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?"
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?
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.
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
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.
You're right that it is odd, perhaps if I was from the same culture as Moses, this sort of logic would have made more sense to me. Reguardless light came to be first. If you belive that light from the sun is the only light which can make plants grow, you should visit the basement of every stoner in the world. Light comes from many sources, includeing the unnamed on in Genesis 1 before the creation of the sun.
I am a little confused as to which came first, the sun or the earth. You say that they were both about 10 billion years later, but you didn't mention which was first and, more importantly, how you know. Truth is, we dont know, we can make a guess as to when matter came to be yet not as to exactly what order all the matter in the universe was created.
I never said that earth would be orbiting the sun at the time the sun turned on (and it likely wasn't.) Things which fly by large gravitational centers are affected by them and sometimes orbit them for a while. I said that the ball of rock _could_ have existed before the sun turned on, somewhere in the universe. Truth is, we don't know that either.