OMG! I Made the New York Times

As I was reading this, I was getting ready to claim credit for this article (as a humor post) — Then the New York Times gave me my props….

Stunned!

Myths Run Wild in Blog Tsunami Debate

By JOHN SCHWARTZ
Published: January 3, 2005

As the horror of the South Asian tsunami spread and people gathered online to discuss the disaster on sites known as Web logs, or blogs, those of a political bent naturally turned the discussion to their favorite topics.

To some in the blogosphere, it simply had to be the government’s fault.

On Democratic Underground, a blog for open discussion and an online gathering place for people who hate the Bush administration, a participant asked, “Since we know that the atmosphere has become contaminated by all the atomic testing, space stuff, electronic stuff, earth pollutants, etc., is it logical to wonder if: Perhaps the ‘bones’ of our earth where this earthquake spawned have also been affected?”

The cause of the earthquake and resulting killer wave, the writer said, could be the war in Iraq. “You know, we’ve exploded many millions of tons of ordnance upon this poor planet,” the writer said. “All that ‘shock and awe’ stuff we’ve just dumped onto the Asian part of this earth – could we have fractured something? Perhaps the earth was just reacting to something that man has done to injure it. The earth is organic, you know. It can be hurt.”

The ridicule began immediately. Online insults, referred to colloquially as flames, rose high on other sites.

“What would life be without D.U.?” asked an editor* at Wizbang, a politically conservative blog ( www.wizbangblog.com), using the initials of Democratic Underground.

“Get out the tin foil hats,” a contributor* to the blog wrote.

You could read the whole thing but this is the best part. BTW The post in question can be found here.

* But just a note to that fancy schmancy newspaper guy– Down in the blog world, we don’t have editors to write our heads. We have to write both the stories AND the headlines. (grin)

hhhhm Update below the fold and not a good one.

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UPDATE I should have the read the last graph before I posted… On this one, the Times is dead freaking wrong:

In the tsunami discussion on Democratic Underground, some participants continued to post farfetched theories about what caused the earthquake based on pseudoscience and conspiracy, and on Wizbang, the vituperation continued unabated, spreading even to many victims of the disaster.

Wrong.

I was joking when I ribbed the reporter for not understanding blogs. Clearly he does not.

While the DU content is from a vast membership, Wizbang has exactly 3 people writing for it presently. Certainly none of us blamed the victims.

We’ve had the better part of a half a million people show up at Wizbang this week. In that mix, there were a few goofballs who came thru and posted nonsense in the comments. It was pointed out to me by a commenter on another thread last night and I removed all the comments from that post and emailed Kevin that I did it. (it was his post)

[For the record, the guy’s question might have been in good faith but taken the wrong way… I deleted it anyway.]

Wizbang is one of the few high traffic blogs left to have unrestricted open comments. We work very hard to keep the comments free of such noise. To say that Wizbang attacked or blamed the victims is simply wrong. It was an ambiguous comment that I deleted anyway.

(Boy- Talk about a buzz kill!)

Update 2: I was so stunned that one of my posts was featured in a NY Times article, I did not bother mention how goofy the rest of the story was. Kevin took that angle.