End of Candor
Seth Godin is great, because he’s just as eager and evangelical when he’s wrong as when he’s right. He’s raising the red flags like a modern-day Paul Revere, ?YOU CAN’T TRUST BLOGS, THE CIA MIGHT WRITE ONE!!!? He’s wants to make sure that you know your expectations are about to change, and that he was the first to tell you.
For the life of me, I can’t figure out what he’s excited about. By his logic, you should never trust human contact again, because the person you’re talking too might be a CIA asset. But that has always been a possibility. Blogs are simply a form of personal communication, and like all intrapersonal communication, capable of being subordinated by ulterior motives. And I have news for Seth — nobody reads blogs thinking, ?What a crafty way to get my news without CIA interference!?
Personally, I think the whole NYT thing is yet another attempt by the old media to deflect attention from their own conflicts of interest (I recall some recent story of a news commentator being paid to boost ?no child left behind? in his newspaper column). It seems that every time the old media gets caught in a lie or loses a major advertiser, we see a story about ?YOU CAN’T TRUST THE BLOGGERS?. It’s stale and pathetic, really.