What News Can You Trust?
7 Comments Published by Charles Douglas on Thursday, March 22, 2007 at 3/22/2007 11:01:00 AM.
If truth is the first casualty in war, then in these days of embedded reporters and government secrecy, our media's ability to accurately portray this war has suffered from shock and awe tactics of the worst variety. Never before have hundreds of honored dead been snuck back into this country in the dead of night to an Air Force base where cameras are kept away from, nor have documents previously made available to the public become "re-classified" in order to obstruct even historians from understanding these events.
I watch the reports and sometimes I can't quite even remember which set of insurgents we are supposed to be fighting, as each different day seems to bring alternating raids by US forces on communities held by Sunni and Shia militias. There hardly seems to be much of a story left to keep straight as Iraq falls into unprecedented chaos, yet we still hear the lies everyday about conflicts both engaged in and yet to come. Just last weekend from ABC comes the "fact" of 60,000 war dead in Iraq, when, as FAIR notes yesterday, the scientific consensus points to a figure between 500,000 and 900,000. Even Debra Saunders is still trying to resurrect the WMD bugaboo of imminent danger from those massive stockpiles of chemical weapons we never found, not to mention those nuclear weapons just around the corner, produced in reactors so well-hidden that four years of occupation has yet to turn them up.
While I appreciate the direction its given us technologically, I don't find Digg to be as effective a tool as it could be, simply because there is nothing to safeguard against malicious "bury" votes on individual stories or videos simply due to personal bias. Thanks to "Media Dissector" Danny Schechter I stumbled upon a new system still in its beta stage, NewsTrust, which like Digg feeds the most popular clips up front by combining up and down votes. Yet unlike Digg, this service rates the raters based on their validation as real persons and not anonymous robots, and gives their vote different weight based on their professional experience in the media, education levels, participation and so on. Readers can give more complete reviews with up to six different variables to calculate their ratings, as well as leave written comments.
While Schechter calls this the "Web 2.0 game" we're jumping into, I think it's a bit more profound than that. We now have the beginnings of an infrastructure to develop real-time accountability for journalists, to each other and to media consumers. The next step is to take the focus of the site on international and national news and make room for competing visions of local events. In our big comeback issue for the Sentinel we intend to have NewsTrust buttons on each of our news articles so that the readers (real, not anonymous) can make their input count.
I watch the reports and sometimes I can't quite even remember which set of insurgents we are supposed to be fighting, as each different day seems to bring alternating raids by US forces on communities held by Sunni and Shia militias. There hardly seems to be much of a story left to keep straight as Iraq falls into unprecedented chaos, yet we still hear the lies everyday about conflicts both engaged in and yet to come. Just last weekend from ABC comes the "fact" of 60,000 war dead in Iraq, when, as FAIR notes yesterday, the scientific consensus points to a figure between 500,000 and 900,000. Even Debra Saunders is still trying to resurrect the WMD bugaboo of imminent danger from those massive stockpiles of chemical weapons we never found, not to mention those nuclear weapons just around the corner, produced in reactors so well-hidden that four years of occupation has yet to turn them up.
While I appreciate the direction its given us technologically, I don't find Digg to be as effective a tool as it could be, simply because there is nothing to safeguard against malicious "bury" votes on individual stories or videos simply due to personal bias. Thanks to "Media Dissector" Danny Schechter I stumbled upon a new system still in its beta stage, NewsTrust, which like Digg feeds the most popular clips up front by combining up and down votes. Yet unlike Digg, this service rates the raters based on their validation as real persons and not anonymous robots, and gives their vote different weight based on their professional experience in the media, education levels, participation and so on. Readers can give more complete reviews with up to six different variables to calculate their ratings, as well as leave written comments.While Schechter calls this the "Web 2.0 game" we're jumping into, I think it's a bit more profound than that. We now have the beginnings of an infrastructure to develop real-time accountability for journalists, to each other and to media consumers. The next step is to take the focus of the site on international and national news and make room for competing visions of local events. In our big comeback issue for the Sentinel we intend to have NewsTrust buttons on each of our news articles so that the readers (real, not anonymous) can make their input count.
Labels: danny schechter, debra saunders, digg, humboldt sentinel, iraq, media, newstrust
