The old shaman can shake his feathers and rattle his bones at us all he wants, but the net is here to stay. EFL. THE Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, has criticised the new web-based media for "paranoid fantasy, self-indulgent nonsense and dangerous bigotry".
None of which, obviously, are found in the traditional media.
He described the atmosphere on the world wide web as a free-for-all that was "close to that of unpoliced conversation".
"Unpoliced conversation"? The horror! Isn't that how the evil, world-destroying USA got started? This statement highlights another point of agreement between the religious left and its ally in the campaign to roll back the Enlightenment, militant Islam.
| Thou shalt have only proper conversations. |
Online professionalism is the answer, and this is enforced by massive and immediate feedback. This can give the online journalist an inherent advantage in credibility, as can the multiplicity of search and checking options.
Dr Williams also extended his wide-ranging critique of journalistic practice to the traditional media, arguing that there are "embarrassingly low levels of trust" in the profession and that claims about what is in the public interest need closer scrutiny.
The net is doing exactly that, holding to the MSM to account for the first time in their history and changing the world in the process.
He called for a "more realistic, less fevered" approach to stories by journalists and added: "There is a difference between exposing deceptions that sustain injustice and attacking confidentialities or privacies that in some sense protect the vulnerable."
| "So leave me and my pecadillos alone, you hear me?" he added in a soft voice. |
That is impossible, the institutional media are collapsing because their malfeasance is finally being exposed, and this malfeasance is now recognized as inherent in the nature of centralized activist media themselves. They cannot reform, even if their pathological hubris would permit it.
