This column is dedicated to the intersection of technology and traditional news media. With less than a week to go before America elects a new president, that intersection is looking more and more like the scene of a multi-vehicle pileup. The victims: democracy, the average voter, my patience. For me, the most telling collision of the past few weeks — the one that serves as the best example of the old vs. new media/bias vs. objectivity paradigm that’s now all the rage — was the Oct. 23 WFTV-Orlando satellite interview with Democratic vice presidential candidate Joe Biden.
Renay,
While many of us are well aware that mainstream blogging and professional journalism are not equivalent, the difference is all but lost on the masses.
Readers/viewers tend to criticize media coverage with which they disagree, regardless the credibility of the news source or the quality of the research behind a story. They hope to find issues with an article, no matter how small and irrelevant, only for the purpose of discrediting it. They're not out to prove that they're right, but to provide "opinion as evidence" that their opponents are less than truthful (to imply that the opponents must be wrong).
I read blogs with a more skeptical eye, and even then mostly in the context of entertainment. So few offer opinion based on facts.
You may be right, but its only a sign of how far the main media has fallen, that, instead of dealing with real issues, they hunt around the internet for trivial gibberish. Then, this is the trend anyway. Don't do anything that rocks the parent companies boat, fire, then ruin the career, of anyone that does so anyway, flash a lot of stuff on the TV that distracts from real information, and thus, you never have to do any research, on *anything*. This is why so called reporters on various "talk shows" are so nice for the companies. They can pick some loud mouth idiot with opinions, who is willing to ignore issues that directly effect the companies, then have them lie, slander, distort and misinform, all they want, and at worst, if a lot of people write in, they might have to bring on some token person from the other side to "balance" things (while usually ignoring or shouting them down, unless they just pick someone even more ignorant and clueless to "support" that side's views).
Why should the main stream offer anything less of an echo chamber than the internet, when their whole goal has become one of, "Lets spend 5 minutes on 'issues', then 25 on trivial BS, its all about info-tainment right? And people don't want to know the bad stuff, unless its like, a war, or a flood, or something else we can't get by with ignoring."
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Internet Echo Chamber Drowns Out Real Campaign Issues
Posted by: Renay San Miguel October 31, 2008 08:30 AMThis column is dedicated to the intersection of technology and traditional news media. With less than a week to go before America elects a new president, that intersection is looking more and more like the scene of a multi-vehicle pileup. The victims: democracy, the average voter, my patience. For me, the most telling collision of the past few weeks — the one that serves as the best example of the old vs. new media/bias vs. objectivity paradigm that’s now all the rage — was the Oct. 23 WFTV-Orlando satellite interview with Democratic vice presidential candidate Joe Biden.
While many of us are well aware that mainstream blogging and professional journalism are not equivalent, the difference is all but lost on the masses.
Readers/viewers tend to criticize media coverage with which they disagree, regardless the credibility of the news source or the quality of the research behind a story. They hope to find issues with an article, no matter how small and irrelevant, only for the purpose of discrediting it. They're not out to prove that they're right, but to provide "opinion as evidence" that their opponents are less than truthful (to imply that the opponents must be wrong).
I read blogs with a more skeptical eye, and even then mostly in the context of entertainment. So few offer opinion based on facts.
Why should the main stream offer anything less of an echo chamber than the internet, when their whole goal has become one of, "Lets spend 5 minutes on 'issues', then 25 on trivial BS, its all about info-tainment right? And people don't want to know the bad stuff, unless its like, a war, or a flood, or something else we can't get by with ignoring."