terrier of truth on the pantleg of bullshit

October 2, 2004 8:25 AM

Better than newsfilter : Metafilter as a terrier of truth on the pantleg of bullshit ? - I noticed, all of a sudden, an emerging posting trend which seems to me far healthier than reflexive newsfilterism - as shown in these six threads.
posted by troutfishing to MetaFilter-Related at 8:25 AM (9 comments total)

Ever since the Dan Rather thing the old media has been rife with stories about the way bloggers will fact check the news from now on. I'm sure there's something to it. Reporters usually know very little about a subject going into a story. They walk in fresh, talk to everyone they can find, and then publish. 9 times out of 10 there's someone who's been on the spot where the story took place for years, because they work/live there, and they see plain as day where the reporter got it wrong. No one I know who's ever been in the newspaper said "Yeah, they pretty much got it right." Only now, they have another option besides writing to the editor.

I never thought, during that stream of stories about how the bloggers are going to bring down old media, about how much News gets reposted here, verbatim. We certainly do eat up their stuff 1000x more often than we find fault with it.
posted by scarabic at 9:31 AM on October 2, 2004

Agreed, definately a good trend. Good posts fleener, insomnia_lj, mathowie, jackspace, krewson, and taumeson! Amberglow's post on the whole "let me finish" thing was good too, even if it's very probably just a reaction to something not visible on the television, it was still interesting, which is something most of the election circus posts definately weren't.
posted by fvw at 12:09 PM on October 2, 2004

I bet bullshit is a Dockers guy.
posted by Armitage Shanks at 12:23 PM on October 2, 2004

Oh yeah.
posted by troutfishing at 1:25 PM on October 2, 2004

I think a lot of us have been doing that for a while tho--i know i've been most moved (for various reasons) to post stuff that points out that what we're being told/shown isn't true (and recent history has given us an abundance of examples).
posted by amberglow at 4:34 PM on October 2, 2004

thanks troutfishing. i was going to say it was depressing that more people haven't commented in this thread when every "not-another-newsfilter" meta post and its idiot brother get 80 comments. on the other hand, good news is ... good news!
posted by louigi at 12:07 PM on October 3, 2004

[...]Metafilter as a terrier of truth on the pantleg of bullshit ?

I prefer MetaFilter as the bullshit of truth on the pantleg of a terrier; being an amorphous postmodern chunka on a fretful little dog's trousers leaves open to us infinite possibilities for articulative experimentation*; being merely a tenacious cur (no matter how honorable) chains us to a coldly-kenneled eternity of hounding journalistic ass-sniffing.

*And of course, a terrier wearing tiny Dockers sporting a philosophically ambiguous agglomeration on one of its pantlegs amuses me, as I'm sure it amuses everyone, though probably not in equal measure, thankfully.

[/end jeshavinfuntrouthaddafewxtrawordsinthepipehaddaflushem]
posted by Opus Dark at 4:42 AM on October 4, 2004

Oh man....I need a perspective tweak to scrapple with that one. ".....being merely a tenacious cur (no matter how honorable) chains us to a coldly-kenneled eternity of hounding journalistic ass-sniffing." Too true, too true.

The truth of bullshit on the pantleg of a poodle ?

nah, sounds too DongResinous.

A colonoscopy of truth for spuds "media" Mckenzie ?

Nah, leave the dog out of it...

The white hot rectal probe of truth up the ass of media bloat....
posted by troutfishing at 3:21 PM on October 4, 2004

That's a start.

louigi - incest sells copy. Always did. [ But, you're welcome ].

Oh - I should have added "...the dockers clad ass of the media bloatacracy...[ blutocracy ? ]"

OD, run that through the rinse cycle of your mind, reassemble.........
posted by troutfishing at 3:26 PM on October 4, 2004