Ciao!

Miguel, I applaud your activism, but I hope you've thought out the decision to host a mirror.

If the Times becomes surly, they may start slapping lawsuits. While they may not win, they do have an army of paid lawyers with a lot of capital. Being haled into court can be a costly affair.

Quite apart from the trademark, etc., issues, which -- like it or not -- are legitimate, here's a question. Are Cox's "columnist corrections" actually corrections? Answer: Not really. They're really arguments about whether a joke should be interpreted literally, whether a quote was taken out of context, whether certain statistics prove something -- in other words, the "corrections" are not as much corrections as arguments, that is, opinions. Cox is not as much fact checking as opinion mongering. Nothing wrong with that, but it's hardly caues for passing out halos.

Cox takes exception to Brooks's joke about the difference between Democratic and Republican candidates. Hello. It's a joke. Is he going to start correctiong David Letterman's Top Ten List? Jay Leno's monologue? (Leno would be an easy critique: it's not funny.)

In a correction of Krugman's no-longer-looking-for work percentages (in which Cox misplaces the decimal points, thus rendering 32 percent as .32 percent), it's not clear if 32 percent is unusually large or not, because we can't tell from Cox's comment if the number just climbed up from 15 percent -- which would be a doubling, has been bobbing up and down for ten years, or what.

Maybe Cox's best defense is that he is doing a parody of an Internet corrections column.
Dan

Good points, both of you. I may very well have leapt before looking. But I think Cox is doing OK. He's not fact checking, but bias checking columnists. Of course, colum writing is by nature opinion writing. And it's fair to check them.

That's why I like blogs as news media. A "news" or "opinion" item is posted, then is commented on, then linked to, them commented on the links, ad infinitum. It's not static. Old media is static, one-way conversation from journalists who often think better of themselves than they should. That's my little axe to grind.

I used to work for a paper. I was an assistant weekend editor who edited, proofed, and wrote headlines for stories. I also did some writing. I was thinking of going into journalism. Until I kept running into experiences where senior editors w/ their own opinions would dictate how stories should be edited/written.

Often, when you see a quote that says "inside sources say" ... in my experience those are the words of the editor after he/she tells you: "I'm sure someone must think that, find someone who says it, I don't care who." Media isn't about telling "facts" (and having confidence in common people to make their opinions), it's about telling a side of a story. It sickened me; I changed majors.

Yes, the Times might send me a cease & dissist letter. I'll pull the mirror & walk away. The idea's to push the envelope, start a discussion on why is it that large media conglomerates can say/print/broadcast what they want & no one has a right to criticize them? People can say whatever they want about my blog. Online or not. I don't think corporations (which have legal "personality") have any more rights than I do.