To the Editor:
Recently, Mr. Wayne Cosby said “there may be good reason to question the accuracy of some Internet information, but it represents a forum where we, the average citizens, can get what the national media has covered up.” This much is true. We bloggers do engage in journalism – in every phase of it, including the editorial process. No one can quash our stories if they might offend advertisers or public figures.
The flip side is that we have no Mike Goens to check our facts or quotes, either. Yes, bloggers report all kinds of things withheld by the gatekeepers of media; for example, depending on the Web site you visit, Earth is controlled by Zionist Jews, the Masons, aliens, or a subterranean race of reptilian-human hybrids.
Thus, when stories cross over from the Web to the so-called “mainstream media,” or MSM, reporters and editors exercise more than the usual diligence. Of a dozen leads on Joe the Plumber developed by bloggers, only three penetrated the mainstream media; the others were misleading or mistaken.
Mr. Wayne Cosby has fallen victim to the dark side of Internet journalism. “The fact … is that Arabs, Muslims, were responsible for 9/11,” he says. (Several Web sites aggressively disagree with this presumption, but I digress.) “It is reasonable that persons with like ethnic and religious affiliation should be viewed with suspicion.”
What rot. Islam requires the public confession of faith. There is no such thing as a “secret Muslim;” ask any professor of comparative religion. And Obama is no more an Arab than is Wayne Cosby – ask any ethnologist. These inventions don’t become true just because someone posts them on the Internet.
Fantasists have made a handsome profit convincing people like Wayne Cosby that Obama was already perpetrating a vast fraud while in the womb. When he says “The crisis looming over (Obama’s) place of birth will not go away,” what he really means is that a few million people want to believe in a conspiracy so much that they will see one. Occam’s Razor has never convinced UFO enthusiasts or 9/11 theorists; neither will it convince Mr. Wayne Cosby. Regardless of the evidence – or lack thereof – they will not let it go for eight years.
The paranoid will always be with us.
Matt “Hussein” Osborne
Florence
