Needed: a center-right wire service
We all feel pretty much the same way when we read the tired, lazy misstatements of the AP and Reuters. You know, things like the nutty claim that 100,000 Iraqis were killed by the US (see The Age of Unreason for an update). Or this from Reuters:
Virtually no one disagrees human activity is fueling global warming, and a global treaty signed in Kyoto, Japan, aims to reduce polluting emissions. But the world’s biggest polluter, the United States, has withdrawn from the 1997 treaty, saying its provisions would hurt the U.S. economy.
Meehl’s team ran two computer simulations of climate change — complex programs, he said, that took months to run on supercomputers. Those models included as many variables as the researchers could think of, such as human carbon emissions, other pollution, current temperatures and their rate of change, emissions from volcanoes, changes in solar radiation and shifts in the ozone layer.
Comments: (a) there are plenty of people who disagree; and (b) the US did not withdraw from the treaty — the Senate never ratified it.
And how about the AP, about whose bias we’ve written any number of articles. Care for a friendly profile of Ward Churchill, who “won’t back down?” Or how about an article on ANWR which falsely portrays the state’s enthusiasm about drilling as merely an “official” reaction, while the people are skeptical or worse.
As we have said repeatedly, the lazy and biased reporting from the Old Media will continue as long as they are around, since they believe they see things objectively, and it is we who are off our nut. One Tamara Baker, author of such gems as Bush May Be Planting WMDs in Iraq and Humiliated Corporate-Whore Press Seeks To Trash Watchdog Web Site, sums up matters for us in a Star-Tribune op-ed quoted by Powerline:
David Brock, a former conservative activist who now runs a media-watchdog group called Media Matters for America, agrees with Franke-Ruta that Republicans’ ultimate aim is the destruction of all objective reporting, so that they can say whatever they want, true or not, and get away with it: “Their explicit goal is to get us to the point where there are blue [state] facts and red [state] facts.”
In other words, Republicans for decades have wanted to control the press much as Joseph Stalin and Adolf Hitler did, by attacking and attempting to discredit independent journalism, and for them blogs are just the latest tool in their war. That’s definitely newsworthy, but outside of the blogosphere, few publications will dare state this.
Leaving aside the violation of Godwin’s Law, Baker’s analysis has much to recommend it. One of the functions filled by the blogosphere is that of a center-right Associated Press, as we have said previously. Now it is perhaps time to go a step further: maybe there is a way to actually make money by crafting an alternative to the AP and Reuters which uses the prodigious talents of the blogosphere.
I’m not sure yet, but it is certainly worthy of some real study. The market need is there and isn’t going away.