QotD: Comparing old media to blogging

I'm not going to jump up and down all over the media on this one, because clusterfargs like this are an editor's worst scenario, and no one wants to have a mistake like this happen on their watch. At some point you have to pull the trigger; presses have to roll. There is an assumption of trust when it comes to wire services, just as there's an assumption of trust with your favorite bloggers: they're acting in good faith to the best of their knowledge. This would be a watershed moment if you thought the mainstream media sources were infallible, but if who thinks that anymore? Who ever did? It's not the big errors like this that annoy me — it's the overall tone of the papers that grates, the omissions, the ideological elisions, the pigheaded indifference to historicity, the wimpy even-handedness so intent on non-judgmental objective reporting you half expect them to call a murder-suicide a "Double homicide." It's accurate, but doesn't quite convey the flavor of the event.

Reading the national / international news section of the paper is like putting your head in a thin bubble. Then you fire up the browser, hit the nets, and the bubble pops.

James Lileks, The Bleat, 2006-01-05