Tuesday, August 02, 2005
Become the Media
This item from Air America's rising star, Johnny Wendell, the guy who people who love to lose elections hate:
In today's rapidly changing media landscape, it is becoming harder to tell truth from fiction. Increasingly, sloppy journalism is treated as legitimate news, opinions are presented as facts, and misinformation spreads throughout our news media, threatening the foundation of democracy.
A non-profit venture called NewsTrust is now working on a practical solution to those issues. Our proposed news rating service aims to bring together experienced journalists and citizen reviewers to rate news stories and their sources according to rigorous editorial standards - leveraging online technology to identify high-quality journalism, or "news you can trust."
I've always said that if you clipped the best story from each newspaper in America, you'd have a decent read. Unfortunately, people are buying garbage bundled up with the "New York Time" or "Washington Post" or (for people who prefer Unification Church-sponsored fiction to US Government-sponsored fiction) "The Washington Times." A service like this could give mainstream people a genuine alternative. I doubt it will displace services like The Smirking Chimp, Truthout, or Information Clearing House, since they have such a keen nose for news of interest to people like the blog hosts, but it could help people who aren't organically wired to the Internet experience some real journalism.
More blogs about politics.
