NYT - DU Derided? -- Myths Run Wild in Blog Tsunami Debate [View All]

[matt819]

Take a look at this: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/03/international/worldspecial4/03bloggers.html

This from Monday's NYT re the blog responses to the tsunami. Clearly, they are having fun at DU's expense, though, to be fair, the second snip adds some balance. So, is any publicity good publicity?

<snip>
To some in the blogosphere, it (th tsunami) simply had to be the government's fault.

On Democratic Underground, a blog for open discussion and an online gathering place for people who hate the Bush administration, a participant asked, "Since we know that the atmosphere has become contaminated by all the atomic testing, space stuff, electronic stuff, earth pollutants, etc., is it logical to wonder if: Perhaps the 'bones' of our earth where this earthquake spawned have also been affected?"

The cause of the earthquake and resulting killer wave, the writer said, could be the war in Iraq. "You know, we've exploded many millions of tons of ordnance upon this poor planet," the writer said. "All that 'shock and awe' stuff we've just dumped onto the Asian part of this earth - could we have fractured something? Perhaps the earth was just reacting to something that man has done to injure it. The earth is organic, you know. It can be hurt."

The ridicule began immediately. Online insults, referred to colloquially as flames, rose high on other sites.

"What would life be without D.U.?" asked an editor at Wizbang, a politically conservative blog (www.wizbangblog.com), using the initials of Democratic Underground.

"Get out the tin foil hats," a contributor to the blog wrote.

<snip>

<snip>

Mr. Surowiecki pointed out that there is nothing new about ill-informed rumor-mongering or other forms of oddness. "There were always cranks," he said. "Rumors have always been fundamental about the way people talk, or think, about politics or complicated issues." Instead of a corner bar or a Barcalounger, however, the location for today's speech is an online medium with a potential audience of millions.

But there is another, more important difference, Mr. Surowiecki and others say. Internet discourse can be self-correcting, with near-instant feedback from readers.

What was lost in the sniping over the Democratic Underground posting was the fact that the follow-up comments were a sober discussion of what actually causes earthquakes. The first response to the posting asked, "Earthquakes have been happening since the beginning of time ... How would you explain them?"

Further comments explained the movement of tectonic plates and provided links to sites explaining earthquakes and tsunamis from the United States Geological Survey and other authoritative sources.
<snip>