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Much discussion is taking place on the Net regarding Hugh Hewitt’s excellent discussion of the blogosphere in an O’Reilly interview.
O’REILLY: All of that’s good, right. All of that is good, but I’m telling you there aren’t any rules any more, and that’s what frightens me.
HEWITT: No, but there’s self-correction.
O’REILLY: Look, I operate under rules here, Hugh. If I say something defamatory, I get sued.
HEWITT: Yup.
O’REILLY: If I say something irresponsible, NewsCorp pulls me off the air. It happened to Michael Savage over at MSNBC. Pulled him right off the air —
HEWITT: Yup.
O’REILLY:—all right, after that crazy thing he said. Internet’s not like that. No rules. Last word.
HEWITT: Oh well no, no no. The person who gets pulled off the air is the reader that you lose. If you lose your credibility as Blog discusses, you’ll lose your audience. GM is blogging now.
O’REILLY: No, but you’re not going to lose credibility if you smear people. People like to read smear stuff.
HEWITT: The Vice-Chairman of GM started blogging last week. If he says something wrong, he will lose credibility with his shareholders. All of business is going to start blogging, Bill, because it’s the way to communicate. It’s the way of the future. You can’t throw away your credibility.
O’REILLY: OK, Hugh Hewitt, thanks very much. We appreciate it.
I’d just like to add that if a blogger makes a misstatement of fact, he or she is liable to hear about it immediately in the blog’s comment section; and it’s even possible other bloggers may post about it on their own sites. Those comments and blog posts are immediately widely available for discussion.
So, due to the interactive nature of the Net, blogs are far more subject to receiving correcting feedback, than mainstream media is.
Sites Google Identifies as Being Similar to This One. You know how, when you search Google for something, you get a link to see other similar sites? There’s a web page from TouchGraph that lets you chart those links. Here’s the chart for The Big Picture :
Sites Google Identifies as Being Similar to The Big Picture.
Click a Site to Go to that Page.
A recent study shows that traffic cameras are causing an increase in car crashes:
...The most extensive U.S. study of intersection photo enforcement released in July by the North Carolina A&T University’s Urban Transit Institute found, “The results do not support the conventional wisdom expressed in recent literature and popular press that red-light cameras reduce accidents … Our findings are more pessimistic, finding no change in angle accidents and large increases in rear-end crashes and many other types of crashes relative to other intersections.”
Evidently people slam on their brakes near intersections that have cameras, to avoid possibly getting photographed, and this causes an increase in rear-end crashes.
The government tries things all the time that don’t work. But of course, politicians don’t like to admit errors—in part because the press and their political opponents then use this to rake them over the coals.
It takes public attention to get officials to admit to these kinds of mistakes. And some understanding and forgiveness on the part of the public for such well-intentioned errors, would make it much easier for them to do.
I know some may read this and think, “Forgiveness for politicians? What’s that all about?” Surely it’s an unusual thought. But we’re all human, and we all make mistakes. Everyone deserves some forgiveness once in a while—even politicians.
