Fear The Internet - Such A Scary Place

from the blame-the-messenger dept

Oh man. I really thought that (especially among mainstream US news organizations) that articles like this one had passed their prime five years ago. However, Business Week is taking a step back in time to tell us all about how evil the internet is. Oh my! You can gamble online! Oh gosh! People buy drugs online! I can't remember an article that made me laugh outloud so many times at shoddy, biased reporting. They talk about the threats of cyberterrorism without any caveats (like the ones we've been talking about here lately concerning what the real threat is). They talk about someone who died from a drug overdose and don't offer any counterpoint to the guy's mother who says she blames the internet more than the guy who sold the kid his drugs. Mostly, the article is filled with random anecdotes of people who have problems. Just because they chose to manifest themselves via the internet doesn't mean the internet is such a scary place. This is an amazing piece of dreadful reporting, and I hope it goes down in infamy along with Time's FUD piece about cyberporn that caused such a stir seven years ago (man, time flies...). It's amazing that anyone trained in journalism these days could write a story that takes so many things out of context, and writes them up in ways that are clearly meant to be inflammatory without once suggesting there's more to each story. I normally respect Business Week for at least having decent writers. They've lost a lot of that respect with this piece.