ConvergeSouth - Policing the Media

Continuing ConvergeSouth coverage....

After getting lost on campus, Atrius made his entrance on Saturday morning. It was a great continuation of the previous day's session on journalistic ethics (see my previous ConvergeSouth post).

The discussion centered on the perils of he-said-she-said journalism, even in cases in which there is only one side backed by empirical facts, the other side being a wrong-headed opinion manufactured for the express reason of having another side - the best example being evolution vs. intelligent design creationism. Problems with voting machine code is another example: the media has no problem reporting on other methods of vote manipulation (e.g., vote supression), but stays away from the only problem that is empirically proven to be true: the code is so poorly written that the voting machines are extremely vulnerable to tampering.
One thing that a newspaper cannot do (and blogs do all the time) is provide links - an instant source of background information. Will newspaper articles of the future all have URLs in the footnotes?

Instead of me going on and on, go check the posts by Atrios himself here, here, here, here and here, as well as these reports here and here.

Previously:
ConvergeSouth - First Impressions
ConvergeSouth - Some Pictures
ConvergeSouth - International Coverage
ConvergeSouth - Building Community
ConvergeSouth - Blog Carnivals
ConvergeSouth - Ethics

Check the Technorati Tag: ConvergeSouth