[...] pass this up. I’ll be brief.Raph has made this simple – and brilliant – statement in regards to the state of the new media on his official website:The days of letting facts be reported without comment seems to be [...]

[...] Zenke has just written an extremely interesting piece on ‘opinions’ and the game press, citing a Raph Koster piece about Time Magazine’s [...]

[...] just written an extremely interesting piece on ‘opinions’ and the game press, citing a Raph Koster piece about Time Magazine’s [...]

[...] made a statement in a post on his site, saying: The days of letting facts be reported without comment seems to be [...]

[...] accountability and accuracy in the media. So when I read the following line by Raph Koster in his recent observations on changes to Time, I got kinda fired [...]

I mean, there’s nothing to say that the Internet couldn’t have been like Samual Pepys Diary and the Manhattan yellow pages.

But instead, it was all about these nerds posting these really short and pointless “weblogs”. We all couldn’t wait until all that stuff fell off the pages and went into the back end where it belonged.

Perhaps Raph remembers the Harper transition. I remember being hugely irritated by it, because I felt they are morphing to fit people’s shrinking attention spans instead of going the distance to try to hold them.

So now Time, which was always biased and always biased with the Strobe Talbot sort of liberal soft-on-Moscow kind of world view, is now forthrightly so. Editorializing isn’t analysis, tho, Raph, it’s just putting opinion in pieces that we thought were supposed to be factually reported out, chiefly by finding the 4-5 different viewspoints on each story and representing them *so the reader could form his own judgements*.

Depriving the reader of the ability to form his own judgements by having the points of view of all sides in a conflict or all narrators in a story is a huge disservice. It means the dumbing down of the world.

Today,there is no fear. In fact, extremism is encouraged by the system and is an absolute must to stand out from the crowd of cable and website news.

To think that having more voices means that most people will somehow figure the facts out from the fiction seems ludicrous to me at best and dangerous at worst.

I’m against governmental regulation of the media in just about every way, but there needs to be some accountability other than ratings and advertiser dollars. There needs to be places that the average person can go and be able to count on objectivity without needing to piece together every important news story on their own.

/Derail on

Actual quote as of this AM:

The American Civil War (1861–1865) was a major war between the United States (the “Union”) and eleven Southern slave states that declared their states’ rights to secession and formed the Confederate States of America,

The beauty of dynamic editing…..

Now there are Professors who are more knowledgable and spend thier entire lives debating the prime cause of the civil war. So I wont go down that road because it’s just subjective opinion. Kind of like saying something is a MYTH, or that teachers are inherantly liberally biased.

But these subjective opinions and inaccuracies are tought and repeated over and over, in the dictionary, on TV, in the Papers, encyclopedias and um….wikipedia. Because human knowledge and perception of events is faulty.

So therefore the best we can hope for is a relative accuracy as objective as possible right? However everyones standard of accuracy, like thier subjective opinion, knowledge, and perception is variable, which leaves “objective” and in this case we mean facts.

And our example being the Civil War, and a quote from wikipedia merely demonstrates that a) the civil war happened, b) for some reason c) on a certain date d) for reasons precedent to the actual start of the conflict e) which we think we might know, but are subjective according to our view.

Notice I said a “complete entry”, what that means is “according to our knowledge to date” and you’ll find that subjects like the “civil war” are far different than say “Shrodingers Cat”. Which posits the mere observence can change the outcome….much like changing They to Thier for instance .

Its hard to say how these things get propagated, they’s and thier’s, and the possible killing of cats, or not (or maybe the cat didnt exist?).

That we can distinguish between subjective and objective only proves we can distinguish between something thats probably not true and mostly not true.

The (beauty) problem of humans is decoherence. Subjectivity and objectivity are the mechanisms we developed early on to deal with a world where the Cat’s used to eat us and a reality we dont really understand even now that the tables have been turned.

/Derail off

OTOH as Morgan simply stated:

Absolute objectivity is as much a myth as absolute subjectivity.

Except both exist, one exists, or perhaps neither of them exist.

But dont blame me, blame the friggin’ Cat

Good lord. I’m gonna have some fun and go straight for the Godwin on that one:

“I didn’t notice Hitler’s anti-Jew leanings…”

Seriously now, the players in the US media space need to get over themselves and wear their ideological badges (whichever badges they happen to be) on their sleeves like the rest of the world’s media.

This transparent (from the outside) pretense at even-handedness has lasted far too long and done far too much damage.