Judith,
Lisa in her response to a question about the bloggers versus the MSM touched on the NYT and unfortunately did not have available a very recent example to push home the point of the MSM's unreliable reporting:

THE NEW ADVENTURES OF OLD RATBOY

La Russophobe (blogspot) fisks an NYT piece by Thomas Friedman on Russia providing facts and figures to discredit the article.

The post finishes with : Why did we fail to understand this? Could it be because Ratboy and his ilk misled us? Will we ever learn? Not as long as we keep eating Ratboy’s toxic jellybeans.

Maybe there is no official editor and fact checker for the blogs, but of what use is it when instituted in the MSM and still falls far short of its intended purpose?

Hey Judith -

Thanks so much for the mention in your conference roundup. The transcript you quote is pretty inaccurate, so I'm adding my corrections here.

1. The Jordanian blogger I quoted is a "he" - Rami Abdelrahman (ramiswall.blogspot.com). He told me about a family ritual he enjoyed while growing up in Amman during the 1980's, when both Israel and Jordan had only one (state run) television station: on Friday afternoon, families all over Amman would gather around the TV to watch a cooking show hosted by an Israeli Arab chef named Abu Rami, who endeared himself to viewers with his humour. The cooking show was followed by a weekly Egyptian movie - in Arabic, obviously - that was broadcast with Hebrew subtitles.

2. While a short article about the Israeli-Lebanese blogging phenomenon was indeed published in the NY Times, as well as in many other prominent newspapers in North America and Europe, it was the Wall Street Journal that published it as a front page story. Link to the WSJ article is here.

3. I quoted the figure 100,000 to refer to the number of hits my blog received during the second week of the war, after I published a post called Putting Things in Perspective.

4. I mentioned Time Out not because they wrote about the blogging phenomenon, but because after I published the story of the friendship between the editors of Time Out Tel Aviv and Time Out Beirut, they both received many interview requests from the MSM media. In other words, MSM reporters were monitoring the blogs for stories.

5. I promoted the idea of broadcasting more Israeli TV content with Arabic subtitles because that would give Middle Easterners a more diverse, nuanced and accurate picture of Israel's complex society - and this picture is sorely lacking.

Cheers,

Lisa

Thanks for the corrections Lisa - I don't know who made the transcripts. Send me a copy of your talk and I'll post it.