September 15, 2004
From the desk of Mindles H. Dreck:You're either with us or you're with the bloggers
Pinch Sulzberger lashes out at the hoi polloi and proves he is both a snob and a stasist (via Kaus):
This takes us to another important on-line phenomenon, the rise of bloggers. These individuals publish web logs that offer an ongoing narrative of their thoughts and observations. Some are professional journalists, but the vast majority of them are just folks with something on their minds.While some of these individuals are making a serious and thoughtful contribution to our global dialogue, too many simply contribute to the sense that we're in the midst of an opinion-ridden free-for-all.
Well, excuse us. Journalists vs. "just folks with something on their minds"; "serious and thoughtful" vs. "opinion-ridden free-for-all". Such manicheanism.
The Scribe is troubled. Some intrepid new group blog needs to name themselves "Opinion-Ridden Free-for-All" (or that could be AI's slogan!).
UPDATE: More tired defenders of the establishment weigh in:
"Information Anarchy"; "It hurts because now anyone can publish on the Web. You have people who are politically aligned raising questions about our standards, but there is no attention given to their standards."
It hurts, it hurts us. Nasty bloggerses have no precious standards.
Posted by Mindles H. Dreck at September 15, 2004 10:08 PM | TrackBack | Technorati inbound linksIt's as though everyone has an opinion and wants to express it! Worse yet, they want to enter into a dialogue with others about their personal opinions. Sometimes they even have opinions about important political subjects. The horror! What's next? Will the dirty, ignorant, unwashed masses try to replace elements of our national government and use their opinions to choose the replacements? I scoff at the very notion.
Is anyone else struck by the parallel to the invention of the printing press?
I seem to recall the Church argued that common folk shouldn't be allowed to read or own books. How could they possibly be trusted to interpret them correctly?
No doubt this observation has already been made at least a dozen times. But I haven't seen it yet, so here it is again.
It's somewhat surprising that they're so open about their "It's not what you know or what you say, it's who you are" attitude.
I wonder what other logical fallacies are SOP in the MSM.
It's become incresingly clear that American leftism is not so much a body of ideas as a badge of class identification. Recent comments by the MSM just further demonstrate that many of these people consider themselves to be members of an aristocracy.
Is that iraqwarwrong blog a parody? It is, right?
Tsk tsk (not on the main thrust of the post itself) but...
"hoi polloi" means "the people" or "the masses". The term "hoi" is the Greek word for "the" when used before a plural. Hence, "hoi polloi" does not need to be preceeded by the definite article "the".
Russtovich
BTW - this link (http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=hoi%20polloi) goes on to say that using the term "the" for phrases borrowed from other languages is perfectly acceptable, and criticism of such usage borders on the pedantic. Guilty as charged. :)
Thanks to two troubled years of Greek (along with my Latin), I knew that. But it is still jarring when you don't precede it with the article. On balance, fewer comments when violating the Greek rule as opposed to fracturing the conventional usage.
News stories are told by story tellers - any simularity to real information is probably accidental. Since Al Gore invented the internet, its now possible for me to quickly find someone with more or different information on a subject than can be printed in a daily newspaper or broadcast on a daily news program. While much of whats available online may be of questionable value, it often provides reference to other published material on a subject. (I prefer academic peer reviewed studies, as opposed to reporter reviewed reports)
I' would also like to add - I've been around just enough news worthy events to recognize that what I experienced was not what was reported.
I suspect that people become reporters not to tell the truth, but because they want to help people. This leads to stories being skewed toward the attention getting, as opposed to the factual.
Basically, in my occasionally humble opinion, if its in the news, it so unusual that I probably don't have to worry about it.
Mark - I suspect many people really do become reporters because they want to tell "The Truth." Unfortunately, for some of them (e.g Mr. Rather?), The Truth may be quite different from facts and reality. But since their goal is to tell The Truth, it's perfectly fine (in their minds) to ignore any conflicting facts.
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