Wednesday, October 24, 2007

Why does reading the newspaper actually decrease your knowledge?

So asks Nassim Taleb.

Don Surber has a good case in point (via Glenn Reynolds):
Drudge and NYT are about even in Web hits. A British study showed one-quarter of the U.S. hits for Brit newspapers come from Drudge. I’m guessing he steers quite a few hits to NYT.

MoveOn hates Drudge because the Clintons were able to get Newsweek to spike the Lewinsky story, and they would have gotten away with it too, if not for that meddling Matt.

NYT carries water for MoveOn today in a Page One story that included this:

The site is a potent combination of real scoops, gossip and innuendo aimed at Mr. Drudge’s targets of choice — some of it delivered with no apparent effort to determine its truth, as politicians of all stripes have discovered at times.

Well, let’s put that to the acid test. The Drudge at 8:20 a.m. Eastern today.

Top of the Page:

Wildfires Prompt State Of Emergency In 7 Counties…
Malibu inferno…
Thousands more homes could be at risk…
Wind gusts to 60 mph…

And the links are to: KNBC, the Daily News, LA Times, and Weather Underground — the news service, not the group of radical bombers that was featured in a NYT story on Sept. 11, 2001.

Banner headline: “HELL COMES TO SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA”

Source? AP.

Left side stories think to 1. ABC News, 2. AP, 3. Fox News, 4. Financial Times, 5. AP, 6. Financial Times, 7. Malaysia Times, 8. Hollywood Reporter, 9. Times of London, 10. International Herald Tribune, 11. Deadline Hollywood.

Center column: 1. Times of London, 2. London Telegraph, 3. London Guardian, 4. International Herald Tribune, 5. Times of London, 6. Washington Post, 7. Washington Times, 8. Haaretz.

Right side: 1. New York Times, 2. AP, 3. Bloomberg, 4. AP, 5. Agence France-Presse, 6. Washington Post, 7. AP, 8. YouTube

32 links – 31 to news organizations that were established pre-Internet. The lone Web-only site is YouTube.

The only story that is based solely on innuendo is the lone NYT story: “Clinton Finds Way to Play Along With Drudge

Which is where I got the quote. Game. Set. Match.

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