The so called "new media" has been grabbing my attention for some time now. First, there were blogs (just like this one), then social sites, and now it's the never ending stream of information from our smart phones, Twitter, RSS and such...
However, the controls are gone, there is no "time to press" anymore, since every piece of information is instantly available, not only on the Net, but in the palms of our hands. How bad it can get? Well, take one of the most popular blog/news sites on the Internet: The Huffington Post. You can hear about it everywhere: on the Internet, in the print media, TV, you name it. It has an aura of authority, if not by the fact that it is cited in a vast number of places on a regular basis. But, is it really a reliable source of news?
Politically, it has it's own "color", but that can be good, or bad, depending on where you stand in the political spectrum. From the scientific point of view, there are no opinions, only facts, which can be either correct, or not (and that's easily verifiable). It is this arena that sites like The Huffington Post fail miserably. As I am no authority on scientific matters, I refer you to the recent post on the Science-Based Medicine blog:
Pseudoscience In Medical News at the Huffington Post
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