The Iron Yuppie

Roger L. Simon: How Duranty Happened

As it is my custom, I'm continuing to comment on stories weeks after they happen. The above piece by Mr. Simon says that the Al Qaaqa missing weapons story is on the level of Mr. Duranty, the NY Times reporter, white washing Stalin and still winning a pullitzer prize. There used to be a great Usenet (yes Usenet, that thing before chat rooms and forums) saying (Goodwin's law for the curious) that the first person to mention Hitler in an argument automatically loses. The law captures a wonderful microcosm representation of human discussions. Any given discussion will continue until one compares the other side to the most evil thing known to fully demonize the other side. To bring it back to this story, let's say that what Mr. Simon says is exactly accurate... does this really equate to painting someone who is killing millions of people as a good guy? This may be a bit of an exaggeration.

The other interesting point about the above discussion is how intensely opposed to the main stream media these people are because they perceive bias in what the reporters are saying. A person has the ability to see bias in EVERYTHING and the more partisan he is, the more likely he will be able to see it. Beyond that, bloggers LOVE to tout the main stream media is dead and that blogs are the wave of the future. This has echos of 5 years ago, when people said priceline deserved to be worth more than all the airlines combined, webvan would revolutionize groceries for everyone everywhere and the front page of AOL was more valuable than all the networks, movies and radio stations put together. Look, I do not deny blogging adds a facet to the media that was not present before, but I have yet to see a story that was truly generated out of blogging, rather than just reacted to by the bloggers. I fully admit I have a limited view of the blogsphere (as everyone must, given it's size and a human's bandwidth) but this is just an aspect to the media... it's not the alpha and the omega. Please people, use perspective!