It's an old-fashioned hole diggin'
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| Also listed in: Campus Progress Blog |
Rightly so, David Horowitz is being taken to task for his most recent assault on Liberal Academia(TM) which has proven to be, well, almost completely wrong. What's interesting- actually, hilarious- has been Horowitz's response that, as noted on Pandagon, is the website equivalent of digging one's self into a seventy-foot hole.
Enjoyable and annoying at the same time, but it's a more interesting example of the juvenile nature of the world of online punditry. In the real world, crisis is met with the stages of denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. For right-wing bloggers, the pattern is denial, anger, bargaining, and launching an unfounded attack againt liberals followed by proceeding to ignore the issue and waiting for people to stop talking about how wrong you are.
The most perfect example of this pattern is the recent actions of the right-wing blog Powerline, whose authors pushed an Ann Coulter column that suggested the "outing" of Maya Keyes as an example of how liberals will pore into personal lives for the sake of attacking conservatives. The problem in Coulter's accusation being that it was 100% factually innacurate was brought to the attention of Powerline, who, faced with incontroversial evidence of their mistake, proceeded to grow and harvest an entire field of straw for the sole purpose of grasping at it.
What ties these two incidents together is rather revealing- it's not the fact that each of the authors were proven wrong. All media and news sources are wrong. Most are forced to issue retractions and corrections- ironically, Powerline devoted itself to forcing this out of Dan Rather. What's telling, and frankly disturbing, is the almost physical inabilty for either Horowitz or the authors at Powerline to just freaking admit they were wrong.
Here's what gets me about the whole deal- webloggers and online pundits in general tend to pride themselves on their archives. With the exception of Matt Drudge, who deletes all his proven-false information, 1984-style, and therefore lies in a class by himself, most people who write on the internet keep an archive of everything they've written.
The relationship is somewhat perplexing- If I wanted to, I could go to Instapundit and look up something he wrote three years ago. Except I don't want to. In fact, no one does. I think it's safe to say that very few people actually go back and read the archives of a political weblog. By nature, they're topical, and people care about the current issues of the moment. If you wanted anything older than two weeks from many major newspapers, you'd have to pay them. For stuff several years old, you're talking microfiche at the public library, if at all.
And yet, while webloggers have without a doubt the best archival and retrieval functions out of any major media source, they are the most negligent in maintaining them. Forget the obvious point that webloggers rarely, if at all, issue retractions. The subconscious belief of the blogosphere is that any post older than about 48 hours is officially carved in stone. I'm sure there's an example or two, but the number of instances in which a weblogger- left or right- was called on a blatant inaccuracy of something they said a week, let alone a month or a year ago, and then corrected in their archives is close to nil.
It's that very belief that I think explains these actions from Powerline and Horowitz. They know that, if allowed a week to let their lies sit in a blog archive, they are no longer obligated to actually correct it. That's the magical, unspoken, mind-numbingly ignorant law of the blogosphere- on the internet, everyone is correct after 15 minutes.
Enjoyable and annoying at the same time, but it's a more interesting example of the juvenile nature of the world of online punditry. In the real world, crisis is met with the stages of denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. For right-wing bloggers, the pattern is denial, anger, bargaining, and launching an unfounded attack againt liberals followed by proceeding to ignore the issue and waiting for people to stop talking about how wrong you are.
The most perfect example of this pattern is the recent actions of the right-wing blog Powerline, whose authors pushed an Ann Coulter column that suggested the "outing" of Maya Keyes as an example of how liberals will pore into personal lives for the sake of attacking conservatives. The problem in Coulter's accusation being that it was 100% factually innacurate was brought to the attention of Powerline, who, faced with incontroversial evidence of their mistake, proceeded to grow and harvest an entire field of straw for the sole purpose of grasping at it.
What ties these two incidents together is rather revealing- it's not the fact that each of the authors were proven wrong. All media and news sources are wrong. Most are forced to issue retractions and corrections- ironically, Powerline devoted itself to forcing this out of Dan Rather. What's telling, and frankly disturbing, is the almost physical inabilty for either Horowitz or the authors at Powerline to just freaking admit they were wrong.
Here's what gets me about the whole deal- webloggers and online pundits in general tend to pride themselves on their archives. With the exception of Matt Drudge, who deletes all his proven-false information, 1984-style, and therefore lies in a class by himself, most people who write on the internet keep an archive of everything they've written.
The relationship is somewhat perplexing- If I wanted to, I could go to Instapundit and look up something he wrote three years ago. Except I don't want to. In fact, no one does. I think it's safe to say that very few people actually go back and read the archives of a political weblog. By nature, they're topical, and people care about the current issues of the moment. If you wanted anything older than two weeks from many major newspapers, you'd have to pay them. For stuff several years old, you're talking microfiche at the public library, if at all.
And yet, while webloggers have without a doubt the best archival and retrieval functions out of any major media source, they are the most negligent in maintaining them. Forget the obvious point that webloggers rarely, if at all, issue retractions. The subconscious belief of the blogosphere is that any post older than about 48 hours is officially carved in stone. I'm sure there's an example or two, but the number of instances in which a weblogger- left or right- was called on a blatant inaccuracy of something they said a week, let alone a month or a year ago, and then corrected in their archives is close to nil.
It's that very belief that I think explains these actions from Powerline and Horowitz. They know that, if allowed a week to let their lies sit in a blog archive, they are no longer obligated to actually correct it. That's the magical, unspoken, mind-numbingly ignorant law of the blogosphere- on the internet, everyone is correct after 15 minutes.
