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What you are suggesting would further entrench and enrich the Fourth Estate. Is that your intent?

by Crito 12y ago

anigbrowl 12y ago
It's not my intent, and I find your premise questionable. Are you suggesting that newspapers and similar organs would try to make money out of people who wanted to search their archives? If so then yes, they probably would, but so what?
- Crito 12y ago
  No, I am suggesting that people who are not payed to search through archives will frequently lack the time to search through archives. Digging through newspaper articles at your local library to find information on the dozen politicians on the ballet is something that most people do not have the time/resources to do. For the most part, these people will have to rely on the media to do that for them. Search engines are an equalizer, they allow people to search through massive amounts of data blazingly fast. This closes the gap between the research a professional reporter is capable of, and the research that the general public is capable of.
  - anigbrowl 12y ago
    Again, so what? In the case of a politician running for office, the media is likely to do that research anyway; take a look at Oregon, where the governor's fiancee is mired in scandal over long-past personal relationship, which is being pushed with a barely-implicit guilt-by-association angle for the Governor's implied failure to perform due diligence on his intended wife. You're also overlooking the 'public interest' exemption to redaction of search results which has been extensively documented and would certainly apply to the case of a candidate seeking office. Meanwhile, you're completely ignoring the actual problem, which is that now anyone can do a bang-up research job on private rather than public individuals, without being held to any ethical standards for journalistic accreditation or publication. Somewhere upthread I pointed out the example of mugshot aggregation sites, which operate a thinly-veiled extortion racket under the rubric of 'free speech'.

What you are suggesting would further entrench and enrich the Fourth Estate. Is that your intent?

by Crito 12y ago

What you are suggesting would further entrench and enrich the Fourth Estate. Is that your intent?

It's not my intent, and I find your premise questionable. Are you suggesting that newspapers and similar organs would try to make money out of people who wanted to search their archives? If so then yes, they probably would, but so what?

Crito 12y ago
No, I am suggesting that people who are not payed to search through archives will frequently lack the time to search through archives. Digging through newspaper articles at your local library to find information on the dozen politicians on the ballet is something that most people do not have the time/resources to do. For the most part, these people will have to rely on the media to do that for them. Search engines are an equalizer, they allow people to search through massive amounts of data blazingly fast. This closes the gap between the research a professional reporter is capable of, and the research that the general public is capable of.
- anigbrowl 12y ago
  Again, so what? In the case of a politician running for office, the media is likely to do that research anyway; take a look at Oregon, where the governor's fiancee is mired in scandal over long-past personal relationship, which is being pushed with a barely-implicit guilt-by-association angle for the Governor's implied failure to perform due diligence on his intended wife. You're also overlooking the 'public interest' exemption to redaction of search results which has been extensively documented and would certainly apply to the case of a candidate seeking office. Meanwhile, you're completely ignoring the actual problem, which is that now anyone can do a bang-up research job on private rather than public individuals, without being held to any ethical standards for journalistic accreditation or publication. Somewhere upthread I pointed out the example of mugshot aggregation sites, which operate a thinly-veiled extortion racket under the rubric of 'free speech'.