For God's sake, with a system like this, if the country came under enemy attack, the only people who'd know it would be bloggers!
My mom went to Oklahoma University, so she noticed when the crawl at the bottom of the TV said that someone had blown himself up there. But she searched and searched for additional information: nothing else that night on the TV nor in the local paper in the morning. She told me about it, and I found some info on blogs. But why did we have to turn to blogs for reporting of such an event?
Eric of Classical Values has a post with lots of details about what the media is and is not reporting. Funny how a Muslim convert who tries to enter a sports arena and blow himself up isn't news...
Posted by Sarah at October 6, 2005 08:45 AM | TrackBackCNN is a blog?
http://www.cnn.com/2005/US/10/04/oklahoma.explosion.ap/index.html
No, CNN is not a blog. And CNN did not mention anything about the guy's connections to radical Muslims. I'm pretty sure that was the point of Sarah's post, but thanks for giving us the link to MSM's watered down generic non-news.
Posted by: Oda Mae at October 7, 2005 01:00 PMThrough Googling I saw some blogs which said he had been linked to an Islamic center. Looked like unconfirmed rumor at this point; I saw no hard evidence on the two or three sites I read, anyway. Maybe it will turn out to be true; I can't say it won't. Should the media report it before it is confirmed, though? If they did, and then it turned out to be false, then bloggers would be blasting them for that.
Posted by: Pericles at October 8, 2005 03:20 AMBut journalists apparently got tons of things wrong about New Orleans, which they reported without confirmation. They ran with Flushing the Koran too. It just seems a bit selective to me.
Posted by: Sarah at October 8, 2005 10:30 AMFair enough. Although I think that the errors in the New Olreans reporting were actually errors in a conservative direction rather than a liberal one. The original reports depicted New Orleans's poor welfare recipients as vicious animals, more or less. I saw several conservative commentators jump on this point in various ways, for example to criticize welfare. You posted a link to the "Two Tribes" essay that was in this vein, and another was all over the Internet. I think that the media has a huge bias toward sensationalism, more than they have any political bias. It comes from the fct that most of the media is now in the nads of a few profit-hungry corporations, and the ethos of serving the public is breaking down.
Also, I think that it is sometimes easy to pick on small mistakes in the details of reports to ignore the substance. Okay, so the Koran wasn't flushed... intstead, it got urine sprayed on it. Would that story coming out have been any better? The fact that CBS ran with faked National Guard memos about Bush was a big win for Republicans, because it distracted people from the other evidence. I remember a great quote from the secretary of the Texas ANG unit. She said she knew the memos were fake, because she would have been the one to type them and didn't and because the commander ould never have put such things on paper. But she went on to add that the memos did capture exactly the sentiments that the commander freely expressed verbally about Bush around the office. :)
Posted by: Pericles at October 8, 2005 02:27 PMBombs at Georgia Tech and UCLA too.
Once is a fluke.
Twice a coincidence.
Three times is enemy action.