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Tuesday, November 30, 2010

Trolls, Heal Thyselves

The New York Times had an Op-Ed yesterday complaining about anonymous trolls on blogs who post inflammatory messages to get a reaction:
Trolling, defined as the act of posting inflammatory, derogatory or provocative messages in public forums, is a problem as old as the Internet itself, although its roots go much farther back.
What do we call non-anonymous trolls who post inflammatory, derogatory or provocative messages in public forums to get a reaction?
Frank Rich
Maureen Dowd
Gail Collins
Nicholas Kristof
Paul Krugman
And what do we call the place which pays for such non-anonymous trolling?
The Gray Lady
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8 comments:

  1. Or should that be:

    Trolls, Heel Thyself

    :-)

    ReplyDelete
  2. I attended an Upstate New York College in the 80's and took a remarkable course entitled 'Politics and the Media'. Essentially the professor posited that 2 or more reporters/news organizations almost never wrote the same story or had the same version of a given event. Therefore, we were encouraged to sample many news 'sources' (or, as the professor would often say, 'news products') and then try to explain why a particular slant or bias existed in a given 'story'. Really opened my eyes, of course, whatever was presented on the news was 'fact'(wink). One of the accompanying texts for the course, which I still have and is a revealing/pertinent read, is entitled "The News at Any Cost - How Journalists Compromise Their Ethics to Shape the News" by Tom Goldstein. If one understands that people in the the media are motivated by many different factors, then the term 'objective journalism' would/should probably never be used again.

    ReplyDelete
  3. And what do we call the place which pays for such non-anonymous trolling?

    I don't think it's fair to single out the NY Times like that (and aren't they the "Yellow Lady" now, anyway?).

    The Washington Post, with such luminaries as Richard Cohen and Eugene Robinson, certainly deserves consideration as well.

    ReplyDelete
  4. File under Double Standards, Liberal.

    When a Liberal says something provocative,it's "clever" and "witty" and "cerebral".

    When a Conservative does, it's "inflammatory" and "dangerous".

    So tired of it.
    Fix Bayonets!

    ReplyDelete