The Horse’s Mouth
One of the really great things about the internet is that you often don’t have to rely on what a reporter has to say about the news. You can get it straight from the source. It’s a sad commentary on the state of so called journalism that they are usually very different things. I suppose that has always been the case. It’s just never before been quite so obvious, or so easy to check
That was brought home to me this month with reporting on the Initial Benchmark Assessment Report on Iraq submitted to Congress. You don’t have to read what some self important hack masquerading as a journalist thinks about the report. You can read the report. It’s right there on the White House web site. It’s about 25 pages so it isn’t for everybody but it’s written in readable prose and if you are interested you can form your own opinion. You might wonder whether any of the reporters who’ve had so much to say about it actually read it themselves. There are also position papers there on everything from the economy to health care. It really is a wealth of information and since so much of the news is politically oriented, it’s a priceless source.
The State Department has a pretty good web site too. If you want to know what the Ambassador to Portugal thinks, ask him. A half hour’s browsing two or three times a week just might give you a different perspective. They put their own spin on things but then so does the New York Times. All the federal agencies do something pertinent to their own area, some of them better than others but I give them all at least as much credence as the mainstream media or the various special interest groups. The factual data is usually reliable. If they get anything wrong somebody will challenge them on it.
Then there are the blogs, it’s true there is a lot of misinformation floating around but there again that’s a problem with the mainstream media too. Sometimes it rises to the level of disinformation as famously happened in the last presidential campaign when Dan Rather got caught using phony documents to smear George Bush’s service record. It was the blogs that pointed it out and it’s questionable whether the regular press would have reported it otherwise. Many of them agreed with Dan, a lie told in the service of a greater truth isn’t really a lie. The blogs have a correcting mechanism in Snopes. If you want to know if it’s true that the Post Office issued stamps commemorating Muslim holidays (they did) or that you have to register your cell phone number on the national do-not-call list (you don’t) just check it out on Snopes. When something fishy starts getting around somebody will likely spot it and report it. The regular media are largely left to police themselves and they are prone to “stand by their stories” even when they are obviously wrong. Rather still stands by his.
Wikipedia may be the best thing that has happened in the encyclopedia business since Denis Diderot published the first Encyclopédie in the eighteenth century. I get more search hits on Wikipedia than anything else, including when I looked up how to spell Encyclopédie. They get something wrong too every now and then but they are pretty good about corrections, it’s free, and there are carefully researched and well written articles in it on a greater variety of subjects than Diderot could ever have imagined.
Of course the problem with all this is that you have to be interested, and you have to have time. Most of us are so busy and so deluged with information that nothing more than a sound bite can get through. But if you are interested and can take the time the information is not only likely to be there, it’s easy to find. The implications are profound.
That was brought home to me this month with reporting on the Initial Benchmark Assessment Report on Iraq submitted to Congress. You don’t have to read what some self important hack masquerading as a journalist thinks about the report. You can read the report. It’s right there on the White House web site. It’s about 25 pages so it isn’t for everybody but it’s written in readable prose and if you are interested you can form your own opinion. You might wonder whether any of the reporters who’ve had so much to say about it actually read it themselves. There are also position papers there on everything from the economy to health care. It really is a wealth of information and since so much of the news is politically oriented, it’s a priceless source.
The State Department has a pretty good web site too. If you want to know what the Ambassador to Portugal thinks, ask him. A half hour’s browsing two or three times a week just might give you a different perspective. They put their own spin on things but then so does the New York Times. All the federal agencies do something pertinent to their own area, some of them better than others but I give them all at least as much credence as the mainstream media or the various special interest groups. The factual data is usually reliable. If they get anything wrong somebody will challenge them on it.
Then there are the blogs, it’s true there is a lot of misinformation floating around but there again that’s a problem with the mainstream media too. Sometimes it rises to the level of disinformation as famously happened in the last presidential campaign when Dan Rather got caught using phony documents to smear George Bush’s service record. It was the blogs that pointed it out and it’s questionable whether the regular press would have reported it otherwise. Many of them agreed with Dan, a lie told in the service of a greater truth isn’t really a lie. The blogs have a correcting mechanism in Snopes. If you want to know if it’s true that the Post Office issued stamps commemorating Muslim holidays (they did) or that you have to register your cell phone number on the national do-not-call list (you don’t) just check it out on Snopes. When something fishy starts getting around somebody will likely spot it and report it. The regular media are largely left to police themselves and they are prone to “stand by their stories” even when they are obviously wrong. Rather still stands by his.
Wikipedia may be the best thing that has happened in the encyclopedia business since Denis Diderot published the first Encyclopédie in the eighteenth century. I get more search hits on Wikipedia than anything else, including when I looked up how to spell Encyclopédie. They get something wrong too every now and then but they are pretty good about corrections, it’s free, and there are carefully researched and well written articles in it on a greater variety of subjects than Diderot could ever have imagined.
Of course the problem with all this is that you have to be interested, and you have to have time. Most of us are so busy and so deluged with information that nothing more than a sound bite can get through. But if you are interested and can take the time the information is not only likely to be there, it’s easy to find. The implications are profound.
posted by Onfoot at 12:58 PM
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