a result of chance, synchronicity , chaos and non-determinism...to look for truth in them is simply futile.
Ofcourse an attempt at truth is better than reporting plain falsehoods, but that doesn't mean such an attempt is the real truth, because there is no real truth, only perspectives.
Wonkette is clearly entertainment, not news. What's the problem? The real questions here should be:
(1) Is anybody gullible enough to take that site at face value?
(2) Can Cox be held responsible for the American public's failure to understand when someone is taking the piss?
All of the blogs I read begin with links. They report their little blurb about each story, with a link to whatever source they got it from. If you find it the least bit suspicious, (I usually do, since I'm a bit of a skeptic) just follow the link to the source.
Now, admittedly the source is usually another blog, and that one sometimes links to another blog, but eventually somewhere down the line they link to big-mainstream-media. Failing that, there's Google. The purpose of the blogs should be to quickly summarize lots of information, not to provide trusted data. If anything catches your eye, find the data yourself.
The article is from the Fashion & Style section.
/. lead-in that works the 'ethics in journalism' angle.
It's the
Funny you should ask... "Young America's news source: Jon Stewart"
Intelligent Design: because MATH is HARD.
I'm your regular run-of-the-mill pretentious journalist. I read the Washington Post every day. I read Atlantic Monthly, The New Republic, The National Review, Harpers and others. I find Time and Newsweek basically worthless. And I can't stand most television news.
I love Wonkette.
Wonkette is not journalism.
Her goal is not to inform, her goal is to entertain. Most importantly, she is upfront about this. She makes no proclamation that she will tell the whole truth. Her level of credibility is just a hair above The Onion and that's fine because she's entertaining and doesn't claim to be anything else.
Guess what: The people who read Wonkette know not to go to her for the news. Wonkette is just Entertainment Tonight for people who care about the stars of politics instead of the stars of hollywood etc. I couldn't care less if David Beckham had an affair, but I got a kick out of knowing that Mathew Yglesias was in Best Buy.
But, to get to why this is on Slashdot. Yes, the Internet is different. Previously, the news mediums available to us before were push only. They lectured to us. So, it was natural that articles looked like lectures.
The Internet instead is a conversational medium. As a result, much of it will inevitably look much more like what people are talking about, than a newspaper or even television.
So close and yet so far from the world's perfect ID number
Everyone go out right now and read Evelyn Waugh's Scoop. Not only is it hilarious, but you will see that none of these issues is new.
1948 Chicago Daily Tribune healine
No matter the medium, the rule is Caveat Lector, let the reader beware. What we take as "truth" is based upon our trust and experience and skepticism, and enough disparate sources of information to do our own parity checks for accuracy.
Dogma - "let's just say we'd like to avoid any empirical entanglements."
All news in every form is biased to some degree, that is a fact. Either get over it or don't accept anything anyone tells you and live in a dark cave for the rest of your life.
personally, if I find a news item of interest on say Slashdot, I investigate further and check for information from reparable news sites. However, most people are too dumb/lazy to even read any article mentioned in a given post and then go on to rant about something completely unrelated. Ah well, the world is full of idiots anyway, why no at least keep them ill-informed too.
It's the tradition of your forefathers, boy. Don't sweep it under the rug.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
I am ahead of 2/3rds the Sheeple out there... The point being you must exercise your brain and seek more than a single point of view to get the facts. Any media source be it traditional or web are ALL BIASED in one way or another, whether it is towards commerical sponsorship, or personal agenda's. I honestly don't think that things have changed that much, the proliferation of the web has allowed the light to shine on the problems that have been present all along....
errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?
That's funny, you think it's too "liberal". (whatever that means these days). There's always people with their slant on things. That's just the way it is. Seems like you "conservative" people just whine all the time. Look at at a KDE submission on slashdot. Gnomers get flamed by the mods. I think they put up a "go to slashdot" thing on AIM to all loyal KDEers. Same with Apple. Those guys go on a love-fest when there's an Apple story. The moeration gets out of hand. That's just way it is, people are biased. Nicholson said it best : "You can't handle the truth". Most people can't. Just stick by your convictions and see what happens. Quit whining and labeling people that disagree with you as "UC Berkley student modders". Please.
Well, I do appreciate, say, a really well-written news analysis in the New York Times (which aims for neutrality and comprehensiveness). And I think that's different from, and complementary to, the analysis bloggers generally do. So I wouldn't want the news sources to "let the bloggers handle the journaling".
But I also appreciate a news source that clearly labels analysis and commentary as such, and also includes the straight-up reporting -- and I agree on that point: news sources should not neglect reporting proper.
Let's remember that Drudge's big breakthrough came when he revealed the Monica Lewinski scandal. This was a verified story that Newsweek
spiked after months of rigorous investigation by Michael Isikoff. Far from getting a pass on accuracy, Drudge was right about a story that mainstream media outlets were censoring for political reasons. It's all very well for these dinosaurs to accuse Drudge of a lack of accuracy, but the irony is that with his breaking news he's been correct and the vast majority of his other articles link to mainstream stories. Drudge is more of a news aggregator than anything else where the stories link to an eclectic mix of media outlets. Claiming he doesn't match their standards for rigor is a bit of a joke considering some of the unconfirmed nonsense that gets published by media outlets. These are the same media outlets who showed us the Iraqi Minister of Information day in and day out without so much as a comment about the veracity of his claims until the M1s rolled into the city. That's not unbiased or even handed reporting, these organizations had reporters advancing on Baghdad and new darned well the claims were false but never explicitly pointed it out.
Wonkette is one of those sites that, when you first see it, you're like, "Oh my god, this is a great site! It's witty and informative!"
By Day 5, you're thoroughly sick of reading about Karl Rove sightings at Pottery Barn, or how long John Kerry's schlong is. It doesn't take long to get a feel for Ms. Cox's range.
Fast, accurate, or good. Any two of the three.
I skimmed the posts and did not see this mentioned...
As others have said, I do not feel that any media outlet has a 'pass' on accuracy and truth. Though as is often the case, truth can be relative. That is why I don't want some reporter's truth, I want the 'facts' and just the facts, when I read/watch/hear a news story. This highlights a much larger problem and trend, and that is an overall lack of integrity and honesty in news reporting. It seems that no reporters anywhere in the US follow the old school reporter rules of 'what, when, where, why and how'. It is a rarity to read/watch/hear a news story today and come away with the full picture and a fair understanding of what happened. Between lackadaisical reporting and editing standards and personal bias in the entire reporting/editing cycle, no neutral, complete stores are left.
This affects all news outlets, not just print. News media in the US have gone through some phases. Initially US newspapers proudly proclaimed their political bias with their titles and tag lines. Their stories were all written from that perspective. The country then went through a phase of 'honest reporting' where you got 'just the facts'. Now news reporting is sliding into a period of just not seeming to care about an honest, un-biased news piece. That coupled with the much lower reporting and editing standards leaves news stories that are just that, stories. Now a days, I can not sit and watch any of the local TV news broadcasts or any of the big three networks nightly news. The sorry state of TV news is appalling. Print is not much better. They are all in such a hurry to get the scoop that none of them care about the facts. What they have not twisted to their political bias, they have dumbed down for popular consumption.
I have to use this cause I can't afford a real sig...
Inaccuracy from a single online news source is OK, when you cross-reference it with other sources. The Web offers a cheap, workable way to do this that print/broadcast media don't: aggregation. Especially with so much news (in print/broadcast as well as bits/interactive) produced by parallel distribution workflows, headlines, stories, angles and agendas all take a resonance that's unnerving across multiple newsracks, but manageable in an RSS aggregator. See not only the contrasts in reporting/story, but the uncomfortably synthetic similarities of "manufactured news" that agrees too much, especially across "independent" sources.
Wall Street has used these techniques (and techs) for years. Multiple data sources are compared/contrasted for "data quality assurance". Long after the "single point of failure" is left behind, more textured info, weighted perspectives, prediction/accuracy performance grades and simply emergent patterns in the grapevine all add to the usability of the data, with enveloping context environements abounding. Of course, if you still just believe everything you read, at least you'll be too confused by the diversity to do anything that gets in the way of the rest of us clever enough to put the picture together.
--
make install -not war
Growing influence over whom? The blog community is microscopic compared to even the rest of the Internet community. Also, only the dimmest fool would ever trust a blog story he couldn't verify through traditional news outlets.
If you knowingly publish something that is inaccurate simply to score a scoop, you're unethical (otherwise known as a liar).
If bloggers want to be taken seriously as journalists, they can't take Denton's easy way out.
-- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"
Wonkette is one letter away from Wankette!
This is where it pays to start off with a Karma bonus.
Basically, if you have a contrary post that is not well thought out, or calls everyone stupid, then there is no possibility that your post will survive being down-modded into oblivion.
That's the nature of the business, and it's not necessarily "slashthink", instead it's the general phenomenon of conversation. If six people are sitting around talking about the postive value of ice, and you come by - in effect - interrupting the conversation, telling everyone about how horrible freezing to death is. It's on topic, but it's rude... This is the time in group-think where we say, start you own thread, and we'll get to you.
Yes, I've seen top-thread starters get modded down due to group think, but never a post that's more than a few lines of on-topic, non-inflamatory material.
There are ways to tell people that they are wong without saying, "Hey, Nimrod, your being dumb!".
Whenever I am reading text and notice it using the word "evolutionist" it's like a lightbulb goes on, and it's suddenly clear why the preceding paragraphs were salted liberally with incoherent bogosity. Calling someone an "evolutionist" in this day and age is a bit like using "geosphericalist" as a pejorative in the 19th century. It's a waste of time arguing -- just smile and nod and back away slowly.
For anyone with legitimate interest in the arguments there's always talk.origins.
Misreporting Yesterday's News, Tomorrow?
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
You won't see Washington Times issue retractions on all of their Clinton bashing that turned out to be based on falsehoods.
The immediacy of the web renders actually a "scoop" of very little value. The whole notion of the scoop is best represented by newspapers and (to a lesser extent) TV. A newspaper scoop is a big deal. If you can get the story ready before press time and your competitor can't, you have an entire day as sole-source for news before they catch up. With TV, you might have as much as an hour. But the web? You got maybe five minutes. It takes most of your potential "customers" more than five minutes to find out that there even is news. Citing the importance of "getting the scoop" is a load of crap. They just don't care about accuracy.
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
I always hear about how "undeniably" right-wing Fox News is--constantly--but I never, ever see an example ever cited.
:)
One liberal article I read once wrote that Dennis Miller had turned conservative, and in an aside mentioned that as a result he was one of Fox News' regular patrons. I only saw him on the channel a few times and never saw him anywhere else. If anything, that would tell me that the other channels are biased because they refused to offer the viewpoint that Fox News gave air time to. I don't see how having a guy on with some pro-Bush views suddenly makes the whole channel biased.
Besides, Hannity Colmes kicks ass, and I usually dislike annoying lefties.
Seriously. Modern journalists just do Nexis searches for their "facts", so all it takes is one bad "fact" to get out there and it gets propogated.
Dan Rather on CBS announces the Florida election results way too early
It wasn't Dan Rather. It was John Ellis at Fox News...
For those who don't know... John Ellis is the cousin of GW Bush. If the phrase "conflict of interest" comes to mind, it unfortunately didn't to the Editors at Fox News.
At least with a newspaper, they'll print a correction. If I hadn't been here, your disinformation would have been recorded for posterity unchecked.
* If "Linux" just refers to the kernel and not the operating system, how can "FreeBSD" refer to the operating system (userland tools, standard libraries, etc.) and not just the kernel? Face it, "GNU/Linux" looks and sounds ridiculous.
* If you expect companies to follow the copyright of the GPL, you should support the RIAA going after infringers of its copyright. If not, you're a hypocrite.
* There is absolutely nothing wrong with a company being upset that its product is being pirated freely over online networks. Try getting a real job sometime and see what it feels like when your work is everywhere, and you start worrying that your days are numbered. Does John Carmack want you to "sample" his new game via the "free advertising" happening on eMule?
* OSDN-owned Slashdot thinks its niche opinion represents the majority of the world. This is a result of people visiting every day and buying into the groupthink. Nobody outside of Slashdot knows or cares about "Linux," "RIAA", "M$," or anything else Slashdotters think is such a huge issue in today's society. Go to a mall or coffee shop sometime and see what people actually talk about.
* Speaking of OSDN--it's a Linux company...that owns a "tech news" site...that posts news stories negative toward competitors like Microsoft. If a Windows company or even Microsoft itself owned a "tech news" site and posted anti-Linux articles all the time, everyone would be up in arms. But with OSDN, it's a-okay to run a popular tech news site that "coincidentally" posts a lot of articles negative toward competitors.
* Slashbots think people don't like the music coming out these days, which is the cause of the piracy. Never mind that if people didn't like the music they wouldn't be pirating it, most Slashbots--again, this goes back to the niche opinion thing--don't realize that most people these days love the music coming out and want to hear all of it. Probing around, you discover that Slashdot is made up of nerds and fogies who listen to things like The Who and Blind Guardian and techno--not what mainstream society enjoys.
* Any company ending in "AA" is evil. Especially if it doesn't want you distributing its works without paying for it. Somehow, this mindset is supposed to make sense.
* The inevitable result of all this is a world in which nothing can be profitable because people simply pirate free copies. Is that really what Slashbots want? OSS and free-ness in general reminds me of the hippie era of the 60s--idealistic socialism that only exists because of the surrounding capitalism around it that provides the environment for it to exist. We all know what happened to that idea.
* Slashdot editors are abusive. We all remember The Post. It's amusing the editors never mention the issue. The worst editor is michael, who will mod you down, insult you for your post count, and post unprofessional color commentary along with the article. This is the same bizarre person who cybersquatted Censorware for years--even as Slashdot posted articles negative toward cybersquatting! Michael played it off like he was some sort of stalking victim, which made it all the more bizarre.
* The moderation system is broken. If you mod someone as "Overrated," you can't be metamodded. People abuse this all the time to gang up and knock you down into oblivion.
* Somehow, user-ran executables are always a "New Microsoft Hole" (actual article headline). Meanwhile, LinuxSecurity [linuxsecurity.com] posts weekly security advisories for all the Linux distributions. You never, ever, EVER see any of these mentioned on Slashdot--bizarre things like arbitrary code execution via MPlayer.
* Microsoft is supposed to be some sort of non-innovative rip-off artist. Meanwhile, the same people posting those comments do it through KDE with taskbars, sidepanels, start menus, similar print dialogs, and an integrated web/filesystem browser. Slashdotters--ripping people off then criticizing those who came up with the ideas in the first place.
*
The guy with the long mike hears "God, I just bombed [indistinct] Cuba [indistinct]."
Sounds exactly like Drudge.
He frequently takes quotes out of context using ellipses to create whole new meanings. My favorite was several months back when he tooks quotes from Gen. Wesley Clark testimony to Congress from page 6, then page 26, then back to page 7... stringing it together into a paragraph that said something completely different than what the quotes in context clearly said.
I agree with your point, but the sad thing is we're already there.
That being said, does the nature of the World Wide Web in fact give sites like Wonkette, Drudge, or even Slashdot a free pass on accuracy if it means the difference between getting the scoop or not?"
No, human nature gives these sites free pass to print exciting, breaking (though not fully or even partially accurate) news. People in general want to be caught up in the excitement of *something*. They like to think they have an inside track, or some source of information that their fellow man does not have. It's a source of pride to them.
These sites simply cater to this human desire. They get started because they, typical humans that they are, feel they have some sort of inside track and they want to show off. Soon enough they attract a large enough audience to see dollar signs and attract other 'anonymous sources' who are more than happy to pretend they have an even deeper inside track or understanding of a particular event.
At that point they have no where to go but down, because their customers expect greater and deeper stories to get their 'fix'. They have a very strong urge to fulfill that need, but it can't be fulfilled forever unless you're willing to extrapolate and fill out tenuous information.
Some sites keep it under control a little bit, but few try to hide the fact that they don't really care. Slashdot practically trumpets this fact. They're more than happy to post an 'update', especially since it really won't hurt their reputation. By the time it's up, half their readers don't see it.
It's not necessarily a news site problem - it's a human condition. Whether this condition is a problem depends on how well you can capitalize off it.
-Adam
Did you even read the damn .sig?!!!!
There are no free passes. However, the way libel and slander law works for a public figure is that there are two things to be proven. The person who has been libeled or slandered bears the burden of proof: they must prove that the accusation is false AND that there was malicious intent on the part of the publisher to cause harm.
/. actually treads a wholly different line. The majority of the "reporting" here is relayed from other sources. Those sources bear the ultimate responsibility for accuracy. A savvy reader knows better than to expect more than a grain of truth from the "Inquirer", but puts a whole lot more faith in "Tech Report".
This is what allows the gossip rags to get away with so much - only taking occasional hits from people such as Carol Burnett or Tom Cruise.
I was taking one day at a time, but then several days got together and ambushed me. (from a Rhymes with Orange comic)
It was sarcasm. Sigh.
An apt moderation in an article about online journalism, in which some are bringing up the insane, broken moderation system...of course, I can't participate since I haven't gotten mod points ever since daring to reply to The Post.
Yes, editors, you piss me off--just the fact that for a site that constantly professes to be supportive of open free speech movements and the OSS community, you sure do run a closed-off, behind-the-scenes kind of operation. Modbombs, removal of moderation abilities for daring to reply to a post the editors didn't like, etc. Michael, I'm specifically looking at you here.
Kuro5hin has the right idea about openness, but the bizarre leftist slant the site has taken in recent years coupled with the fact that you have to get "sponsored" by an existing user to sign up means it's pretty much dead in the water.
Well, I do appreciate, say, a really well-written news analysis in the New York Times (which aims for neutrality and comprehensiveness)
I'll bet they even believe that. The problem is that the 'journalist' community is rather small, and they all read each other's stuff, so there tends to be a consensus of opinion.(Although with Fox you at least get a second nexus of opinion.) I get much more out of reading the blogosphere. Where else can you find anti-war conservatives and pro-war frenchmen?
One man's -1 Flamebait is another man's +5 Funny.
Your links are great examples of what's great about the blogging world.
Still, there's a lot of value in what the major news sources do. Even the blogsphere is susceptible to a consensus of opinion -- and one example of that is the general contempt for the major news sources, as exemplified by the first sentence of the first blog you posted:
Even the New York Times is beginning to apprecate the difference between conservatives and neoconservatives.
"Even the New York Times?" Oh for heaven's sake, the NYT writers have been presenting a very complex and nuanced picture of the relationships of the different parties in the Bush administration for years. In fact, it was from a NYT article that I learned about the term "neoconservative", about the history of the movement, and about the particular personal history of Paul Wolfowitz and his disagreements with other members of the administration. That article was published over a year ago.
So yes, it's great that we have a forum where people can make overdrawn statements like the one above, and draw out debate. But it's also great that I can go read a news analysis written by people who are holding themselves to higher standards of circumspection and objectivity than the bloggers.
Yes, I know none of the media are perfectly objective. Well, duh. But the NYT (and most of the other *respectable* big names, i.e. not Fox or CNN) hold themselves to much higher standards of objectivity than any blog I read. That effort is worth a lot, even if the success is never complete.
The grandparent post says Slashdot is Libertarian, not non-partisan.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
Wonkette waves the review that calls her "A foulmouthed, inaccurate, opinionated little vixen."
I had a friend who used to love the saying "Anybody who takes me seriously deserves to."
Similarly, anybody who takes wonkette's mouthings as 100% deserves what they get. That isn't to say that what she says is 100% inaccurate, but you do have to consider the bossibility of inaccuracy in what she's saying. Nothing wrong with that as long as you're reasonably forewarned, and in this case, you appear to be.
Sometimes boldness is in fashion. Sometimes only the brave will be bold.
FACT - something happened
OPINION - this is what I think about what happened, or what I think it means
INFLUENCE PEDDLING & LIES - here is what I want you to believe
All news agencies mix FACT and OPINION together pretty freely these days. Today's news that "Prime Minister Tony Blair is expected to ..." is NOT A FACT, even though it's reported by the New York Times (that bastion of journalistic integrity) and probably will be fact within 24 hours. And most talking heads on TV give us unvarnished OPINION.
Clearly, many blogs are filled with OPINION. That's all they promise to do. I don't have a problem with the Drudge report's spin on things -- their primary reason for existence is to add spin, and it's obvious.
The problem comes when "journalists" use a respected platform to spout opinion, hide the facts, or report lies ("an unnamed source in the White House said today...") and thus distort or change peoples' opinions under the guise of authority.
But blogs, by definition, have no accountability to anyone. The author can't be fired for editing a news photo in Photoshop, or for reporting what isn't true, or mis-quoting someone's words. The same is true for someone standing on a soapbox in Hyde park. You, the reader, have to take it with a grain of salt and compare what you're reading with everything else you know and read.
The rallying cry used to be "Question Authority!". But these days, you have to question practically everything.
Of course, with any fact you can put a spin on it but this does not matter as long as the listener is aware of the bias. It is a bit scary when a press baron like Murdoch is considered one of the main reasons Blair won the previous elections, and that the future of the Blair government seems to depend on Murdoch not to tell his UK news papers to go after Blair. Either the British readers of Murdochs papers are happy to vote for the guy picked by Murdoch, or they are ignorant of the bias they are served ...
bring it on! --- JFK
I consider almost all American journalism corrupt. This is compounded by the fact they claim to be impartial while leaving out important facts that do not benefit their corporate owners and do not benefit the White House.
This is not a conspiracy, just good business sense.
Does any form of journalism have any ethics. I have not seen anything close to ethics, truth in reporting, or objectivity in 35 years, from any form of media. The NYT is so far left it make the Washington Post look conservative. They all lie to make their own agendas look correct.
Professional Politicians are not the solution, they ARE the problem.
Examples:
- When was the last time you saw a detailed news story in the mainstream press showing what companies are making how much money from defense spending, managing the Iraqi oil industry, and other economic activities surrounding the war? What happened to the "follow the money" dictum vis a vis the war in Iraq?
- Lots of articles about how the Bush administration planned the war ahead of time and made up bogus reasons to go to war, but where is a well documented discussion about the "real" reasons? If it wasn't WMD, terrorism, democratization of Iraq, or the "gathering threat" (and it appears that all of those have been fleeting pretexts), then what was it?
No doubt many of you can find examples in many other contexts. The upshot is that journalists are in practice theater critics of a rigid Kabuki, where characters ratchet through formal storylines, and the rich backstage dynamics that inform the drama are outside of public view.I think that a web site that intends to be a "News" site should work just as hard as any print media at getting the facts. Community sites like /. should try and keep as close to factual as possible but should not necessarily be held up to the same level as serious media. Sites like Wonkette & Drudge are just personal mastabatory vehicles for their authors and shouldn't be expected to hold to any standard of factual reporting. Now, there's nothing inherently wrong with these kind of sites but everyone reading then should always remember that anything published on them that is remotely close to factual is there by accedent.
--
If I actually could spell I'd have spelled it right in the first place.
The difference between a tabloid and a newspaper is nothing more, and nothing less, than the premium they put on accuracy and other journalistic standards. If a blog wants to be a tabloid, then simply treat it as one.
Following the scox case has been an eye-opener for me. I never really trusted ziff-davis, or any other pop-media; but now I think the tech pop-media is the biggest joke in the world.
One of pet peeves is that after publishing outragous lies, they often just quietly change the story on the web-site. YOu go back to the "same" article, and select passages have been removed.
"does the nature of the World Wide Web in fact give sites like Wonkette, Drudge, or even Slashdot a free pass on accuracy if it means the difference between getting the scoop or not?"
Why not? Much of the traditional media has already gone that road. Once very traditional and proper BBC News science reporting was accurate and precise. Now it's quite often FUD. And witness the fiascos that occurred in reporting the the results of Martha Stewart's trial (the FUBAR covered marvelously by The Daily Show), and despite their insistence they'll stop, much US media's over-projecting voting results.
Should we trust blogs as much as we do the media? Wrong question. We should trust the media as little as we do blogs. They both consist of, in large part, opinion, and implicit advertising in that they're marketing their outlet and its ad rates based on readership.
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
Oh for heaven's sake, the NYT writers have been presenting a very complex and nuanced picture of the relationships of the different parties in the Bush administration for years.
It's the Cathedral and the Bazaar, isn't it? You can either rely on the NYT (or the WSJ, which may be eclipsing it) and find what you hope is a very 'complex and nuanced picture', or you can form one from the voices in the marketplace. I guess I prefer the bazaar.
One man's -1 Flamebait is another man's +5 Funny.
Wonkette is not /. She's not Drudge. She makes no effort to be either. I've read her since day one. Early on the targets of her humor were the Democrats because the primaries were the big news on the Beltway. As that ended and the Republicans came to the fore via Iraq, the 9/11 hearings, etc., they suddenly found they were the most prominent, and therefore likely targets.
/. gets -3.
She's a satirist, a humorist. She's NOT a source of straight news. She reportedly is the best read blog by all the D.C. insiders because she's the gossip columnist with her thumb on whatever is going on in that fairy land, our capital.
On a sense of humor scale of 100, she gets 105 and
The moment we abandon objectivism as a real, attainable position is the exact same moment we have to abandon universal truth as the objective of our inquiries. And not so incidentally, it is that very moment we have to start calling creationism a credible 'theory' instead of the bloody nonsense it really is.
In a poll (undertaken in Australia, I think) regarding media I read not so long ago, journalists were ranked below politicians in terms of credibility and trustworthiness. I seem to remember that they were ranked somewhere alongside lawyers. And that's a mighty low position. Oh, how the mighty have fallen: the Bernsteins/Woodwards of yore reduced to the Dregs
Let me suggest that this disenchantment has less to do with too much objectivity but rather too little. If you have to put up with constant spin and slanting of news anyway, why not go the whole hog and go for someone who doesn't make any faint pretence of objectivity but wears their subjectivity as a badge of honour?! Why watch BBC's Andrew Gilligan when you can have Bill O'Reilly?
Unlike you, however, I don't see this trend as indicating that people trade off objectivity for passion, I just think that given the lack of what I will here call reporting -- i.e., an impartial recounting of events -- which would be the first choice for most people, they are left with the second best, viz. the quasi-editorializing pontificating that is produced by most media outlets today, and then they prefer to listen to someone in their 'corner'. Again, I see that purely as a forced choice between two evils of essentially the same kind (the pro-guy or the con-guy, both (self-) opinionated bastards), rather than a true choice between two different approaches (impartiality on the one hand; partiality on the other).
Regarding accuracy, I think very few people outside the lunatic fringes of politics would really give that up as easily as you suggest. The quest for immediacy is, I believe, largely a media myth, appealing in its simplicity: it's much easier to be first than to be right. HEll, all you need to is to invent things as you go along: obviously you have a really good chance of being first with a story you yourself have just invented. And if somebody else invented it before you, why, all you need to do is invent something else. No sweat. Which is curiously reminiscent of the Ruth Shalit/Stephen Glass/Jason Blair approach to journalism, wouldn't you agree? I refuse to believe that there are very many people who would in the long run prefer their version of 'journalism' to a detached factual recount of events, however colourful their stories.
The blogosphere has its place, just like editorial/op-ed pages and openly opinionated pieces do. And no doubt people read/hear/watch these with great interest. That does not in any way subtract from the fact that the essence of journalism must be reporting, plain, simple, and objective. Passion has its everyday place, but that passion should, as a general rule, rest with the reader/listener/viewer, not with the reporter.
The moment we stop believing that objectivity is not only possible but also desirable is the moment that every argument is reduced to a mud-slinging match, where might is right and truth really is the first casualty.
The liver is evil and must be punished.
"That being said, does the nature of the World Wide Web in fact give sites like Wonkette, Drudge, or even Slashdot a free pass on accuracy if it means the difference between getting the scoop or not?"
/. but one should always be aware of the source.
/. and blogs give people the chance to react or offer alternative sources.
It's funny to say on
The web may give rise to some inaccuracy in reporting, but luckily it also empowers people to investigate themselves.
I don't want to belittle the issue, as it is an important one, but one could raise the question "should the web be more correct and integer than other media?"
At least, now you have the option of a thousand sources instead of just the pre-packaged opinions from multibillion dollar media-outlets.
And at least, places like
I think, therefore I am...I think.
Yes, it is The Cathedral and the Bazaar, in that blindly traditionalist slavery to the former and ideological treatment of the latter as panacea are equally stupid. It's not either/or. I want cathedrals and bazaars. Or rather, I want plenty of cathedrals in the bazaar.
/. article on open source's usability problems hit the nail on the head. Frankly, Linux usability sucks ass, and could use a bit of Cathedralizing!
So sure, take your example: On the one hand, my work relies on the JCP (a bazaar), and on Jakarta projects (even more a bazaar) to implement those specs and pick up things they miss miss. I'm typing this on an open-source rendering engine, and I'll post it with an open source network stack. And how happy I am! On the other hand, I'm posting this on OS X, because Linux's font rendering and usability standards just drive me up the wall. The recent
Same thing in news: I would rather have a world full of cathedrals and bazaars, where I can pick from the best of both, than a world where ideas (however diverse) flow around in only one way.
(I don't know what your WSJ comment is supposed to mean. They're both very fine papers, and will remain among the country's half-dozen flagship publications for a long time, I think.)
That first sentence of my original post should of course have been:
The liver is evil and must be punished.
does the nature of the World Wide Web in fact give sites like Wonkette, Drudge, or even Slashdot a free pass on accuracy if it means the difference between getting the scoop or not?
This may sound counterintuitive, but I read Slashdot largely because it provides me with what I believe is a very accurate and unbiased view of tech news. I know I've just made some of you spew coffee on your monitors, and I apologize. Here's the trick though - wait until the story has a few hundred comments, then browse at +4. Slashdot is a fantastic collaborative information processing system. On all but the most polarized issues (EG: SCO), the threads here will almost always present all sides of an argument, and are merciless in debunking the bunkers.
While it's true that the overall readership of Slashdot has a slant, even a supposed arch-enemy like Microsoft always gets a few highly rated posts presenting MS's side of the argument.
The trick is to know how to use a site like Slashdot - don't take any one comment as gospel (except the ones from me, of course). Read them all with an open mind, let simmer, and you'll find you get a far less partial perspective than you can get from traditional news-media sources that typically have stories written by a single person.
And you get to see run-on sentences that boggle the mind.
Stop-Prism.org: Opt Out of Surveillance
Is there a story moderation like "-1, crappy grammar"?
Well, you raise a serious point about Slashdot in particular. And we all know that it's vital to be skeptical of the press.
So do what I do. Always take a moment or two to ask, Is Slashdot's latest story on the new Apple Powerbooks being a couple hundred kilohertz faster really true?
I once wanted to attend a peace demonstration, phoned up a guy who was mention in my local paper by name as the organiser, but the poor chap had NO idea that he was supposed to be organizing a peace march lol!
Out of curiosity, I checked back with the newspaper and they said they had copy-and-pasted the story with slight modifications from a church newswire organization. I phoned them, too, and they didn't know about the story at all.
This was not a tabloid, mind you, but the most respected paper in the region.
This is particularly true if she is willing to talk in frank terms about ass-fucking. And Wonkette certainly is. In fact, for some reason it's so important to her that she capitalizes it as 'Ass-Fucking' every time.
-ccm
Too much Law; not enough Order.
...you linked to The Daily Howler with a straight face.
[PowerPoint] is a tool for capitalist presentation
So long as they avoid libel (which is a matter for the courts), then it's an issue of institutional choice.
If everything that's called news must be true, then you would deny me the pleasure of reading The Onion. It's a news parody site, but at first glance it's not obvious. The top of the page says, "America's Finest News Source (tm)," so it must be news. Yet the Supreme Court ruled to protect parody as a first amendment right. What's wrong with that?
What about the Weekly World News? It's the highest circulated paper in the US. I see nothing wrong with their editorial "fact" fabrication. Nowhere does that paper say, "Entertainment Value Only". People use it for entertainment though. What's wrong with that?
Basically, you can't hold these institutions under different legal standards than the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal. They are all publishers. So long as they avoid libel, they are free to print whatever they want. Their accuracy beyond that is an institutional choice.
If you don't feel they are accurate, and you expect them to be, your only recourse is to spend your money elsewhere. If enough people do that then the advertising will suffer.
A good example of this is the New York Post. This is a paper that suffered under claims of inaccuracy for years. Now they report more "gossip" to keep readership up. How many respected newspapers keep gossip on the front page?
I, in a very humble opinion, see nothing wrong with any of this. It's publishing. It's there to sell papers.
Where I do see a problem, is when someone expects the government to keep someone's first amendment rights in check. Libel and Slander laws exist to protect when a first amendment right infringes on someone else's rights. You do not have the right to force someone to give you accurate news. You do have the right to investigate and find out the truth yourself. Our system, as it exists, is pretty good. What's happening is exactly what should happen. Lies and mis-spoken facts are getting out there, and then being found out. This is the way our system has evolved. And sometimes it doesn't work quickly, but it does work.
Bottom line, there is no way to force the truth onto those whom don't care. Those seeking the truth can find it. Until I can no longer find the truth when I seek it out, then I see nothing wrong with it.
Kinetic stupidity has a new brand leader: Allen Zadr.
you're comparing apples and astrophysics here. Wonkette is a blog, not news and as such, "correctness," political or actual, is secondary to her humor. And remember, humor is all about the timing, so there is little, if any, time/room for fact-checking. News organizations, OTOH, are, and should continue to be, held to a different standard because they allegedly are in the fact business. We demand the utmost in sincerity, honesty, and truth-based reporting from Tom Brokaw, Sam Donaldson, and Peter Jennings because that is what they purport to do. Well, at least we should demand these things.
I still think you're missing the point. Wonkette is not to be taken seriously by anyone. Ana, herself, does not take it seriously. If others do, they are foolish. Let me put it this way: just because someone decides that Mad Magazine doesn't fairly and accurately depict modern life, should we try to hold Alfred E. Neumann responsible for not publishing to a higher standard??
As far as other bloggers go, I think all of them are revolutionary. Even the bad ones. Maybe, especially the bad ones. The media belongs to the people. It's about damn time we took it back. For better or worse, I'd rather wade through real people reporting (or even "reporting") the news than some tan, coiffed, corporate-shill bozo living a Don Henley song.
Have you even bothered to go to Ana's website??? or are you just blathering on like most of the people on this forum, with complete disregard to the facts... true irony considering how many of you claim to want fact checking before posting.
"sounds like a capital..", "majority of the information coming from your loud mouth is false"? Where are you getting this from? Her site, BTW -- for those of you too lazy to look -- is mostly a stand-up (or maybe, sit-down?) comedy routine, with politics and politicians and those who report on politics and politicians being the main topic(s). All you should have to do is look at the graphic at the top of her website to know this is a spoof of a lark of a joke.