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  2. Incendiary weekend post on bloggers vs. journalists

Incendiary weekend post on bloggers vs. journalists

By clock on February 7, 2009.

When I see news on MSM I check with trusted bloggers if the news is to be believed. Trusted bloggers? Takes time and work to find out who.

I automatically do NOT believe anything coming from corporate media. I check blogs to see what they say if I catch some news on MSM first (rarely these days). Some blogs can be trusted 100% of the time, some 90%, some occasionally, some never. It takes time and effort to figure out who is who, but that effort is worth it - you get immunized from MSM lies. You also learn the skills of critically reading between the lines of MSM and evaluating their "news" for accuracy and validity yourself.

And you always check a multitude of trusted bloggers, never just one, no matter how trusted. So, why should people trust a single MSM source? Beats me! I don't even trust the multitudes.

And some blogs are just for entertainment, filling the function of comics pages in the newspaper. Usually funnier than Family Circus. Not everything is politics. That's perfectly OK.

More importantly, collections of bloggers and all of their readers put together can organize actions that have real-world power. And that is just the beginning.

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The obituaries page is funnier than Family Circus.

As for "trusted bloggers", the primary value of most of those is not verification of a given account - how many of them have a reporter on the scene to confirm a breaking story? - but that they'll have some background info to fill in the gaps, deliberate & otherwise, in the corporate versions.

By Pierce R. Butler (not verified) on 08 Feb 2009 #permalink

Why separate the two? One can be trusted and at the same time highly entertaining. Formal language is both dull and raises flags about veracity.

CPP, I read the comment. I laughed. Mrs.Coturnix asked "What? Did PhysioProf post a comment?"

Bora, I think the reason for your information gathering style is because you are a scientist first. Your "theory of reality" is stronger than your "theory of mind".

The way you build a robust âtheory of realityâ is by making it all interconnected. A theory of reality is built from the bottom up, from diverse facts that are connected and interrelated. A good theory of reality has holographic and fractal properties. It is true at every scale, it is true when pieces of it are removed. Untrue parts donât fit and with a big enough and robust enough theory of reality they stand out and become obviously wrong before they are removed.

A theory of mind is built from the top down. It is imposed from without and requires no internal consistency.

Politics is mostly theory of mind. Science is mostly theory of reality.

Just to elaborate a little. With enough facts, they only fits together into one reality. That is the problem that MSM has, unless they can limit the number of facts (or lies) that are strung together, they cannot build a consistent whole picture. The only reason a picture isnât consistent is when some parts of it are wrong.

That is what the Bush administration tried to do with secrecy. Limit the facts and you can limit the pictures that can be built out of those facts.

PRB is exactly right. It isnât the few dribbles of facts on a breaking story that the bloggers have access too, but to the vast quantity of facts that are the background that are necessary to see where the breaking story fits with everything else.

The Anthrax story is a case in point. The FBI put out this story, obviously to frame one particular guy who happened to be dead after they had put excruciating pressure on him. The FBIâs story had a lot of very obvious holes in it. No way would he have been convicted. What has come out paints a picture (to me) of either gross incompetence or deliberate obstruction of justice or both.

MSM canât deal with a story like that because reporters donât know enough to know when they are being lied to by their âsourcesâ.