Sunday, November 07, 2004

MSNBC - George, John, and Warren

Warren, Ohio--Keith Olberman, one of the few reporters I had any kind of respect for over at NBC (Steven Frasier was another--perhaps some day I'll post a list), ventures uncertainly into the uncharted land of non-mainstream information. He's looking at information passing through the "rumor mills" of the internet, an unusual enough occurrence for a mainstreamer. But he's promising to follow up on some of the stories....Bush: "There's rumors on the internets..."

An excerpt:

The only reason I differentiate between the blogs and the newspapers is that in the latter, a certain bar of ascertainable, reasonably neutral, fact has to be passed, and has to be approved by a consensus of reporters and editors. The process isn’t flawless (ask Dan Rather) but the next time you read a blog where bald-faced lies are accepted as fact, ask yourself whether we here in cyberspace have yet achieved the reliability of even the mainstream media. In short, a lot gets left out of newspapers, radio, and tv - but what’s left in tends to be, in the words of my old CNN Sports colleague NickCharles, a lead-pipe cinch.

Thus the majority of the media has yet to touch the other stories of Ohio (the amazing Bush Times Ten voting machine in Gahanna) or the sagas of Ohio South: huge margins for Bush in Florida counties in which registered Democrats outnumber registered Republicans 2-1, places where the optical scanning of precinct totals seems to have turned results from perfect matches for the pro-Kerry exit poll data, to Bush sweeps.


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