Huffington Shows Old Media the Door

How comes you stand on Arianna on this one is really puzzling to me. I thought your piece was superb barring that final statement. Arriana's vision for 'New Media' would certainly leave the world worse than what 'old media' has already done. In saying there is only one side to a story makes that person of no difference from the likes of Osama! Old media may have its problems, prejudices and flaws but i will still prefer a world with 'old media' than live in Arriana's world of 'new media'.

To answer your question on who should decide, should the likes of Arriana and her band of liberal thinkers be the ones to decide what is truth for us all ? Were does she has the authority to think that she can decide on what we should believe when she has display her unflinching loyalty to a particular group? So let her leave us in peace to decide our individual and collective destinies. Whatever she says is "truthiness" at its highest degree!!!!

As someone who published his own newsletter for a dozen years, and since then have worked on the Web side of newspapers, I agree and disagree with all of the comments!

Yes, the late-20th Century U.S. tradition of journalism was the aspiration to objectivity and fact-checking. (Not at all true around the turn of the century, or in other parts of the world.)

But circumstances continue to change, not always for the better. Institution after institution, pillars of our American society, turned out to have rot in them --

Army: My Lai massacre, Tuskegee 'experiments' 

Government: Johnson's made-up, or at least exaggerated incident in the Gulf of Tonkin that got Congress to back the expansion of our troops in Vietnam, Reagan's Sandinista scares every time Congress was about to cut funding, and the arms-drugs-Contra-VP Bush connections, and so on.

Church: sexual abuse scandals

Social scientists: believeing and/or implanting false accusations in the minds of children setting off nationwide panic over daycare. 

 Industry: waves of corruption getting exposed every decade or so. Lobbyists: cigarettes aren't bad for you, etc., etc.

Press: reporting what the President (this one, previous ones, too) says without fact-checking. Occasional fake Pulitzer-prizewinning stories slipping through. Reporting ten thousand protesters in advance of Iraq war, instead of the police report of between half a million and a million. (New York Times, AP both did this, more than once.)

 So the breakdown of the old truism: "freedom of the press belongs to them that owns one" into the proliferation of "Wordpresses" on the Web offers possibilities for instant correction, at least. The problem of false blog postings being perceived as true seems no worse than the persistence of the belief that Saddam had something to do with 9/11, despite years of evidence to the contrary. The larger statement of the problem is the persistence of false beliefs in the face of any and all evidence to the contrary.

On balance, then, I stand with Arianna on this one! 

RE: [The main problem with old media, Huffington said this morning, is the tendency to "present every story and every issue as if it has two sides."]. The media presents BOTH sides of a story? HA HA ha ha ha ha…really? When? Where? Wha…wha… what planet is she from? Give ME a break! There is a big difference between being accountable with the accuracy of the facts and being accountable with the REALITY of what those facts actually represent without a personal bias. After all, perception (a bias) is often ones reality. The Old vs. the New media still suffers from that age-old affliction…bias (as Brian Newby alluded to). The biases we all have really permeate our being, our human being. To claim that bias does NOT exist in journalism is pure unadulterated denial. There are enough articles, studies etc that examine Media bias to show that this exists. When Old or New Media can face REALITY that the bias IS there…then maybe…MAYBE they can work on truth.

RE: lpricci49’s comment, “…we do not want truth to be something we can all agree on”, hmmm...why not? Truth should be PRECISELY something all people can agree on - sun is hot, the Earth is round, water is wet, the media IS biased. I know, I know these aren’t really “media” debatable items by themselves. How about the sun is too hot because of the holes in the ozone, the Earth is round because of the cosmic evolutionary processes (or because God created it that way?), water is wet (or seems wet) to human skin because we lost our scales millions of years ago climbing out of the primordial soup (I used to believe in evolution, what a joke), the Media IS BIASED (...well that’s just a fact). Of course then if it were the case that we all agreed on truth…with no differing opinions….yawn…I guess it could get boring.

She certainly fine-tunes her audience by taking one view as truth.

But take away her ego and isn't she just what newspapers were 100+ years ago?  Most major markets today have only one or two newspapers but in the hey-day (and, yes, the hey-day was before "back in the day," and some time after the first Sunday), people expected to read slanted accounts, or at least things written from a perspective from which they would likely agree.

She's not providing a service, enlightening the world about truth.  She helps move the national debate by saying things that she mostly believes, targeting others who think like her and her contributors.

I think there is a place for the Huffington Post.  But it's no more the standard for accurate news than any of my posts, and I say that with complete fondness for most of my posts.

The Huffington Post sure made a decision on whose side it's on. Here are some of today's headlines:

 I think that people are entitle to their opinion and to write about it, but they shouldn't try to be a news reporter if they are not going to check sources, facts, etc.

I'm a little confused on what Arianna was trying to say... if it's that she can express her opinion, but still report news (doing the fact checking, etc), I agree - people shouldn't hide anymore. If it's neither, then I don't.

Thanks for pointing that out, hounhosp. I thought that was one of the most ludicrous points she made -- among all the other ludicrous points she made. Bloggers are notorious for printing rumors and not checking facts. Their goal, as Arrington and the boys at TechCrunch have outwardly said time and again, is to get stories up as fast as possible. (First on Techmeme!) If that means printing an incorrect fact or two, ah, well, so be it (acc. to them). Sure, there are also "old-media" journalists who haven't done their jobs correctly. But this isn't a trademark of old media that's changed with the birth of new media. It's just sloppiness. It's absurd to think bloggers and vloggers and floggers (wait...) aren't sloppy or to hold them accountable for every snarky word they say.

But, then again, if you ask Huff, there's only one side to this story anyway. So I'm sure we're simply wrong by her standards.

It is not true to say that old media are not accountable. The ethic of the job requires that journalists present information that are truthworthy and can be verified. According to the post 'Hello, Mom? What Makes a Source Reliable?', an old maxime in jounalism attributed to Arnold Dornfeld says : "When your mother says she loves you, check it out." Journalists have always been taught to verify their sources. That is what many do. It may happen that some cases of "untruth" and unverified information and facts arise in the traditional media, but this is not always so. I agree that the new media (blogs, online communities etc) offer a new plateform for everybody to give their opinions, but we all know that not everything presented there is  true and ethical. What we should know is that both media have their weaknesses. And there is no use  throwing the traditional media away and embrasse only the new media.

John Sliber of Boston University (http://www.bu.edu/philo/faculty/silber.html) once delivered a very moving speech about how 'real' American values were being replaced with 'counterfeit' values. 

One such exchange I remember very well:

• The real value: "Everyone is entitled to their opinion"
• The counterfeit value: "Everyone's opinion is as good as the next guy"

And let us not mistake Digg, Del.icio.us, Reddit  and Google Rank  as an arbiter of truth: we do not want truth to be something we can all agree on- that would be Colbert's "Truthiness", no more.

Big problem we all face; when we read, and more when we write.

Lawernce Ricci
www.EmbeddedInsider.com

John Wayne was 34 years old when the war started. He was divorced with four kids. He served this country in his own way throughout his career. My comment was on the roles he played, at any rate. I'm not very good at being judgmental. 

I understand that everyone must be put in their place in this society, though.