Stephen’s Statements A little bit of everything from Stephen Duncan Jr, a Software Developer in Portland, Oregon

Thursday, October 14, 2004

MSM Gets it Wrong Again

Journalists do Research? Hah!

Oh, I'm blogging as a Democrat? Well, I read it in the New York Times, so it's probably true. Did Rutenberg read enough of my blog to see that I'm voting for Bush, or is he just concluding from the fact that I don't mind saying that I observed spittle in the corner of Bush's mouth that I must be opposed to him? Maybe Rutenberg is assuming that these bloggers are all so partisan that if they say one thing against a candidate, they must say everything against that candidate. Why no referrals from the New York Times on Sitemeter? WaPo made my name into a link, but the Times doesn't do links. In fact, where WaPo has the ellipsis above, the Times has "on Althouse.com," which is neither the name of this blog nor the URL. And why two b's in "Web blogger"?

First of all, MSM stands for "Main-Stream Media", for those who haven't seen the abbreviation pop up before. Secondly: Almost all the instances I can think of where someone I know or have read personally talk about an article about them, the article is always inaccurate. The myth that journalists usually do a lot of reasearch and fact-checking, and are therefore a more legitimate source than other sources, is completely absurd by my experience. I mean, my college newspaper did a short fluff piece on me (random student profile article), and got things wrong. Sure, that's a case of someone who's not quite a journalist yet; but they were only a couple years away.