The mainstream media has become all but useless, while the net is definatley chock a block full of wackos, its also full of people of reporters not constrained by corporate interess.

For those of you who are interested in some alternative news you won't see on channel 9 have a look here;

www.911truth.org
www.st911.org

and in the interests of balance;

www.911myths.com - these guys are dedicated to proving the conspiracy wackjobs wrong, might interest you redneck.

That people continue to believe the WMD story regardless probably has as much to do with why people access particular news sources as what sources they choose. Same goes for flat earthers and intelligent design enthusiasts - if they do consider evidence against their beliefs it's less because they want to be informed and more because they're looking for chinks in the armour of the opposition.

The forums on OLO provide ample evidence for this, when the number of comments on an article goes through the roof when it's about something more emotive than rational, and people turn to some very strange sources for evidence to back up their truth claims.

It's no different where mainstream news is concerned when people pay more attention to op-ed columns than to the news.

"It's enough to make you feel queasy. A recent Harris poll found that half the American public - up from 36 per cent last year - believe Iraq had weapons of mass destruction at the time of the US invasion. This despite the fact that the final report of the Iraq Survey Group - experts handpicked by the CIA and Pentagon - concluded that Iraq had no deployable chemical, biological or nuclear weapons in 2003, and had not produced any since 1991"

I couldn't agree more that these findings are very sad. But I wouldn't be blaming the unreliability of the internet - what I would be more concerned about would be the mainstream reporting of US government statements simply as fact, without touching on any of the obvious elements of bias that accompanied these statements.

I'm kind of amused by the idea that the mainstream media can be regarded as exercising quality control over the accuracy of their stories. I've been close to a number of minor stories and have yet to see one where the main facts were reasonably represented in the media coverage which occurred. Not as close to any big stories but close enough to be fairly confident that the handling of those is no better.

R0bert

I do not know the figures for information obtained from the media versus the internet but I think they would show the media as a larger source than the Internet. If correct this makes criticism of the internet for belief incorrect. That the media is biased to wards its own commercial needs rather than its role in providing accurate and as complete as possible information thus favouring popular opinion, patriotic opinion in the case of a war situation, has I think been demonstrated.
This is not to deny the main thrust of this article for the net is indeed an object of danger to informed opinion, the onus is on the user, his education and intelligence. There is a move to curtail the chaos of the net by bringing it intor corporate control just like the rest of the media. I hope this article recognises this.
True distortion untruths emotional idiocy is as much a part of the net as the media but the breadth of the net is such that if time is spent in chasing data cross checking criticising a closer to the facts can be found.
I am sure I am not the only one who turned to the net in 2001/02 seeking facts on Iraq (Iran, Israel Tom Cobbly and all) and found that it seemed the whole pitch (the major media sources quoting Government data uncritically) was a confidence trick. A lie. That in some countries at least the ‘trusted leaders’ had lied distorted data in favour of their own ends (maybe national interest maybe easier electoral run) when it should have been in favour of an informed electorate that could tell its representatives how to act.
I am sure that once the troops were committed disagreement was more difficult because the thought of troops being in danger restrained opinion. Still Australia from Sept 11 2001 had committed herself to America and the data was adjusted accordingly, not excused by the Flood report. Such good and evil dichotomies still exist spread by the corporate media.

An interesting implication of this is the possible collapse of the west??

Firstly, have you noticed how poor countries get smaller and wealthy ones get bigger? The third world is full of one independance movement after another. Yet Europe is now much closer to being a single country than ever before... Why?

One factor is the huge body of shared cultural infastructure... Europeans have interconnected railways, shared (or wire) content in TV news and current affairs, they all watch a reasonable amount of hollywood and have the same multinational companies producing and marketing the same goods.

Why third world nations tend to be torn by civil strife is that they don't have this shared infastructure, and consequently the guys in the next village and on the other side of the country have nothing in common with each other.

If the web breaks down our shared cultural values into factions who don't talk to each other... how long can western nations continue to hold, well, 'western' values?

I don't have clearly formed views on this, but it is an interesting idea...