What should concern Bill Keller is that we’re a nation of morons. I don’t know whether Twitter and Facebook make this problem better or worse, but i know that social media didn’t cause it. I also know that employing people like Judy Miller and William Safire was at best a passive way of aggressively misinforming people on a regular basis. When the New York Times lies it’s especially pernicious, because the left side of the country’s political culture actually has a tendency to believe the New York Times. Also, too, the intelligentsia of our country reads the paper like it is some kind of prerequisite to being taken seriously to know what was in last week’s Style section. If you were seriously wondering whether Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction or served a catered lunch to Mohammed Atta then the New York Times gave you the wrong answers. It made smart people stupid. I don’t think Twitter ever did that.
What Bill Keller Should Worry About
