One of the all time great examples is Deborah Howell’s famous column trying to frame the Jack Ambramoff scandal as a bi-partisan, “he gave money to both” thing. She was completely dumbfounded that her attempt to grab a little truthtelling cred and innocence points for the Post was met with such fury.

When people say newspapers are accurate because of editing, I keep wanting to shove a bunch of clippings of overdramatized stories in their face.

Though, I’m increasingly seeing the same thing in blogs, too. But at least, in blogs, it’s alot easier to find alternative versions, which helps, since different people oversell different stories, and the different telling also tells me alot.

Anatole. those “massive floods” (especially Iraqi bloggers) was and remains the only way of understanding what’s happening in Iraq on the ground. No single paper comes close. Give me the chaos any day. And, of course, just like with newspapers, 90% of everything is junk. Except, since we have more choice, it’s easier to find the other 10%.

Of course, nowhere can we be more certain that we are in the presence of ideology than when we assured of its absence.

This is basically right. But that bias is modified by another: a bias in favor of advertising the political innocence of the news tellers themselves. My argument:

Who’s-gonna-win is portable, reusable from cycle to cycle, and easily learned by newcomers to the press pack. Journalists believe it brings readers to the page and eyeballs to the screen. It “works” regardless of who the candidates are, or where the nation is in historical time. No expertise is actually needed to operate it. In that sense, it is economical. (And when everyone gets the winner wrong the “surprise” becomes a good story for a few days.) Who’s going to win — and what’s their strategy — plays well on television, because it generates an endless series of puzzles toward which journalists can gesture as they display their savviness, which is the unofficial religion of the mainstream press.

But the biggest advantage of horse-race journalism is that it permits reporters and pundits to “play up their detachment.” Focusing on the race advertises the political innocence of the press because “who’s gonna win?” is not an ideological question. By asking it you reaffirm that yours is not an ideological profession. This is experienced as pleasure by a lot of mainstream journalists.

I disagree that massive floods of information don’t affect our decision making – we disperse our concentration over minutia and we tend to lose most consideration for a bigger picture, be it ethical concerns, policies vs gaffes in politics or even intellectual effort to analyze the facts ourselves rather than lazily look for some pundit/blogger/what’s his name who already did it in a complaisant way. That’s why we amazingly emerge (after hours of online browsing) somewhat fatigued and ever so subtly brain-washed albeit in good faith of having found scores of similarly thinking (idiots) who had successfully put behind them the simplest of notions that “lying is not good”… or other ethical constraints. How else would you explain why there is buyers to Clinton’s Bosnia stories, or the stories of how an “incest dad feels about himself” (apart from psychiatry interns).

Or that Hanna Montana (who’s that in all honesty?! do we really expect teenagers to read risqué coverage?) hinted at exposing her goodies come her sweet sixteen or something like that. Who cares, a normal person would think. How very interesting and controversial the same person would yield at the end of the day (after hours of browsing that is). Here we see how an esthetical concept (a beautiful photograph) was and quite intentionally twisted beyond repair into a perverse dispute of who gets to goggle at whose kids and in what state. Thanks media!

I just don’t want to pretend that online narrative is good. It useful? maybe it’s evil… for sure and it is here to stay. It is a test of our principles and self-discipline.

But you may be right. While a consolidated media’s (or town square’s) convergence upon a “wrong” fact or narrative certainly inhibits alternative views, the chaos of an environment where the opinions of a large populace that has easy and instant dissemination available certainly has its own obstacles for forming any consensus at all, much less the “true” one.

The great thing is that developments in social media applications are allowing us to dive deeper into the story behind the story - seems like a perfect counter balance.