Tuesday, July 21, 2009
“Blogs Are Best at Debunking Myths That Can Slip Through a Lot of the Traditional Media Outlets"
Guess who just said:
Blogs are best at debunking myths that can slip through a lot of the traditional media outlets.
?
Some rabbid blogger?
A radical proto-terrorist?
A neo-nazi?
Some loser who lives in his mom's basement?
Wrong. Obama just said it.
So next time an Obama official (or someone from a future administration) tries to crack down on free speech on the Web, remind them that President Obama himself has praised blogs as a better news source - better at fact-checking and debunking myths - than the "traditional" corporate media.
4 comments:
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Great catch, George! I'll make that comment go a long way in my work.
ReplyDeleteBut if you notice the context of his statement, and the audience, he was speaking to "progressive bloggers" urging them to push his specific healthcare agenda. While his comment was nebulous enough to be applicable to other bloggers Obama was clearly trying to harness another media source for his agenda. His intentions for calling the bloggers together actually undermine what he said about the usefulness of the blogosphere.
ReplyDeleteHeh.
ReplyDeleteYou mean until he flip flops and changes his mind (AGAIN). The question is, who was his audience. Then you understand why he said it.
The problem with blogging isn't that it doesn't have the capacity to root out facts mainstream outlets often miss, because it does when it wants to.
ReplyDeleteThe problem is that so much blogging is little more than blatant agenda journalism, and it has made that approach an accepted form of discourse on a whole range of current social/political issues.
By doing so, it diminishes the pursuit of objective fact-finding and replaces it with subjective fact-molding. Was Cronkite a liberal or a conservative? No one who watched him for 20 years could tell you at the time, that is certain.
We're getting to the point today where there are no truths, good, bad or ugly; there are merely perception-managed spins on events that masquerade as insightful journalism.
That's not a good thing.