Getting back to the point.
The extent to which outside experts may be able to influence what a journalist
writes, or a journal prints, is an interesting issue unto itself, but it's not
really the question at hand here. The question would seem to be whether we need
to position ourselves somewhere low down (should that be high up?) on the information
food chain, or whether we can be satisfied with simply being information consumers
at the point of publication. Do we really need to be aware of all the stages an
article goes through until it reaches our eyes? Can we trust the person writing
a particular article (and the group publishing it) to give us the information
we need without our having to dig far below the surface to check the sources?
If all of us are producing news, are we also going to be checking everybody's
sources, or their accuracy? Had it not turned to Slashdot, Jane's might
have ended up printing an inaccurate report on the topic at hand. Had that happened,
it's a fair guess that they would have encountered a great deal of criticism,
leading them to change their report, or to defend it. They would have been called
on to defend their accountability, which seems totally legitimate. In a framework
of hundreds of prosumers of the news, would we also demand that same accountability
from each news producer/consumer? Would we be able to do so?
Go to: One case in point, or
Go to: How many prosumers can fit on the head
of cyberspace?