I’ve noticed that many large papers now publish “blog” content and label it as such, thus implying (again, to sophisticated news consumers) that it doesn’t have a high standard of fact checking applied to it, and will probably tend to lie somewhere in between ‘news’ and ‘op-ed’ in the expected level of veracity. The WP actually republishes Techcrunch on their site, which is a fairly big endorsement of TC! I wonder if they filter the feed or just take it raw. Scoop.co.nz have pioneered (at least here, and I don’t think it was common worldwide before they did it, and probably still isn’t) the model of simply publishing unedited press releases from just about anyone who wants to supply them, with headlines from those feeds alongside their own editorial content and selected independent journalism in the center of the site, which apparently gets more overseas traffic than from NZ. (nb: co-founder @althecat is another Kiwifoo, but we’re not close friends or anything)

As to Google, well, there are some smart cookies working there, I’m sure some of them have thought fairly deeply about the whole ‘Don’t be evil’ mantra, while others are totally focused on the engineering side of things. It seems they don’t consider disrupting the status quo, destroying existing business models, and as a result putting people out of work, to be evil. OTOH. I think they could make a reasonable argument that if they didn’t do it, someone else would. Technology giveth, and technology taketh away. Plenty more to say on the subject but I’ll leave it for another blog post.

A thought about democracy – how many people actually voted for Ecan last time it was elected?

- having once tried the test the tutor thing, they often suffer a sense of humour failure when they find it.

- journalists can have the quelling effect in both work and personal spheres; I sometimes think two or three times before making personal public blog posts on controversial subjects, but it’s more ‘will this make me look like an idiot’ than will I lose access by making this comment.

- independant sources are a great start but just because someone isn’t paid to do something doesn’t make them unbiased and independant sources have to be investigated and correlated. With stories from the AP and Reuters and the other feeds, the media outlets are presuming that this basic step has been done for them – this is the step so many bloggers forget about (can’t stop to fact check, must publish and get the hits and ad money first and can always correct later is no basis for a system of investigation). Journalism, like every other important system, is a series of checks and balances – prone to abuses as well as triumphs, capable of creating great things and terrible things alike. When Google claimed to ‘do no evil’ I think they had at best a remarkably naive view of what evil can be.

@Blancmange, as per clause 7.1 the post was actually meant to read like an “outline of potential threads in a hypothetical answer to a demonstrative example of the question no longer being asked in a fellowship exam at a college I never plan to attend” but you could also view it as an intro to several articles I might write in the future. Since you’ve mentioned the Bush/Obama thread I’ll follow that one up in more detail soon, it’s likely to have a broader appeal that some of the other ones I might go after. Oh and if I do post an updated version of the whole outline I’ll be sure to try and get some indenting in there!