Bill Ryan's Other Blog

The internet has been a curse to old media outlets.  They once had complete control of ‘the news’. But the internet has changed all of that and fast.  Layoffs and falling stock prices happen with as much fervor as the denunciations of bloggers by MSM types.  The MSM gets stuff right. They fact check.  They are professionals, not just some malcontent in pajamas (oh yes, and the MSM never stereotypes).  There’s a lot of crap floating around the internet, no doubt.  There are times where the blogosphere hops all over something that turns out to be BS.  There’s a lot of misinformation.  But on the whole, the blogosphere is a lot more credible than any media outlet I know of.  Any charge you can levy against the blogoshere is equally applicable to the MSM.  Hell, every word I’ve written so far has been written a hundred times before and is self-evident to anyone outside of the media and the fiefdoms it protects.

As I read this, I can almost hear Winston Wolf telling Vincent and Jules “… before we all start sucking each other’s d****…”  B/c that’s exactly what’s Marc Fisher is doing.

Today’s Pick Story of the Day is a testament to reporting, about as basic and straightforward a story as can be imagined, yet one that performs the ultimate public service. It’s a simple narrative built from classic reporting. The Post’s Matt Zapotosky was assigned to figure out just what happened Saturday, when, during the biggest snowstorm ever to hit Washington in a December, people spontaneously gathered at a major intersection to have a friendly snowball fight, only to find some lunatic–in this case, a D.C. police detective–waving a gun at them and threatening to turn the whole wonderful scene into a horror show.

Many readers will have already read sketchy summaries and eyewitness accounts of this incident at 14th and U streets NW on the blogs, or seen various versions of the stunning video on YouTube. But Zapotosky, in clear, unemotional prose, goes out and finds the puzzle pieces and puts them together, so we learn that the snowball fight wasn’t quite as spontaneous as it had first appeared, but rather was another little triumph of social media organizing. There are still a few missing pieces–we need to know at some point exactly who this detective is and what his record is and what was in his head as he scared the bejesus out of a big crowd of the people he’s supposed to be protecting. But as a first draft of what happened, this is a story that adds value through reporting, and that’s what it’s all about.

To this idiocy, Radley Balko responds with the following (and as always, he’s spot on):

Thank goodness the Washington Post didn’t perpetuate irresponsible Internet rumors on that snowball fight story. Instead, they went straight to MPDC for the official version of events, unskeptically published the resulting lies from the department’s spokesman, after which WaPo columnist Marc Fisherput up a smug blog post gloating about how responsibly the paper treated the story, as opposed to those hysterical blogs and Internet sites. Never mind that the blogs and videos had proof the WaPo got the damned story wrong. Facts aren’t as important as who followed journalistic protocol.

The official story coming from the DC PD is crap.  Now they are claiming that the officer was responding to a call and the call reported  someone in the crowd had a gun.  Sure.  Just like every time a bad cop beats someone up, it’s always b/c they were resisting arrest. Funny how that little fact only came out way after everything already blew up. Funny how he never makes mention of it. Funny how, if he’s so scared of a gunfight that he needed to draw, he stood around and talked smack for a few minutes before every taking it upon himself to do any investigating.  Before long, he’ll probably be complaining that people posting links publicly available on the web are endangering his family or something equally dishonest.   Watch the whole thing for yourself, it’s pretty clear what happened. No amount of context is going to change this.

[tags]Marc Fisher, Snowball Fight, Detective Baylor, Radley Balko[/tags]