Wretchard betrays a Computer Sciences bent in this post about an article by Joe Strupp in Editor & Publisher. Mr. Strupp describes the dilemma Swiftboat Veterans have posed to editors who must now struggle to preserve a facade of objectivity. As the John Kerry swift boat controversy navigates itself from the shoreline of the 2004 presidential campaign into the mainstream, newspapers face a dilemma of how to report on the veterans group attacking the Democratic nominee's record without giving them undue credibility or blowing the issue out of proportion.
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"There are too many places for people to get information," O'Shea said. "I don't think newspapers can be the gatekeepers anymore -- to say this is wrong and we will ignore it. Now we have to say this is wrong, and here is why."Wretchard's analysis uses the programming analogy to describe Mainstream Media's lock on the production of news in bygone days.
The article is a candid and unconscious description of the actual nature of news. It is not just raw information or pixels pushed onto a screen, but a system of semantic entities: an series of information objects, containing properties and methods containing embedded logic, set loose on society.The rise of the internet as a competing news source has forced Mainstream Media to modify their approach
The Mainstream Media responded to accusations by Swiftvets that Kerry had misrepresented his combat record in Vietnam by creating their own alternative news object, whose methods were restricted to OutrageAgainstBush( ) and SympathyForKerry( ), with read only properties Responsible and Respectable. They could no longer block the data, but they could still transform it.That's exactly what bloggers did to Mainstream Media to create this situation. They transformed the news. Where once we were limited to ABC, CBS, NBC, and the local paper for news, suddenly anybody with a computer has access to every newspaper in the world. Once upon a time the morning daily lined the parakeet cage before finding its way to the trash. Now stories are archived all over the net for instant retrieval and analysis. MM is under unprecedented scrutiny. Today's pulp of news is instantly analyzed against underlying data or transcripts, or even earlier stories. The slightest variance immediately finds its way around the world to anyone interested in looking.
Where bloggers have the advantage is that they don't make the news, nor do they seek to suppress it. Where MM hoped to dictate which story is important and which is not, bloggers pick up what's dropped and modify what is distorted. MM can hope to transform the data they can no longer block, but that in turn will be transformed by the relentless bloggers.
