Wednesday, April 27, 2005

Failings

Frode has blogged our lunch together at Ikkyu yesterday, smoothly accentuating the more earnest aspects of our dialogue. As well as the failings of search systems Frode remarks about the failings of journalists - unless they are writing about journalism, they're writing about something they don't fully understand.

Generalised as it is, he does have a point there. Personally I am reluctant to air opinions on topics on which I would not be prepared to stand and face up to an acknowledged expert. Yet a great deal of the output of mainstream journalism (and the worst sort of weblogs) involves synthetic commentary posing as informed analysis.

Occasionally though, even the most careful reporter will fall down one of the holes in their knowledge. However hard a hack tries not to opine, a shallow understanding can lead to the transmission of fallacies and misconceptions. Frode feels that he has been on the receiving end of some of these of late.

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