Current Events — HabitableZone

Current Events » in reply to Who is Jason?

Who does he have to be?
Tom Brosz — (archived)

Do you know the background and resume of every person writing for the New York Times? Does who someone is make more difference in a matter of opinions than what one writes? Geez, I hope that doesn't apply here.

For the record, Jason is in the military, and writes largely on military issues, particularly as applied to how the media treats them.

The statement he makes is as "speculative" as the "speculation" that if I drop an anvil on a raw egg, that the egg is going to break. And you know it. Bush would have been shredded by the press for a tenth of the questions that have come up on Kerry. Without alternate sources of news, the questions themselves would never have been asked.

There are tens of thousands of blogs on the web. Of these, I follow maybe a dozen regularly. Not all conservative either. I use my own judgment.

The blogosphere has far more accountability than the mainstream media. Well-known blogs are inspected closely by people from all sides of the political spectrum, and bullshit has a very short half-life. The New York Times has a corrections page. Inside. Somewhere.

I wrote a letter to Nicholas Kristof pointing out a serious omission in his NYT column on nuclear weapons. It vanished into the ether. On the blogs, my comments and arguments on facts usually go smack under the story, to be judged against the main story. Others can add comments under mine. All are visible to everyone else. Odd that a political philosophy that values consensus so highly should not welcome such a process.

I understand that this ticks off the mainstream media, which is used to being the arbiter of what is "news" and what is not, and what to think about it, and it ticks off those who like the cut of the New York Times's jib. Sorry. News has just entered the free market in a big way.

This doesn't make the "approved" sources useless, by any means. But I would lay greater odds of accuracy on a big story that has been filtered through the blogosphere for a couple of weeks than one that shows up in the New York Times one day. This is from experience. Take it how you like.

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