Sunday, August 06, 2006

 

Alternative Media

The blogsphere has caught the MSM out spectacularly this week.

In Australia, Tim Blair exposed a major Australian publication which had fallen for the Jesse Macbeth fraud (follow links here).

Internationally, it would appear Reuters has run an embarrasingly fake photo from Lebanon that seems to be their come-uppance for relying on terrorist stringers to help them get the scoop. Follow links here.

I am savvy enough to know the vast majority of the non-blog reading public will never find out about this and have but a niggling suspicion the media is defective. Most of us know a lot better. The mainstream media is often a disaster.

Which illustrates the point: We need an alternative media.

Depsite their own arrogant claims, I have long thought and easily proven that Indymedia is far from the solution.

Quentin George goes further when he notes that Indymedia is an alternative to the mainstream media...
In the way that drinking out of a toilet is an alternative to drinking from a cup.
Quite.

Comments:
Huh? I don't get it. The Reuters photog that used cloned smoke was caught. It took time for the editors to recall the photo. Is that possibly because Reuters, as a public company must be effiecient? (fewer employees doing more work.) When jobs are cut these things get through.
Are their partisan photogs that would fake stuff? Apparently yes. Would "bloggers" be any different?
I have yet to see a blog that did not take sides in something. Taking sides brings risk of distortion.
 
Reuters was "caught" because of the 'alternative media' of blogs.

Had this happened ten or maybe five years ago, whomever spotted it might make a call to their local newsdesk that may go unanswered.

It is certainly safe to assume the media may not have been held accountable as it was in the examples I cited.

Note I did not suggest blogs are the answer. However blogs by and large don't purport to be a replacement for the mainstream media.

Indymedia does - and fails.
 
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