Trust The Voice in Your Head

It nearly makes your eyes bleed to read Maureen Dowd say to a reporter in Austin Texas that you can't trust blogs. Not because it isn't true, but because of how baldly it serves the purposes of job protection.

The bloggers have done some great investigative work, and some hilarious work – I love Gawker, they do some hilarious things and some very original columns. It's hard sometimes, because blogs also have a lot of misinformation. I'm never quite sure when you're using it as research, you never quite know how verified it is. It's like the Wild West.

Sure some people have difficulty with the truth, but that has nothing to do with their employment status. Jayson Blair worked for her employer as did the reporters who bungled the Wen Ho Lee story. It seems like a couple of days ago that Times public editor Byron Calame was scolding the editor of the Times opinion page for allowing lying privleges to Dowd's fellow columnist Paul Krugman. The presumption of trust that newspeople award themselves with flys in the face of polling data that make George Bush's numbers look great.

No one expects Maureen Dowd to be perfect--that's why they have a corrections page. But it's a bit much having to listen to a woman, whose column is constructed entirely out of the voices within her head, suggest to readers that her employer guarantees accuracy.