We, as Americans, always seem to trust what we see on the news, and trust even more what we read in the major papers. Perhaps we should always be more careful to take everything with a grain of salt.
Here's a great essay by Adam Curry, former MTV VJ and now adamant blogger, about the lies told in the press about Dutch politician Pim Fortuyn after he was assassinated. It is an interesting read since Curry had the inside scoop -- he was getting information live from his friends on the phone who worked at the place of the assassination, while at the same time seeing false information spewed out on TV and the major news feeds.
Posted by Eli at May 8, 2002 11:16 PMWhy should we trust Curry any more than anyone else out there?
Posted by: Naysayer at May 12, 2002 07:25 PMThat's a great question, anonymous naysayer. Perhaps we shouldn't trust some schmuck that we've never heard of (which isn't a very accurate description of Curry) more than the New York Times or other news sources. We should take it all with at least a grain of salt.
But there are a couple of interesting things about blogs that can make them more reputable. First, we could get to know Curry easily by reading what he has had to say in the past. Bloggers put themselves out there, and you can hold them to it because there is a public record of their discourse. This is also true of journalists, but blogs seem to have a more open and personal voice. You can get to know a blogger's opinions, what taints his views one way or another, by reading his blog. That's not always easy to figure out with a journalist.
The second reason to trust Curry, or most bloggers, more than a journalist or reporter is that he is closer to the source of the story. Reporters, try as they might, often get a story wrong. They don’t quite know what is going on, they misinterpret a quote, maybe even hear a quote incorrectly. Bloggers are often experts in the fields they are reporting on. This is clearly the case when Dave Winer (http://scripting.com/ ) talks about blogging and Joel Spolsky (http://joelonsoftware.com/ ) talks about software development. I think this is also true of Curry, although to a lesser extent in this case. He is probably more of an expert on the politics of Fortuyn than the foreign press that labeled him as "a hard right winger" or "anti-Muslim." At the very least, he gives the opinion of what a Dutchman might think of Fortuyn that we wouldn’t get from our regular slew of journalists, and that opinion gives us more reason to take what the journalists that called him "a hard right winger" with more than a grain of salt.
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