the internet is just too free

(Written for the voice of Andy Rooney. Not that he would agree with the content.)

Have you ever thought that the internet was just too darn free? Do you ever find yourself longing for the days when only three networks told you what you to think all the time?
 
Farhad Manjoo does, too. He wrote about it in an article for the New York Times called "How the Internet is Loosening Our Grip on Truth." He writes for the Technology section of the New York Times, so he must be a pretty sharp guy. But for a pretty sharp guy, he says a lot of strange things.
 
This, for example:
 
"Documentary proof seems to have lost its power. If the Kennedy conspiracies were rooted in an absence of documentary evidence, the 9/11 theories benefited from a surfeit of it. So many pictures from 9/11 flooded the internet, often without much context about what was being shown, that conspiracy theorists could pick and choose among them to show off exactly the narrative they preferred."
 
He says that people believe in a conspiracy to kill President Kennedy due to a lack of documentary evidence. He doesn’t really explain what he means, but he seems to think that video evidence is what drives Kennedy researchers. So that, for example, Salon Magazine editor David Talbot wrote his 600-page biography of Allen Dulles, The Grand Chessboard, after seeing that one Zapruder film where the President’s head goes flying violently backward. Not violently forward, as Dan Rather said.

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Hey, Dan Rather. He used to be one of the big opinion-makers in the good old days. Like Henry Luce of TIME Magazine and Bill Paley of CBS.

Hey, my show was on CBS. Henry Luce and Bill Paley must have been some good guys. Except apparently they took orders from the CIA. And so did a lot of other reporters.

You know, I don’t think I ever got a check from the CIA. Sometimes I would get free meals at the CBS Commissary, but only when Roberta was working there. I’m pretty sure she didn’t work in intelligence. She did, however, make great mashed potatoes.
 
On the other hand, according to Manjoo, many people believe that 9/11 was a conspiracy because there’s too much documentary evidence. Too many videos! If only we had a way to choke all those off and make sure people only paid attention to the important videos. Which are the important videos? Well I guess they’d tell us. I wonder which videos Farhad Manjoo thinks are important. I would ask him, but he also says that “We all tend to filter documentary evidence through our own biases.” If that’s true, then he must have some biases that filter his evidence. So I wonder how he distinguishes the evidence he sees with his filter from the evidence that other people see with their filters, and how he decides which evidence is better. It’s all very confusing.
 
I guess I won’t ask him after all.
 
Farhad Manjoo sees terrible things in our future. He thinks that all this freedom of opinion is going to be a “boulder…to squash us all.” I guess that’s possible. Hey, do you think that boulder is built by American workers? I mean, apparently it’s Americans who are doing all this rogue thinking.
 
I’d hate to think the boulder that squashes us all was built by foreigners.

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