{"id":26,"date":"2006-10-03T08:04:18","date_gmt":"2006-10-03T08:04:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/apagansblog\/2006\/10\/the-internet-and-the-public-good.html"},"modified":"2006-10-03T08:04:18","modified_gmt":"2006-10-03T08:04:18","slug":"the-internet-and-the-public-good","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/apagansblog\/2006\/10\/the-internet-and-the-public-good.html","title":{"rendered":"The Internet and the Public Good"},"content":{"rendered":"

Recent years have seen the mainstream media’s ability to serve the public by keeping tabs on Washington wither under the combination of corporate priorities, over paid and lazy talking heads, and sophisticated manipulation by the President’s media managers. It had become almost as if we had a state owned media, but because it was “privatre” people tended to trust it, even as some companies such as Fox won court battles <\/a>by aruing they had a right to lie<\/a> to the public. Competent and conscientious journalists were trapped in an institutional matrix poisonous to their craft. Incompetent and dishonest ones did very well indeed. Many still do.
\nBut perhaps technology will help save us.
\nThe Internet is turning this mess on its head by making it easy to expose incompetence and dishonesty, as with ABC’s lying “docudrama” about 9-11, failiure to alert the American public to important news just before an election as with Newsweek’s <\/em>misleading for its American compared to its iunternational audiences, and perhaps most important of all, aiding invesitigations by conscientous journalists. It is possible the net will be a major factor in the return ofthe United States to civilized standards of behavior in the next election, if in fact it does return.
\nThe current Mark Foley and Republican leadership sex scandal is a case in point. Howard Kurtz writes<\/a> in the Washington Post <\/em>that ABC’s Brian Ross said “the Internet made the story possible, because on Thursday he posted a story on his ABC Web page, the Blotter, after obtaining one milder e-mail that Foley had sent a 16-year-old page, asking for a picture. Within two hours, former pages had e-mailed Ross and provided the salacious messages. The only question then, says Ross, was ‘whether this could be authenticated.’
\nRoss’s putting the story on his Web Page seems to have been a crucial step in uncovering the scandal. According to the New York times, “At least two news organizations were tipped off to e-mail messages sent by Representative Mark Foley long before the story of his sexually explicit remarks to teenage pages broke last week and forced him to resign.” In The Daily Muck’s account<\/a>, the NYT reported<\/a> “The St. Petersburg Times and The Miami Herald received copies of an e-mail exchange between Mr. Foley, Republican of Florida, and a teenager, but neither paper gathered enough solid material to publish a story, according to statements by the papers’ editors.” The story apparently died until a blog Stop Sex Predators<\/a>, picked it up. ABC was next, and the rest may change history.
\nNo internet, quite possibly no story. No such story and the likelihood of continued Republican domination of our country is much greater.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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