Angelo Persichilli writing in this week's Hill Times bemoans, without a trace of irony, the problem of us unreliable bloggers on the interweb:
"Seeing as how information dissemination has become so easy, a lot of information might reach millions of people unfiltered. While this provides a great opportunity for the truth to reach millions, we may also be flooded by faulty, incomplete and outright wrong information, as well as malicious attack and some plain lies.
This will clog the system making it hard to see the difference between truth and lies and justified and unjustified accusations. Essentially, without the filter of editors, producers, and responsible journalists, what exists now is a jungle of bloggers. There is no doubt that the internet has and will continue to let the truth reach people, the problem is that we no longer know what's true and what's not."
Yup, unlike the mainstream media that have editors to ensure the accuracy of everything published in their papers, us bloggers do often traffic in "faulty, incomplete and outright wrong information, as well as malicious attack and some plain lies".
And don't forget the horrid grammar. I know I have been guilty of all of the above in 2009.
The links above are not intended as an attack on anyone, just pointing out that I'm not sure the line is quite as black-and-white as Persichilli's column makes it out to be.
While I would never pretend to be a professional journalist (I neither get paid to do this nor do I fane any sense of objectivity; the whole shtick of this little site is I am a partisan hack writing occasionally interesting political observations, often failing miserably in that regard), I have the utmost of respect for the profession and those who practise it in Canada. While I try to do my best to be accurate in my posts here, I am human and I err.
I suspect that's the exact same reason most professional reporters make mistakes as well.
