Wikipedia... A source I use with caution... vs. the Nashville
Tennessean
This is partly to mention something I do in my
journo life, and partly to give a plug to a friend's blog. Mike Fumento is a
former paratrooper in the 82nd, one of the good guys that went to selection but
got injured, IIRC -- it happens. I've been enjoying his writing for some years
now -- Mike applies logic to various media feeding frenzies, much to the dismay
of the media sharks involved.
The Wikipedia angle comes in at this point. Many in the press are decrying Wikipedia because of an op-ed piece by former editor John Siegenthaler that described how some JFK/RFK conspiracy tin-hats savaged him (Siegenthaler) in a Wikipedia entry. (If you've been living under a rock, Wikipedia is an encyclopedia that anyone can register and edit; I was briefly involved with it and edited some entries on special operations personalities and 9/11 victims before I ran into the political buzzsaw that's Wikipedia's volunteer editors -- a bunch of people who don't have jobs, which means geeks living at home with mom and welfare moms snaffling Mallomars. You can't put in some comment about a hero of World War II without it being twisted by some rabid peacenik, so I gave up. Yeah, we just nuked the peace-loving Japs for no reason. Have it your way.
I use Wikipedia from time to time as a secondary source, or to back up my memory when I almost remember a fact. But I trust it less than, say, CBS Evening News.
The Wikipedia angle comes in at this point. Many in the press are decrying Wikipedia because of an op-ed piece by former editor John Siegenthaler that described how some JFK/RFK conspiracy tin-hats savaged him (Siegenthaler) in a Wikipedia entry. (If you've been living under a rock, Wikipedia is an encyclopedia that anyone can register and edit; I was briefly involved with it and edited some entries on special operations personalities and 9/11 victims before I ran into the political buzzsaw that's Wikipedia's volunteer editors -- a bunch of people who don't have jobs, which means geeks living at home with mom and welfare moms snaffling Mallomars. You can't put in some comment about a hero of World War II without it being twisted by some rabid peacenik, so I gave up. Yeah, we just nuked the peace-loving Japs for no reason. Have it your way.
I use Wikipedia from time to time as a secondary source, or to back up my memory when I almost remember a fact. But I trust it less than, say, CBS Evening News.
Siegenthaler, for his part, didn't take the most
direct route to a corrected entry: register as a Wikipedia content editor and
correct the entry about himself. (Which makes me wonder how he got there. Are
there really people so vain they search for entries about themselves on the
internet?) Instead, he did what all Real Men of the Left do when their
reputation, manhood, or anything else negotiable is on the line: threatened to
sue. Then he ran into this problem: sue whom? Not many of the editors of
Wikipedia use identifiable names (I used "hognose" which anyone from the Army SF
or aviation communities would probably recognize). To actually sue somebody,
he'd have to sue John Doe and start subpoenaing records.
Siegenthaler's an old man. Subpoenas take time. That isn't a propitious pathway for him. So instead he cranked up his contacts at the McPaper (he was ed=page editor when USA Today had, and deserved, that title) and wrote his fulmination. Which caught Mike's eye, for he's been on the receiving end of a bit of ad hominem abuse from Siegenthaler.
We report, you decide:
Mike Fumento, "What Goes Around, Comes Around."
John Siegenthaler, "Should Anyone Believe Fumento on Anything?"
Siegenthaler's attack on "Michael Fumento, a man of many titles," was in response to a Fumento op-ed dismantling a series of Nashville Tennessean stories that blamed pretty much all disease in Tennessee on the Oak Ridge nuclear plant, something the dependably-left Tennessean was, of course, against. The Tennessean's Series of Doom hysteria appears to have hit print in the time before the event horizon of the internet but we've all seen its shoddily-reported ilk (usually on the "TV I-Team investigates!!" beat). Siegenthaler does manage to make a sideways admission while Mike-bashing that "Without clear empirical evidence", there are "some medical authorities and some scientists-highly qualified and distinguished" that would "not waste a minute researching these cases." It's almost an admission that there's no there, there. "But a newspaper thought it was worth researching and studying."
It would.
Siegenthaler's an old man. Subpoenas take time. That isn't a propitious pathway for him. So instead he cranked up his contacts at the McPaper (he was ed=page editor when USA Today had, and deserved, that title) and wrote his fulmination. Which caught Mike's eye, for he's been on the receiving end of a bit of ad hominem abuse from Siegenthaler.
We report, you decide:
Mike Fumento, "What Goes Around, Comes Around."
John Siegenthaler, "Should Anyone Believe Fumento on Anything?"
Siegenthaler's attack on "Michael Fumento, a man of many titles," was in response to a Fumento op-ed dismantling a series of Nashville Tennessean stories that blamed pretty much all disease in Tennessee on the Oak Ridge nuclear plant, something the dependably-left Tennessean was, of course, against. The Tennessean's Series of Doom hysteria appears to have hit print in the time before the event horizon of the internet but we've all seen its shoddily-reported ilk (usually on the "TV I-Team investigates!!" beat). Siegenthaler does manage to make a sideways admission while Mike-bashing that "Without clear empirical evidence", there are "some medical authorities and some scientists-highly qualified and distinguished" that would "not waste a minute researching these cases." It's almost an admission that there's no there, there. "But a newspaper thought it was worth researching and studying."
It would.
Posted: Friday - December 09, 2005 at 10:02 PM
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