An item of conversation from last week at drinkies for one of the team: an acquaintance is wondering about the media, and asked me how I would handle any attacks. Given that the media have generally been very nice to me since I started making the news in the mid-1990s, it’s hard to say, but examining my friend Jen Siebel’s case that I wrote about in Lucire a few months ago, it’s not hard to summarize the motives of the negative as an extension of John Gabriel’s Greater Internet F***wad Theory. Some of the gossip press can be grouped into this bunch and as the blogosphere grows, we can expect to find more opinion masquerading as fact across the board.
   Here, then, are their motives.
   1. They believe that they should have the right to free speech, but you do not, or that their right is superior to yours.
   2. They pretend that they are an authoritative voice on the subject, even if that doesn’t gel with why they avoided approaching you for a comment. They fail to understand basic journalism.
   3. They so believe in their authority that even if you are an eyewitness who was there at the event or involved in the situation, your testimony is less credible than theirs. For some reason, it’s more comforting to the fantasy world they built in their heads to believe the lie because the truth brings it all crashing down.
   4. They generally have some sort of insecurity or an absence of a real life that they have to become fixated on yours, usually as a form of transferring their own shortcomings on to another target. (Where else, after all, do they come up with the adjectives they use? Answer: their own subconscious.)
   It is a mental health issue. Don’t ponder it: leave it to the experts and just continue to do what you are good at.

I was also asked why, if I spout off about politics all the time, do I not get involved formally (beyond the now-defunct 99 MP Party, which would have been more fun to set up after blogs became mainstream). I answered that Darwinists are always seeking the missing link between the ape and the civilized being. Their answer is Parliament. And I am not prepared to muck in. Posted by Jack Yan, 09:49  permalink

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