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- I've suggested before that the most noteworthy impact of new media won't be on journalism but on academia, and a great story in The New York Times proves the point. It details an effort to reform publishing in academic journals from the peer-review model to one in which submissions are picked apart online. I'm sure such an idea would make Andrew Keen faint on the spot, but this is anything but letting the mob into the ivory tower. The minutiae of some tiny corner of an academic field is not going to succumb to Godwin's Law.
- If you're going to write an article about president-in-waiting Mitt Romney, you might as well write it with a level of emptiness befitting the former Massachusetts governor. To wit: "But the most dramatic re invention may be a stylistic one: Romney is seeking to come across as more easygoing and accessible than the formally dressed, perfectly coiffed, carefully rehearsed candidate of the last campaign." But I thought Mitt was The One because he "looked presidential." Am I missing a new media meme?
- Jim Manzi makes another contribution to the genre I'll call the Epistemology Dodge, whereby he criticizes government intervention on the grounds that we lack complete knowledge of its macroeconomic effects. The nifty thing about the Epistemology Dodge is that it's a one-size-fits-all conservative criticism of the liberal agenda. Since macroeconomic theory isn't scientific, we can't understand the effects of stimulus spending, and thus we shouldn't spend any money to fill demand. Since we can't pinpoint the precise macroeconomic effects of cap-and-trade, we're better off letting the market come up with a solution to global warming. And so forth.
- Remainders: Brendan Nyhan on the normalization of the "Obama is a Muslim" myth; indeed, it is mystifying that Democrats haven't coalesced around an election season platform of "we want to soak the rich"; stigmatizing Muslims isn't just an American phenomenon; cable and radio news lead the competition for keeping frivolous stories in the news; and Scott Rasmussen seems more interested in Winning the Morning® than gathering good polling data;
--Mori Dinauer
