Posted by aogFriday, 05 October 2007 at 06:21 TrackBack Ping URL

Continuing on the theme of ignorance vs. ideology, there was an editorial in the Wall Street Journal earlier this week (behind the subscription wall) about the descent of “mainstream” media in to tabloid territory. It used the hook of Brittney Spear’s lastest child custody issues bumping off coverage of minor things like the political turmoil in Burma or the changing situation in Iraq.

It occurred to me this morning that perhaps this is another thing to blame on the spread of alternative news sources and particularly the blogosphere. After all, who bothers to fact check an article about custody of Brittney’s kids? I can’t even be bothered to netsearch up a link to the subject. That means that if you, a journalist, write about that, nobody is going to demonstrate your utter cluelessness to the world. Even better, it’s a subject that requires very little knowledge in the first place which no doubt makes it even more attractive. It’s no different than wanting to hang with the cool kids vs. having to do math problems with the nerds. You do the latter when you have to, but if Brittney walks by you’re outta there like a rocket.