Paranoia strikes deep: but we move on just the same
May 11, 2008 04:38 PM
Give me a break. The conspiracy nuts have "found" an image of John McCain in the opening of a Fox local newscast and are out for blood.
In the animated open, just before the anchors appear, there's a frame or two of John and Cindy McCain. Clearly either a switching error, graphics glitch, or edited in by the poster who admits he was working in Final Cut Pro, the tinfoil hat crowd has decided it's a Fox mind control trick. Never mind that subliminal advertising has never been proven to work. When you want to find evidence of corporate brainwashing, you'll find it in the oddest places.
Sadly, Occam's Razor is never enough for some people. The story is getting more than 3,000 Diggs.
So what on Earth am I doing posting this in a blog dedicated to reinvention? Because I think newsies will get as steamed as I am about it. I think many will use this as evidence of the wackjobs on the Internet and say "See! The Web is full of ignorant clowns who aren't interested in the truth!"
And I'm here to say it doesn't matter a bit.
Because in the wilderness of the Web, there is even room for the crazies. I was talking to a friend who was lamenting a chain email she got. Surely the Web is to blame. But I reminded her that chain letters go back to the snail mail days. And, as a kid, I was responsible for forwarding way more of those.
In fact, nearly every Web nuisance has a real world antecedent. Conspiracy theories? JFK. UFOs. Fake offers for pills that don't work? You can still find them in alternative papers (and the classifieds of mainstream papers).
We look at examples of some blogs that go to the extreme and say "that's why we need professional journalists." But that's not why we need professional journalists. We need professional journalists because there is so much work to be done in covering our communities, aggregating the great local content and being a trusted resource of information. Being better than a few whack jobs doesn't give me a reason for being. Helping reinvent how we do what we do and being in on the ground floor of this wonderful and important shift is our mission now.
Sometime the reinvention gets messy. That's terrific, isn't it?
