Fred Wilson:
The new media world has its pros and cons. The pros are that I’ve got a blog to set the record straight and that everybody is recording everything. The negatives are that bloggers don’t feel compelled to write accurate headlines and twitter can amplify the inaccuracies when those headlines get tweeted and retweeted.
Can I quote you on that?
He should’ve known better than to speak with Arrington in the first place, no?
The new media might just give the more perceptive amongst us a clearer perspective of “knowledge” and “data.” They’re not the same thing. One essential aspect of knowledge is certainty. Know what you know, and don’t be swayed by the possibility of overwhelming data to the contrary, no matter who spews it, no matter how many spew it.
I said it to Fred and I’ll say it here. Many bloggers, and basically all of them on the major sites, don’t give a fig about truth. They are about page hits. Period. If tweaking a headline to make it sound more horrible or scandalous gets them hits they will do it while throwing their own mothers under the bus
Except that in this incidence, “data” was actually “willful distortion.”