Times Snubs Internet
By Callimachus | Related entries in Blogging, Hurricane Katrina, In The News, MediaJeff Jarvis notes, correctly, the snarkiness of this “New York Times” story on the Internet and the hurricane. Jarvis writes:
With all the ways people are using the internet after Katrina â€â€? for news, relief, advice, finding the missing (covered incompletely here), even getting rescued – - what angle does The Times Monday online column choose to cover: nutjobs, racists, and religious kooks and Katrina. Yes, I come to believe that there is an agenda at work: the old trying to belittle the new.
Ayup. The “Times” opens its story like this:
“WAS Katrina a man-made storm for profits?” asked Michael Shore, a contributor at the Web site Rense.com, a few days after the hurricane had all but obliterated New Orleans and its environs. “Just about every human being is totally unaware that technology exists now whereby weather can be used as a weapon of mass destruction.”
It’s all part of a “hideous agenda,” Mr. Shore wrote, to gain “total control of planet Earth.”
Of course.
And so forth, on through the white racist groups trying to suck up relief donations to goofball fundamentalists blaming the catastrophe on some perceived sin of the Big Easy. The site quoted at the beginning of the “Times” story is full of UFO “evidence,” 9/11 conspiracy theories blaming the government, and such stuff.
But when I read the story I noticed something else. All the kooks in the article are “right-wing.” The religious freaks, the racists, the conspiracy-mongers. Did the writer never bother to check out the kind of nonsense flowing on DU and other hard left sites?
Ah, but the writer did manage to find some Christians doing some good in the storm — “left-leaning” Christians.
All this has not gone without response from other Christians on the Web.
“Our Creator is not a Murderer” reads an Internet petition petitiononline.com/katrina) created by Nathan Nelson, a contributor at Sollicitudo Rei Socialis, a left-leaning Catholic blog. God would not kill thousands of people, the petition insists, “as punishment for purported sins.”
That’s an outright insult to the number of Christian organizations, some of them firmly on the right politically, who have been doing massive good work in the Gulf Coast. I’m no Christian, but I can give respect where it’s due. Which seems to be more than the “Times” is capable of.
So, thanks — again — to the New York Times we are given a picture of an America where:
1. The Internet is dominated by lunatics and haters, the kind of people Big Media keeps off its pages in the interest of being serious about the information business.
2. All right-leaning Christians are full of bile and hatred and the handful of left-leaning ones are pillars of sanity and decency.
This entry was posted on Monday, September 12th, 2005 and is filed under Blogging, Hurricane Katrina, In The News, Media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
September 12th, 2005 at 5:47 pm
The NYT plays to its audence. It is a small-town newspaper for a compatively big town. It’s not their fault if other people take them for nayhting else. Its audience has its prejudices and favorite enemies, that same as any other audience. Hicks in the hinterland are the favorite target of ridicule. The NYT would be stupid to ignore that. You make it sound like you expect them to be impartial and obective for the sake of impariality and objectivity.