Monday, November 01, 2004

Sychronicity


Scott Burgess offers up this in rebuttal to the latest e-mailed rant from the Pollster:

Up until now, an information elite has been able to misrepresent and manufacture fact with virtual impunity - sometimes accidentally, sometimes as a deliberate means of pushing a chosen agenda.

For example, if a newspaper polemicist wanted to contend that "Scandinavian countries are best of all" at overcoming obesity, it was unlikely that many would notice and connect the fact that: "Norway has the highest percentage of overweight men in Europe, according to a new report by the World Health Organization (WHO)."

...

Those who did notice such "anomalies" had no easy means of communicating them to others interested in issues of journalistic integrity.Best of all, in this new media environment the once-wise maxim "never get in an argument with someone who buys ink by the barrel" no longer applies - we all have barrels now. Ardent proponents of equality would no doubt applaud this development, were they not the ones whose superior status was now under threat.


All of which means that the Left will no longer be able to get by citing 'stuff that everyone knows'. When people who really do know have their own outlets, the Left's sacred cows start to look like hamburger.

Take for instance the evil of the British Empire. For the past forty years the Empire has been A Bad Thing, that's all you need to know. The L3 may be a bit murky about the specifics in all but a few cases, but our normally nuance-obsessed friends are sure about this: everything Britain did in Africa was evil, and only a fascist would ask for actual details. Well, as luck would have it, Laban Tall has just posted this. That's exactly the type of thing that the mainstream media would rather not consider - for all that they mock Dubya for being retarded enough to call mass murder evil, most journalists have a narrower worldview than any small-town American, albeit with a sign change.

Well, now we don't need to rely on the MSM to tell us the full story. They're no longer able to act as gatekeepers. That's the thing, in their nostalgia for the old ways, their frenzied denial of the realities of the new world, MSM stalwarts like the Pollster resemble nothing so much as expatriates in 1950s Africa, convinced that if only they keep dressing for dinner they can yet stave off the end.

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