"Old and boring newspaper practice" - no comments

Anthony at Black Triangle (via Norm) defends blogging against the charges that it encourages misinformation and "undemocratic forces", that the BBC attributes to Tim Berners-Lee in his comments about the internet. He goes further:

Every week, a colleague and I find mistakes in the mainstream media about our particular specialised area, or failure of the media to disclose competing interests of lobby groups cited in articles uncritically. They even get the fundamental science wrong. Awareness of this has made me more skeptical of areas I am less familiar with.

As another example, it is indicative of the pervasive nature of the problem that Tim Berners-Lee is now protesting on his blog about being misrepresented by the BBC and Guardian.

Says Tim:

In a recent interview with the Guardian, alas, my attempt to explain this was turned upside down into a “blogging is one of the biggest perils” message. Sigh. I think they took their lead from an unfortunate BBC article, which for some reason stressed concerns about the web rather than excitement, failure modes rather than opportunities. (This happens, because when you launch a Web Science Research Initiative, people ask what the opportunities are and what the dangers are for the future. And some editors are tempted to just edit out the opportunities and headline the fears to get the eyeballs, which is old and boring newspaper practice.