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So do newspapers. I can go through any major newspaper, any day of the week, and find several errors of fact. The more numbers in an article, the higher the probability that I’m going to find an error of fact in it.

Newspapers labor under this delusion that hiring liberal arts majors with j-school degrees gives them an edge on reporting facts. No, it doesn’t. At best, it gives them an edge on style, perhaps grammar and maybe spelling. It leaves them utterly devoid of any experience in an increasingly technical world to judge their facts for credibility.

The simple fact is this: Newspapers have been living a lie for decades - since the early 70’s at the very least. The first and biggest lie they have been peddling is that they’re “professionals.” No, they’re not. They might be highly educated in that they have graduate degrees in “journalism” but they’re not professionals. A profession is one where there are a) standards of ethical and legal behavior, b) a state board that issues both credentials and penalties, c) legal liability for malpractice.

Point (c) is the most important. When a professional commits malpractice, you, the wronged public, can come after them for damages.

Lawyers, doctors, surveyors, licensed engineers, CPA’s etc — these are professions.

Journalists are not professionals. Trying to take a journalist to court for malpractice is only slightly less difficult than carrying water in a sieve.

But then on top of this, newspapers lied to not only their customers and the targets of their stories, they lied to the people paying the bills: There have been several high profile cases of newspapers lying about their circulation numbers (see, numbers figure prominently again) to their advertisers. This is akin to shooting themselves in their own guts with a small caliber weapon. It didn’t kill them immediately, but it set the stage for them to die a slow, painful death.

So yes, people in blog-land might well get things wrong. The trouble with newspapers is that they set themselves up on a terrifically high perch, and then failed to deliver. The blogosphere sets itself up on no high perch - it is caveat lector in the truest sense.

But unlike with newspapers, you can find people who deliver very high quality content for free or a moderate charge, who know their stuff very, very well in a highly technical subject area - something you will never find at a newspaper where they’re employing dolts with liberal arts degrees to scribble about stuff which they deliberately avoided studying in college. I can’t find a single newspaper in this country that can get a story right about computer security problems. Not one. I can’t tell you how many times when I worked in Silly Valley that I ran out of patience with reporters in the computer press for their idiotic errors of basic facts - after I’d spent a couple hours with them to make sure that they “got it” — they’d still get it wrong.

I can’t find a general circulation newspaper in an urban area that EVER gets a story right about agriculture in the US. And now that Obama is seized with his penchant for a “smart grid” — good grief, the dribble I’m seeing in the papers about the power transmission grid could fill a manure lagoon.