Having a Brain

I am not a big fan of the “citizen journalism” being practiced on the Internet these days. One of the tenets of “real” journalism is that you don’t distribute information that hasn’t been checked. Citizen publishers are under no such obligation, so the information that winds up in blogs and distributed on mailing lists must always be considered suspect, even if sent with the best of intentions.

So begins a (yawn) dissection of a scintillating article in Publish about misinformation spread (horror) via a mailing list. I could bore you to tears with the details but I’d rather not. (Masochists head this way.) All I have to say is that all information—from the New York Times to BoingBoing—should be treated as suspect. It’s called weighing information; making your own decisions; having a brain.