By the way, I posted this under the “Advertising” section of the blog because that’s all the commercial news is anymore: advertising. Commercial news is news about sponsors delivered by public relations companies, shrill and inhumane examinations of personal tragedies, and propaganda for the owners’ agendas and the companies that pay their bills. CNN, Fox, NBC, CBS, ABC, ((You’ll note that I will not link to these organizations, I’m so sick of them. And anyway they almost never link to their Internet sources.)) they don’t even get the facts remotely correct anymore, and their prioritization of entertainment and sensationalism over important facts is virtually surreal at this point. The new British Prime minister came into office today, but on CNN, one of the top articles is “Girl, 7, Says She’s Trapped in Boy’s Body.” Who the f**k cares! I hope she and her parents work that out, I do, but the world is at war.

McNeil/Leher, the BBC and CBC are responsible and thorough in what they cover and their allegiance is to the facts precisely because they are not funded primarily by commercial interests. If they want to do a story on the oil companies or MacDonald’s they don’t have to worry about those companies or their subsidiaries pulling their advertising. It’s clear to me that it’s the economic incentives and the system in place that allow for these informational distortion whirlpools to exist, but what I don’t know is how we get rid of them. Public policy is going to be incredibly hard to significantly change so long as the public debate is as vacuous as this:

“The immigration bill is amnesty. You can tell by looking at it.”

“No, no, it’s not amnesty. We wrote it and made sure it wasn’t”

“But it’s amnesty! I read it and that’s what I think. And amnesty won’t solve anything!”

“You see but it’s not amnesty because I just said that it wasn’t.”

Ironically, this one reason why I can’t support Ron Paul. His attitude that markets can solve everything is called into question by the very treatment he received on Fox. When commercial and private interests run the public airwaves and news, that interview (ignorant and politicized) is the kind of garbage you get fed to you. For what it’s worth I have BS in economics and I can tell you extreme Libertarians out there that markets do not always solve everything, and that is especially the case when information is not already transparent.

“Readers need a source of information that is unbiased, accurate, and coherent. News organizations like the Times can provide that far more consistently than private parties can. Besides, the web-blog phenomenon does not represent anything fundamentally new in the news media: The New York Times has been publishing individual points of view on the Op Ed page for 100 years. In any case, nytimes.com and web-blogs are not mutually exclusive. We would like to extend our ability to act as a host for all sorts of opinions, and web-blog technology might well be useful in doing so. After all, in countries whose citizens don’t enjoy First Amendment protection, blogs are run by people who’d be considered professional journalists in the US. In its six years online, nytimes.com has been a center of innovation, and it’ll continue to be, incorporating blogs and whatever else will enable our reporters and editors to present authoritative coverage of the most important events of the day, immediately and accurately.”

I’m not here to say that his reasoning is unsound but it is based on a couple of faulty premises and generally misses the context of the bet — namely how Google’s technology works. His first premise is that “readers need a source of information that is unbiased, accurate, and coherent.” You don’t have to be a media cynic in regards to the major media outlets to point out that those three adjectives hardly describe them these days. Between the latest CBS debacle and the Jason Blair incident at the times, information dissemination has called the credibility of most major media and their accuracy into doubt. Insofar as bias is concerned many people are rightly concerned about consolidation in the industry. As far as “coherent” is concerned, well, read the Post. Millions of people do.

So his main premise is a little questionable but the thing that strikes me as more short-sighted is that he makes the assumption that a news “hub” like the New York Times is somehow going to generate a larger number of linkages than a thousand-plus blogs turning out obscure entries on any subject known to man. As most folks know, Google generates its rankings according to how many pages containing keywords link to other pages with those keywords as well. That’s an oversimplification, but the basic point is that the page about Subject A that has the most pages about Subject A linking to it is the most popular page. Two things that have generally annoyed me about the Times is that you have to register and that they don’t link to a lot of other sources. This makes it a relatively insular online publication. It’s hard to link to due to registration and you likely won’t get linked from it. Those user interface problems alone make it hard to believe that the Times online is going to keep up with the blog revolution — a revolution not because people are writing online but because people writing online are connecting, linking, and trackbacking each other.