| Monday, May 10 2004 |
End of the world as they know it.
James Lileks is right. Yes, shocking I know. He said this on big media not long ago:
I’m talking about ongoing coverage of ongoing issues, the sort of thing hometown newspapers are perfectly positioned to do. That’s the niche that waits for them. The internet will swamp their ability to sum up the daily state of the world, because a) there’s so much available on the net from the big dogs, and b) small little-noted institutional biases in the paper’s selection of news stories will kill their credibility with those who sample from many sources.
... and I think the mass media in general will ultimately head down the very same road in the near future. Why? Well, because the mask has more or less melted to reveal exactly how flipping biased they are.
I speak, of course, about the Iraqi Prisoner Abuse "scandal". Where in the
hell did this come from? Okay, a bunch of people did some very silly things, and the situation was dealt with. Three months ago. Finished, you'd think. At least, until CNN "breaks" the story months after the fact. A story which many
Iraqis say is much to do about nothing.
Al-Turfy said he could "tell a million stories" about Saddam’s abuses: the people who were blown apart by dynamite or thrown off 20-story buildings, or the family that was buried alive in a car in Baghdad.
"You can’t imagine," he said. "They killed us like rats. Like anything cheap."
So to view photos of prisoners in humiliating positions — one month after seeing another chilling image, the charred and mutilated corpses of Americans hanging from a bridge over the Euphrates River — was "worth it, because they did the same to us," al-Turfy said, a comment echoed by several other Iraqis.
...
"(The Iraqis) feel soldiers come from good families. Over there, there are 135,000 soldiers. Out of that, 10 people are bad," he said.
Aaaaand... over here? Bush must apologize! Rumsfeld must resign! Guns must be banned! Which has nothing to do with it, but hey, we're on a roll here!
One could conceivably starve a lion for a few weeks, toss him a USDA Prime side of beef, and he wouldn't pounce on it nearly as hard as the media has on the "Iraqi Prisoner Flap".
Note to big media: When people in a foreign country, who were recently liberated by your own government are more in touch with your audience than you are, it
might be a plan to take a step back. Or pick up the want ads, either works for me.
They're doomed, and they're so caught up in their own smarmy elitism that they don't see the freight train closing on their six, because that bit of grass between the tracks is just
so tasty, and look how good we look eating it! Moooo! The freight train is, of course, the Internet, and to a lesser (for now) degree, the blogosphere. We're gaining ground and making in-roads into the public conscience to such a degree that Presidential candidates are aware of the need to have blogs. In an era of millions of smart, articulate people completely tearing spin and bias apart on a daily basis and publishing it for pennies to a global audience, big media is
screwed.
It's interesting, in that light, how little opposition there is to Bush's idea of having broadband in every American home by 2007.
If they only knew.
In geek news, Intel finally
ditched the Pentium 4 line, realizing they couldn't cheat physics any longer. I wrote
on this very subject last year, and things more or less went the way I thought they would: Intel is ditching the P4 in favor of a dual core chip running at slower clock speeds, yet offering significantly greater performance, and, we can hope, dissipating less heat per square inch than a nuclear power plant.
Like, say, IBM's Power4 has been doing for years, and more recently, its little brother the PPC970. Also known as the G5. You know, the Apple G5. Yeah, those guys who are going out of business so fast that they adopted what I'm sure will become "Intel's new chip technology", a year before intel put it on the drawing board.
But that's okay, I'm sure we'll be hearing apologies for the dissing of Apple's technology from the usual suspects any time now, right? Right?
(crickets)
posted by Mr. Lion
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