[WikiEN-l] Reliable sources— some of these babies are ugly

[Charles Matthews]

Gregory Maxwell wrote:
> I don't believe that this is, by any means, only a problem with Fox
> although they might be the most obvious and frequent example.
>   
To a first approximation, mainstream media reporting about "Internet 
institutions" is largely worthless. They mostly know what a webpage is, 
and look at institutions in terms derived from models they know (the 
newspaper with its mainly top-down management, the technology 
corporation). Such reporting can be redeemed by worthly journalism that 
investigates what actually goes on.

The current rumpus being an example of WP being successfully trolled by 
Sanger with the cooperation of Fox, it is not really surprising that 
Fox's reporting is slanted. I think we can expect more of this: it is a 
position of honour, as far as taking the brunt of Rupert Murdoch's war 
recently declared on free content is concerned (with Google, of course, 
and the other search engine companies that dare take advantage of 
non-noindexed pages on the Web).

I think the conclusion should be that admins (such as the one quoted) 
who mouth off about the doings in the usual hyperbolic terms that we get 
used to on mailing lists, might have to reconsider their approach to 
commenting so freely in public, given that this is going to be war of 
attrition against tabloid tactics.

Charles