Tuesday, July 06, 2010

Intellectual honesty

A fine piece of rhetoric finds its way into the first comment on Watts up with that, the piece about the current ice extent:
The main stream media has no intellectual honesty. All they have is talking points that the commentators regurgitate from the teleprompter written by their corporate overlords. It's good to see the MSM dying a free market death. Long live the alternative media.
Ruminating (or fulminating if you like) about the shoddy reporting on the Dutch report about the IPCC, one can only agree, especially the last sentence. If it was not for the blogs, particularly, our world would be a very different – think would it would be like if we had to rely on intellectual dwarfs like Richard Black (or "Godzilla" as Biased BBC calls him) for our news and comment, without the opportunity to fight back.

These are now interesting times, as The Times hides behind its paywall in the hope that it can turn a small proportion of its readers into profitable "customers", while the rest of the newspaper industry watches with bated breath, in the hope that Murdoch can pull it off.

The retreat of the newspapers and the general inadequacy of the broadcast media should create a singular opportunity for us, as readers increasingly look elsewhere. So it is interesting to see the Ruminations of Raedwald on the state of the blogosphere, contrasted with his latest post on how The Daily Mail got a story right.

This sort of underlines the fact, as I keep saying, that the blogs and the newspapers are complementary. We need both, developing a symbiotic relationship where we all play to our strengths. I spose a fair division of labour would be that they could do the crap while we do the "honesty" bit and moan about it. As for the slime in the BBC, they just keep ripping us off.

Unless you know different, that is.

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