Keith Olbermann’s Grassy Knoll

Media Resource Center ( Dan Rather’s Defense, Memos “Could” Be Authentic, Grows Lamer –9/14/2004– Media Research Center) reports that MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann wondered aloud:

“…how the documents came to be so quickly and thoroughly refuted on a right-wing Web site not two hours after they were first revealed on CBS…”

This comment deserves to be pondered, for it contains the entire chasm between Old Media and the “Blogosphere”, and it also exemplifies the genesis of every conspiracy theory.

Olbermann simply sees something HE does not understand, using what HE knows about the analysis of documents. So, because this observation does not make sense to HIM, he imagines an unseen conspiracy machine to fill the vacuam where an interpretive framework is missing.

There is a saying that “any technology, sufficiently advanced, is indistinguishable from magic”. I’m sure the internet is not new to Olbermann. But there is ” technology” here that looks like magic to him, and like every primitive he explains the magic by construing the powers. His default framework is politics, so it MUST BE ONLY THE OBSERVABLE FACE OF AN UNSEEN POLITICAL MACHINE. The” technology” that looks to him like magic is the power of distributed information processing.

I’ll not insult you with an explanation.

Keith is amazed it only took “two hours”. Well, I am amazed it took that long, Keith. Wake up. Read the threads on FreeRepublic.com and the blog posts. See how the internet works. You can actually display a primary source image and thousands upon thousands of people add comments. The sheer number of minds in the discussion IS THE EDITOR, and in the end the information marketplace sorts out fact from error.

In this story, Olbermann — and Rather, and Bill O’Reilly, and any number of other ink-stained wretches — these people are the village elders, certain that the pale men with their picture boxes and their firesticks are demons from the underworld.

They just really don’t get it.

Think back through other paradigm shifts. The Old Guard NEVER DOES GET IT. The new structure simply shoots up and replaces them, and they all die away, mumbling on their deathbeds about the new magic and the way things used to be.

Aulen: Pascha and atonement

“The Paschal season has never ceased to be the impregnable citadel of the classic idea of the atonement.”

Gustaf Aulen: Christus Victor, p.133