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Bloggers - Beowolf Cluster of Fact Checkers?
d3ik writes "Wired has an interesting take on bloggers role in journalism and politics. I've never been comfortable with news discussions sites being called blogs... but I guess "news discussion sites" isn't as catchy. Anyway, the article makes some good points on the role of bloggers in fact-checking (read: tearing apart) some of the stories and claims that the huddled masses would normally take as fact."
So much so that I think the government needs a few dozen blogs for cross-checking the CIA. Maybe next time a blog from an Iraqi scientist will show us that WMD is a lie before we go to war.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
[question for Dubayou] You call yourself conservative, well so tell us what "Fiscally Conservative" means to you?
I for one would like to see Bush answer under oath that he never did coke at Camp David. Perhaps that's one reason he is always there, still looking for the baggy he lost!
The grass is only greener, if you don't take care of your own lawn.
How do you defeat bad free speech? For instance, let's say someone tells an outright lie, or takes a fact an twists it and misrepresents it until they say something opposite of the fact. (This never ever happens, right?) How do you fix that?
I am reminded of a story, but I can't recall the details. The idea is that someone spread a false rumor about someone else in the community. When they saw the damage, they went to apologize. In response, the guy took a down pillow and ripped it open, and tiny feathers flew all over the yard and the street and the wind carried it quite a distance. He said, "Your rumor is like those the down from this pillow. See how it has spread? Now, in order to apologize, you're going to have to go collect ever single one of those feathers and put it back in this pillowcase." That's the kind of damage that bad speech does.
So how do you combat that and how do you fix it?
With more free speech.
Bloggers are the other part of the free speech world. They can produce more information faster than any other source. They have hundreds and hundreds of independent researchers, each specializing in one side or the other of each story.
So when Dan Rather came out misrepresenting the documents, he was held in check by more free speech.
Kind of like the question "How do you stop someone on a rampage with a gun?" The answer: "Get more and bigger guns."
The radical sect of Islam would either see you dead or "reverted" to Islam.
Trouble is that when you ask this president a tough question, the White House will shun not only you, but your entire network.
Actually, they've never met a question that they couldn't brush aside. Typically it goes like this...
Day 1
Reporter: Did you pull rank to get out of the National Guard?
Bush: We destroyed the evi....um... there's not been any proof of that.
Day 2
Reporter: Did you pull rank to get out of the National Guard?
Bush: We've already answered that. Next question.
You won't see that. In fact, what got CBS into trouble is that they went through the trouble of trying to fact-check in the first place.
They could have just went on and just covered it in the same "he-said she-said" manner that practically every other news source uses. This way, they don't need to be worry about being fact-checked themselves because they're not presenting facts...just opinion.
In this way, they actually present more lies than truth. This Rather thing is a very small drop in the bucket.
And that's really why I like reading through sites like Slashdot and Fark. With resources like these you don't just get the 'left' or the 'right' side of the story. True, you get the crazy liberals and the diehard conservatives. You even get the middle of the road people like me that chime in every once in a while... but somewhere in there is the truth. Somewhere, mixed in with the flames and the "what about the children" there is a happy medium that we can draw from.
I look through and say "Wow, this crazy redneck has a point" and "Yes, our country does spend too much on that". I look at the different views expressed on these sites and use them to better shape my outlook on things. Lots of people ask friends for advice before making a decision. They like to get another persons perspective before making a decision. This is no different, we just have a larger pool of opinions to gather perspective from.
As far as accountability goes... maybe that's a good thing. For instance if someone here on Slashdot has something that may be viewed as flamebait they'll post anonymously to avoid the karma backlash. 'Blogs' (as I said before, not fond of the name) provide everyone in the world an Anonymous Coward Get Out Of Jail Free card by allowing them to express their views without fear of repercussion. While this may annoy us when someone that we feel is wrong posts their opinion, it may just be the medium to ask questions that normally wouldn't be asked and express opinions that would've otherwise stayed in the dark.
It's going to be very interesting to see the long-term effect of the Internet on our society. This is yet another example of the phenomenal power of on-line collaboration by interested, unpaid volunteers. Software developers were perhaps the first to begin really using this global distributed medium to build complex, sophisticated tools that people would previously have thought could not be built by an ad-hoc collection of random volunteers. Groklaw is a shining example of what happens when the "many eyes" principle is applied to worlds that are traditionally somewhat opaque -- in this case the world of corporate intellectual property litigation. Wikipedia has used the same principles to construct the world's largest, and maybe most comprehensive, encyclopedia, producing volumes of high-quality factual articles that are nearly unthinkable under traditional approaches. Long-time readers of on-line fora such as USENET and slashdot long ago realized that when you get a sufficiently large and diverse membership, random posts become trustworthy sources of information, because of the simple fact that if the post contains an error *someone* will see it and jump down the poster's throat. Odds are, a fact that stands undisputed is correct.
The common thread running throughout all of these examples is that random volunteers are able to accomplish things that would challenge large staffs of well-paid experts. Why does it work? I mean, it's obviously *so* inefficient to have so many people looking at the same thing, not to mention all of the inefficiencies created by delays in communications, mismatched skill sets, etc. It works because the aggregate manpower available by tapping a few minutes or hours of time from a sufficiently large group of interested volunteers vastly exceeds what any corporation, or even any government, could dedicate to a task. And by "vastly exceeds" I mean "is several orders of magnitude more".
In terms of developer-hours applied per line of code released, I'll bet Linux is the most expensive operating system ever developed. In fact, I'll bet it's hundreds or thousands of times more expensive than the next most wasteful competitor. Consider the issue of code reviews. Most development shops don't do much code reviewing because it's a lot of boring, tedious work that sometimes doesn't seem to provide much benefit. The attitude is that those review hours are better spent writing more code. But every line of code that goes into the core of the Linux kernel gets thoroughly reviewed by multiple people. How wasteful! Linus is a self-proclaimed asshole who is perfectly happy to reject working code just because he doesn't like it, or because he thinks it could be simpler, or clearer, or fewer lines, or less invasive, or whatever strikes his fancy today. Instead, he'll flame the author, provide a long list of things that suck about the code and tell the author to come back after the code has been fixed *and* vetted by at least a half-dozen people Linus trusts. And that's only if he likes the code enough to care, otherwise he'll just silently discard it. How can such an obviously inefficient development process actually make progress?!? It can progress because the manpower devoted to Linux development is simply enormous.
Using a Wiki to build an encyclopedia is just stupid, from an efficiency standpoint. How much effort is wasted on edit wars and on fixing up vandalism? How much time is wasted by people writing erroneous articles that have to be fixed by others? How much time is wasted in discussions about whether or not the use of a particular word violates the Neutral Point of View principle? It doesn't matter, because a few hours a week from every volunteer Wikipedian is enough to cover all the inefficiency and still push the project forward at a phenomenal pace.
Publishing facts to tens of thousands of ordinary people to see who just happens to notice something wrong has to be the most insanely wasteful way of checking facts ever devised. Wouldn't
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nd it's going to let GW Bush get away with his lousy service record.
The only objective evidence that he did not have a lousy record was soundly trounced as being a forgery. There is no other evidence, only accusation.
His service record is wide open for display. It has been approved for full release under the FOIA (even though Kerry's hasn't). So why hasn't any hard evidence appeared over the past three and a half years? Please show me the real documentation proving this. Please show me the objective evidence.
Anyone with half a brain could successfully campaign against Bush on the issues alone. They could do it with one arm tied behind their back. But the Democrats are so lost in their hatred of Bush that they're scrambling for chunks of mud to sling without realizing how filthy it makes themselves. This mistake may have nominally been in Dan Rather's name, but it was the Democrats who took it and tried to run with it... towards the wrong goal!
Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!
Actually, they've never met a question that they couldn't brush aside. Typically it goes like this...
By "they" I take it you mean "politicians" and not just Bush?
Seriously, watch any politician answer any question nowadays. Pretend that you are an English teacher, and grade the response to the question. At least 80% of the time, I'd give out a flunking grade, as the answer segues into whatever talking point the politician had, and ignores the question. I don't know about the politicians but I've never had a teacher tolerate that.
Witness the Kerry ability to turn any question into a question about Vietnam... not that he does it all the time, mind, but that when he wants to, he can.
Actually, I'm kind of glad the bloggers are getting as powerful as they are; without them, we're about two years or less from a media that can't get a straight answer to a question out of anyone, because they never press the questions like bloggers can; we're almost, but not quite, there already. When is the last time you seriously heard someone repeat a question because it was completely not answered? (Now, I know there are a couple of answers to that lately, but next question: Isn't the fact that you can remember them a vivid demonstration of the fact that those incidents are exceptions, not normal practice?)
From my perspective, part of the problem that the American electorate finds itself in currently is that most journalists are pressed by time and deadlines - in addition to being lazy, intellectually dishonest, and unoriginal. Lies are repeated ad nauseum until they attain the polish of fact; lies, evasions or misrepresentations aren't confronted.
Bloggers aren't much better in this regard. Indeed, some myths or misunderstandings ("Al Gore claimed he invented the Internet") circulate longer on the Web than they do in mainstream media.
I think that blogs are useful for keeping attention on things: the costs of the war in Iraq, the veracity of the TANG memos. But they should not be mistaken for serious investigative journalism. Bloggers have even lower standards than journalists, if that's possible, and will rapidly jump to conclusions that a halfway decent journalist never would. (Almost every point raised by the conspiracy theorists over the TANG documents was quickly discredited. That is not to say that the combination of oddities and anachronisms in the memos wasn't worthy of attention, just that the bloggers were focussed on entirely the wrong things - such as trying to to determine kerning in a document that was a PDF of a photocopy of a photocopy of a photocopy).
Sites that specialise in getting hold of original source material, such as thememoryhole.org - are often worthwhile. Writers with an actual understanding of the situation on the ground, or academic qualifications, such as juancole.com, are also good. Otherwise, it is mostly rampant speculation and spin.