Posted on 10/18/2008 11:49:07 PM PDT by Jim Robinson
Yada, yada, yada.
~~snip~~
The growing power of rumor is part of a much larger transformation in the way that voters receive information about politics. The old model was a vertical one, where professional journalists delivered their reports to a largely passive audience through television or newspapers. The new model is horizontal, where folks get information from each other and actively pass it on, through e-mail, text messages and viral videos. Everyone is a potential broadcaster.
This "democratization of information" has many benefits - more sources, more perspectives, more choices. In a forum Steve moderated for The International Journal of Press/Politics, Mark Jurkowitz, associate director of the Project for Excellence in Journalism, offered two examples: the incendiary sermons of Obama's pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, and Obama's speech on race and religion.
"Millions more people will see and observe and analyze those incidents online than would ever tune into a newscast showing the clips," Jurkowitz said. "So you are dramatically expanding the universe. (And) people can make up their own minds without any kind of media mediation whatsoever."
But there's also a dark side to this horizontal system. Without "media mediation," without the persistent truth-telling, fact-checking efforts of well-trained professionals, falsehoods can flourish.
The "he's an Arab" smear reached so widely that the New York Times devoted a front-page story to its origins. Its conclusion: After the allegations first appeared in 2004, they were picked up by the conservative Web site FreeRepublic.com "and spread steadily as others elaborated on its claims over the years in e-mail messages, Web sites, and books."
Said Danielle Allen, a Princeton professor who has studied the episode: "It's an example of how the Internet has given power to sources we would have never taken seriously at another point in time."
(Excerpt) Read more at metrowestdailynews.com:80 ...
ROTFLMAO I'm stunned anyone can say this with a straight face... The MSM doesn't outright lie, but they cover the stuff that makes Obama look good - and they ignore or play down the stuff that makes him look bad.
It's the opposite for McCain or any other Republican.
In the larger sense, everything about the MSM is a lie.
McCain is starting to see the MSM for what they really are... and that's good.
Good idea. The thought police of Obama's administration will try to change history - not by doing good for the future, but by destroying the reality of the past.
HaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHa! Ah, Cookie, your are a riot!
One word, Cookie: Dan Rather!
Accountability? ACCOUNTABILITY? This Marxist hack has the unmitigated GALL to question ACCOUNTABILITY after all the crap her profession has pulled?
The not-so-subtle messages flying about throughout this campaign are really getting to the point of scary.
Why would having Arab heritage be a smear? Many American citizens, including native-born citizens, have Arab heritage.
What we here at Free Republic care about is: why does Barack Hussein Obama, Jr. lie about his past? Did he meet Bill Ayers in 1983 when they were both attending school in New York City? When Ayers and Obama, Jr. shared an office on the third floor at 115 S. Sangamon St., Chicago, IL 60607 from 1995-1998, how could Obama, Jr. claim to barely have met the Marxist, hard-core Communist, bomb-building Bill Ayers?
When Bill Ayers ghost-writes your autobiography, doesn’t he have to ask you, Obama, Jr. lots of detailed questions? And doesn’t that take hundreds of hours in the same room?
“The old model where professional journalists”.....and there in lies the problem. There are no more pro journalist out there.
Yeah - how dare we discuss and fact check what they, our overlords, say ?
The self-congratualtory conceit of these people is nauseating. Why can't we think for ourselves, Cokie ? Who appointed you to do it for us ?
Thanks ever so much for educating me.
Well if Cokie happens to read this maybe I can enlighten her. You see Cokie I am studying accounting and taking an auditing class right now.
No way in hell would a CPA firm have an auditor audit the books of a company he or she has a personal interest. Yet the so called non partisan press such as yourself has hired new journalists from various Democratic Party relationships. Such as Chris Matthews or Tim Russert working for Democratic congressmen or yourself being the daughter of a major Democrat.
You see Cokie I have no problem of it being fair if you was a weatherperson or did stories on sports. But no way you can be unbiased about politics.
And another thing, as an accountant no way in hell could I turn in numbers and when questioned where I got them I could claim “unnamed sources”. No public news story should be allowed to use unnamed sources. The temptation to lie is too great.
Also from everything I have seen or heard that the professional ethics thought to the Journalism students isn’t really ethical. I suggest that the profession brings in military or the AICPA to suggest real ethics for journalism.
Hope you read this and think seriously about this Cokie. I am sure Jim Robinson wouldn’t object if you want to get a Freeper handle and post replies to this thread.
Do they mean fact-checking professionals like Dan Rather, or his producers at CBS?
Tell it to Dan Rather and that Mapes b*tch, you stupid whore. I recall Cokie Roberts back in 1995, snorting and snarking at the republican plan to cut taxes and balance the budget. She was such a well-trained professional that she all but guffawed on the air. She was wrong too, of course.
C'mon. Don't you people know who Cokie Roberts is? Her parents, both of them, were foul liberal democrat hacks. She has the disease in her DNA. How else could she have gotten so far with so little talent or intelligence. She's like a red diaper baby.
Just filling the massive Vaccume Kookie, just filling the vaccume. After all Achmed said he was Mooselip on your show?
Pray for W, McCuda and Our Troops
So this is all Al Gore’s fault? He is the inventor of the internet ya know.
lol
“However, as it turns out, our young Barak Hussein really was born to a Muslim and raised in his early years as a Muslim.”
It’s in his autobiography too. He was born as a man to a Muslim father and had Koranic instruction in school, though he got caught “making faces” during his Islamic instruction.
My fear is that this Christian man, Barack Hussain Obama, will be viewed by the Muslim world as a murtad fitri.
Beyond that, somewhere I have Cokie Robert’s essay on why public radio is dead because now there are Republicans on the board of directors, and how could they possibly be neutral?
One of my African-American students insists that Obama is a Muslim...and I don't know where the student got this information, but I'm pretty certain that this particular student does not frequent any political websites...
Americans have not been paying attention to what Barack Hussein Obama says, but the Muslim world has.
And not just that FRiends, but I do have the definitive proof - that settles this once and for all and proves Obama is a Muslim. (Obama himself knows this and has admitted it - were you paying attention a few years back?)
The problem is that even when presented with the DEFINITIVE PROOF, Americans still would refuse to believe it and that includes many conservative commentators and even FReepers.
I feel sad for my country. Sad that we are on the very verge of defeat - that the prophecies of OBL are proving to be true.
Have Americans forgot that we are at war? Did you think that this war was being fought only with guns and bullets?
I think we’ll get more mileage with “murtad fitri” than we will with Muslim.
Obama’s pretty well armored on the issue, but being an apostate marked for death under shari’a law is a different issue and one that he can’t refute, since the facts are in his own autobiography.
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