Monday, July 26, 2010

Motive + Interest = LIAR

I'm slowly working on a rather longer post on media manipulation. For now, just an aside on the current furor over the Journolist nonsense which seems to have confirmed for about 0.01% of the population (responsible for about 10% of all comments on blog posts) the reality of a vast media conspiracy. Establishing that someone had both motive of and intent to look into a subject does not in itself mean that what they wrote on it can't be trusted. It only definitely establishes that they're interested enough in the subject to look into it further. Until specific instances of manipulation, repression of data, or poor research can be established none of the e-mails written about so far in fact indicates that there is any reason to discount any of these stories based on this information alone. Of course, it gives good reason to question op-ed pages for the few of you out there that couldn't have otherwise figured out that op-ed pages reflect opinions and should be carefully read.

2 comments:

  1. Will you be adding yesterday's Wikileaks.org media news to your longer post on media manipulation?

    "Three news organizations -- the New York Times, the Guardian, and Der Spiegel -- today published explosive reports on a treasure trove of more than 91,000 documents that were obtained by Wikileaks, the self-proclaimed whistleblower site."

    Logs of war: Do the Wikileaks documents really tell us anything new?

    ReplyDelete
  2. I haven't decided on wikileaks yet, too much to read over that I haven't had time for.

    From what I've read so far, I don't think the documents tell us much that's new though it provides more factual basis for ideas that previously relied heavily on the authority of experts giving their opinions on Afghanistan. It doesn't seem to be anything that hasn't been said so far but providing another line of evidence is a valuable contribution even if it doesn't present a previously unheard argument.

    ReplyDelete