This may be true -- and if so it's largely because on the Web the difference between a responsible and legitimate source and a truly crazy source is not obvious. Websites all look about the same. I remember some years ago meeting someone who was convinced of Holocaust denial largely because the deniers had neatly bound hard cover books published by seemingly respectable publishers.
I suspect over time the web will sort itself out and the legitimate sites will become more obviously legit:
Squandering the currency of rationalism
The Good Book advises that "the truth shall make you free" (John 8: 32), but these days it's just as likely that the truth, as you perceive it, shall make you its slave. It may put you among the Truthers, which is also the title of a new book by my friend and colleague, Jonathan Kay. Among The Truthers offers the most accurate and insightful description of true believers since -well, since Eric Hoffer's 1951 classic The True Believer. The two books aren't alike -Hoffer intuits his subject, and Kay researches it -but although Kay meticulously climbs his mountain, while Hoffer is deposited on his by helicopter without his feet touching the ground, once they're at the peak, the panorama is similar.
No one is as reasonable as a person seeking the truth, and no one is as unreasonable as one who thinks he has found it. "Absolute faith corrupts as absolutely as absolute power," as Eric Hoffer has it, which is accurate as well as witty, yet the fundamental problem with believing that the moon is made of green cheese isn't that it's a faith absolutely held but that it happens not to be true. A person who believes in dairy products being the building blocks of the universe isn't a crank because he believes it absolutely but because he believes it at all.
Squandering the currency of rationalism
The Good Book advises that "the truth shall make you free" (John 8: 32), but these days it's just as likely that the truth, as you perceive it, shall make you its slave. It may put you among the Truthers, which is also the title of a new book by my friend and colleague, Jonathan Kay. Among The Truthers offers the most accurate and insightful description of true believers since -well, since Eric Hoffer's 1951 classic The True Believer. The two books aren't alike -Hoffer intuits his subject, and Kay researches it -but although Kay meticulously climbs his mountain, while Hoffer is deposited on his by helicopter without his feet touching the ground, once they're at the peak, the panorama is similar.
No one is as reasonable as a person seeking the truth, and no one is as unreasonable as one who thinks he has found it. "Absolute faith corrupts as absolutely as absolute power," as Eric Hoffer has it, which is accurate as well as witty, yet the fundamental problem with believing that the moon is made of green cheese isn't that it's a faith absolutely held but that it happens not to be true. A person who believes in dairy products being the building blocks of the universe isn't a crank because he believes it absolutely but because he believes it at all.
4 comments:
The National Post also promotes crazy right-wing views by giving those folks a platform, they own the paper!
Certainly they lean to the right. And the Post has limits -- you won't see Truthers there for example. More, they do publish stuff from other viewpoints. And the "news" parts of the Post are perfectly legit -- perhaps selected stories to reflect a worldview -- but that's true of all newspapers.
That's rich coming from a paper that exists only to promote the views of the investor class.
Brig,
It is true that it's hard to see Big Media not being biased against bloggers. I hadn't thought of that point! Good catch,
james
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