You don’t hear it much anymore, but there was a time when the most common charge leveled at the blogosphere was that it was nothing more than one big echo chamber, endlessly resounding with me-tooism and common cause.
It always bothered me, if only a little, that whatever truth there was in the charge could also be applied to legacy media. This week, I came across a couple of pieces that help make that case.
One is Steve Yelvington’s post earlier this week on the media’s sudden obsession with the “dark side” of MySpace. Before pointing to a raft of stories about MySpace as a “dangerous” place, he wrote:
News organizations are a lot like sheep. They graze together. Where they graze, the pretty much eat everything, right down to rock. When one gets spooked, they all get spooked. A sheep stampede is a thing to behold.
The second item is Jack Shafer’s Slate column from today that carries on with the unravelling of the meth “epidemic” that has been so much in the news. He dissects faulty press coverage of a recent American report in a column that journalists should read and heed. The headline and deck for the column say it all: Methamphetamine Propaganda: The government and the press are addicted.
TAGS: JOURNALISM
