“Fair & Balanced”: Harvard Law Bloggers Give Equal Weight to Disinformation

Camera vs. firearm: “Equal violence on all sides.”

Attribution to another publication … cannot serve as license to print rumors that would not meet the test of The Times’s own reporting standards. Rumors must satisfy The Times’s standard of newsworthiness, taste and plausibility before publication, even when attributed. And when the need arises to attribute, that is a good cue to consult with the department head about whether publication is warranted at all. –The New York Times, Guidelines on Integrity

Bill Keller obviously just doesn’t “get” the Internet.

Global Voices Online : The last moments of Bradley Roland Will:

But as one of the blogs David Sasaki quotes had it, there’s a balance to be struck between outrage at the killing of Brad Will, and at the mounting number of local deaths and injuries.

The blog, apparently, is Mark in Mexico, cited heavily in David Sasaki’s post titled Fear and Misinformation Abound — presumably for reasons of “balance.”

Fear, uncertainty and doubt abound. Global Voices Online in a nutshell.

The mysterious Mark’s confirmation bias is attributed by Sasaki to his “sardonic, anti-left attitudes.”

What I would like to know is who signs the guy’s paychecks.

Whoever this Mark in Mexico is — I tried fairly hard to track the guy down, and he appears to have no real life prior to popping up as the proprietor of this school, about which I can also find no information — I have to say that his main role has been to amplify disinformation.

Mark — whom I have tried repeatedly to reach by e-mail to ask him questions about his work — has worked especially hard to amplify the disinformation, for example, that there is equal violence on both sides of the Oaxaca conflict, that the strike was fomented by armed communist agitators for national political reasons, and that the federal police are independent third parties that are now intervening to calm a local conflict.

The Mexican federal police, I submit to you are a narcosyndicate-infiltrated nightmare beyond what you can imagine. Study the San Salvador de Atenco incident. Leave the questions of legality out of it and simply focus on the what happened to woman protestors after they were arrested, and the male prisoners forced to walk a gantlet of riot police armed with clubs.

Not the “stick ’em in a cell and let the system have ’em” professionalism you are used to at home, where an Abner Louima case, for example, is huge news because that kind of thing is, thank goodness, a shocking anomaly.

Anyway, Mark in Mexico consistently reports incidents that never happened, are reported nowhere else, and for which he offers no supporting evidence. His frequent sightings of “armed thugs” intimidating little old ladies in the Zócalo is a typical example.

In other words, Mark looks an awful lot like a shadowy, systematic liar.

Given that nothing that he says checks out, and no information is available to confirm his cover story, I, unlike Olavo de Carvalho, would not repeat a single word he says as fact, or recommend, as GVO does, that readers merely discount his apparent ideological bias, as though he were merely an overenthusiastic Red State blogger.

The real bias here appears to be against the outmoded values of the “reality-based community.”