Oh Cracked....

So  Cracked decided to tackle Brian Williams.

Now... once again we have the fun of URL title versus actual title.

The url is "why-internet-needs-to-calm-down-about-brian-william"  but they then decided to go with the more sedate... "4 Terrible Lessons the Brian Williams Scandal Taught Us"

What's funny is that the article actually doesn't say that Williams is a victim of a witch hunt or that it was even political scalping/swifboating whatever.   In fact they actually a passable summary of events and implicitly condemn Williams for unacceptable behavior.

However....  the rest of the article is all about how stupid 'merican's are stupid for feeling offended.

And their list is basically 

4 Internet news people aren't trusted... and that's somehow... relevant to a non-internet newscaster...

3 "We Can't Trust Ourselves to Choose What's Important"  Yeah... that's the literal title. Yup... an article about a "legitimate" reporter being caught in an ethical lapse is just evidence that the proles *need* those elite media gatekeepers.  

Okay I kid.  See because newspapers cover "legitimate" news and articles trending on facebook are fluff that means the proles can't be trusted.  

"Newspapers tell you what you should know, and tabloids tell you what you want to know."  Again that is an exact quote.  I mean... wow.  Paging Walter Duranty

2 Let's complain about shoddy standards of such internet news sources as Newsweek and Salon

Seriously.  These guys point to Newsweek, including that it didn't report on Williams years ago as the fault of "internet media"

And again let's go to something that I have to stress... is a direct quotation "Hey, Internet Media: Why didn't you figure out and report that Williams was a fibber 12 years ago?"

Good points.  At least they mention... Salon (supposetly a publication in good leftward standing) but hey it was online 12 years ago!  And Newsweek...   was a magazine. In fact was up there with Time, and only stopped publishing a print edition two years ago.  After....  80 years of publishing.

Note  that one of the major news publications that has been in print for nearly a century  becomes "Internet Media".

And note that they do not ask why the print media or broadcast didn't bother to break the Williams story.  You know...  given he was a broadcast anchor...

Oh and the best part...  

1 "We're Comically Smug About How Uninformed We Are"

Again, this is the actual line.  Now sure they're bashing Gawker...   but in the immediately preceding section they were snidely deriding Newsweek as "Internet Media"  and in the section precding THAT they were jock-sniffing the print media.

Man... if only Newsweek had kept printing issues....

Now here's the thing.  There are some good points on how people are just as uniformed as they always have been, and how we like media that confirms our own biases, and that the media was lazy and didn't actually investigate Williams...

But...  those points are kind of lost when the writers themselves engage in the very things they rant about.

Course Williams isn't the only bad thing to happen in the media last week...