Sunday, January 17, 2010

It's because they lie. All the time.


It's easy to make the argument that the mainstream media should simply disallow all comments on their posted articles, since all that happens is indescribably stupid and/or dishonest people show up to spew absolute nonsense.

Case in point -- the idiocy of one "Jim Pook" on this article:

At least Stephen Harper is getting the DART team out quickly. Unlike Liberal Paul Martin who dithered for weeks and never sent it at all because it was too late.

Good for Stephen Harper, he's getting the job done!

Wow -- Paul Martin dithered "for weeks," after which he "never sent it at all." That's ... that's ... awful! Or it would be if any of it were true. Perhaps we can drag people back to reality and see what actually happened, assuming we can reasonably trust Wikipedia (all emphasis added for the benefit of intellectual basket case Jim Pook):

Operation STRUCTURE (Sri Lanka)

DART responded to the Indian Ocean earthquake/tsunami that occurred on December 26, 2004. The reconnaissance crew left for Colombo, Sri Lanka on December 30, 2004. A commercial plane carried a reconnaissance crew with representatives from Foreign Affairs Canada (3), Canadian International Development Agency (2), Public Health Agency (1), and DART itself (6).

Prime Minister Paul Martin announced his plans to send DART into the region on January 2, 2005. Four days later, a plane carrying 150 DART members departed for Ampara, Sri Lanka. On 8 January 2005, 50 more members arrived. Sri Lanka suffered tremendously as a result of the 2004 Indian Ocean Earthquake, and the Canadian government stated that their relief efforts were to be concentrated there. They set up their main camp in a former sugar factory.

Well, golly gee, Sergeant Carter. It might be that Canada's DART team didn't get to Sri Lanka as quickly as some people might have liked, but it's obvious that things were happening within days of the disaster and, in fact, the timeline looks reasonable -- you just don't send an entire DART team without first sending a scout team to figure out how bad things are and where those folks are going to set up.

In short, it would seem that things happened as they were supposed to, and Stephen Harper fluffer Jim Pook is, unsurprisingly, full of crap. Such is the fetid swamp that is the comments sections of the MSM these days -- the occasional objective and accurate observation, completely swamped under a deluge of right-wing dumbassitude.

Why the MSM even bothers with this exercise in self-abuse is a mystery.

4 comments:

lichtik said...

Perhaps there's an opening for a new position to be defined within the MSM: comment checker. After all, they're supposed to have fact checkers so why not comment checkers.

And, just to make sure the idiots are adequately embarrassed, the original comments should be posted as entered and the facts should be edited into the comment.

Ti-Guy said...

Why the MSM even bothers with this exercise in self-abuse is a mystery.

Because it measures performance by traffic. The idiots get people talking and referring to them, thus directing more traffic to them.

The editors themselves are entirely cynical about the whole affair (they themselves refer to their commenters as morons). But they don't care. Why should they?

sooey said...

I don't read corporate media blogs anymore.

Ti-Guy said...

I still pop by MacLean's once or twice a day, but now that O'Malley has left, there's absolutely no reporting or research.