Journalism killed by global warming
THE PREDICTED Internet "Brownout" could be a good thing, because global communications have killed journalism according to a new study.
The global media’s capacity for generating mass panics, such as Y2K and global warming, is killing off our objectivity.
The INQUIRER has seen a preview copy of Flat Earth News and it describes journalists as "moral cowards, intellectual quislings, boot lickers, butt kissers or natural born liars". Some of us are all of those things. But even those who aren’t will find it impossible to maintain any sort of standard for accuracy in the new global media industry. So says author Nick Davies.
He’s been complaining about this for a long time on his web site, Flat Earth News, says the book. Mind you, I googled that phrase, and no web site popped up into view. (Who’s making things up now, Nick?)
He illustrates his argument with copious references to the IT industry, which is particularly PR driven. Source Wire is mentioned. The Millennium Bug gets the entire first chapter – and that’s the only chapter most people read in a book these days. You could pad the rest of The Long Tail out with Chinese phone directories, and nobody would notice.
The Internet has given us millions of unprofessional news organisations, across which journalists are ever more thinly spread. So – the INQUIRER apart, natch - nobody has the resources to check a single fact in a story, let alone dig up an original one.
So the mass media is not, as Marshall McLuhan imagined, a kind of global village schoolteacher, educating an entire world in politics, culture and ideas. It’s "more like a global village idiot, deeply ignorant and easily led," says Davies.
He illustrates his thesis with an example about a UK IT PR company that
sought to cash in on security fears. Acting for an IT security firm, they
informed the media that 63,000 mobile devices had been left in London taxis in
six months. But a simple check with the carriage office revealed the real figure
to be 779!
The bogus story was dutifully reported by the usual
Billy
No Mateses that usually regurgitate press releases.
The INQUIRER didn’t run it.
But this story carries all the hallmarks of what the author calls the Flat Earth syndrome. "An unreliable statement created by outsiders, injected via a wire agency into the arteries of the media, through which it circulates around the whole body of the media,” says Davies, an award winning* Fleet Street reporter. µ
L'INQ
Why psychos and
PRs do well in business
*At least that’s what it says on his book jacket. I couldn’t find any more details on the awards. We’ll have to take his word for it.
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That's been a problem since before the www became commonplace in the home and workplace - it's just a bad practice that's carried over from TV and papers to online.

I watched the www change from a homely useful-ish resource to the advert-laden spam-filled no-one-at-the-helm mess that much of it is today. 
The web was meant to give power back to the "little people" but what's happened rather a lot is that the main problem we all wanted away from, has consumed many sites and areas online and standardised them all to it's reality-tv level of zombie-consciousness. 
Search engines can be useful in certain areas, but mainly aren't any use for searching outwith the brain-drained areas.
Their boolean systems don't actually return results with those ANDs you specified.
I've even found that within a few hours and a few hundred yards (ie - logging on from different ISPs on a different telecomms line), I can put the same term into the same search engine - and it yields very different results.
This could be put down to regular updates, but then you try it again on another day - the exact same thing happens.

It did take a while to find it but here's the Flat Earth Society "web page". It's just a set of forums.
Which is just about nil at this point in time. The Y2K bug was a massive, three-year PR blitz after which nothing came, not even an ATM crash.
How many times have we been warned of impending Internet meltdowns due to some new virus ? More than I can remember. Did the Internet actually melt down ? Nope, still there, going strong.
I cannot imagine that anyone with a brain is going to pay attention to that kind of drivel.
What is true, however, is the capacity of the internet media wankers to believe in their capacity for forecasting mayhem and armageddon. There's no limit to that.
The mass media have undermined their own credibility. Replaced by blogs and alternative news sites, folks have seen journalism return, just without Murdoch and his ilk acting as the filter. 

Once folks realize they have been lied to the Internet does guide them to the truth, eventually. Most often it leads straight to the ones openly admitting the manipulation. Murdoch, the CFR, PNAC - all have such grand egos, they boast of their manipulations openly. Their own ego killed their "journalism".

Liberty accommodates the fools as well.
Too bad the commentators and authors never actually worked in IT.

I spent the 3 years before 2000 recoding a bunch of old apps so they wouldn't choke on their own vomit.

It was a bunch of folks like me wasting their time recoding old crap instead of writing new (crap) that *prevented* a Y2K disaster.

So thank us instead of straining your imagination to pretend we didn't exist.

Curtis W. Rendon
Obviously, The Inquirer would never run a story without picking up the phone. 

Dell dumps Ubuntu
http://www.theinquirer.net/gb/inquirer/news/2007/11/06/dell-dumps-ubuntu

Dell Doesn't dump Ubuntu 
http://www.theinquirer.net/gb/inquirer/news/2007/11/07/dell-doesn-dump-ubuntu