Blogosphere has Another Big Real-Time Win

This one is not only a perfect case of the blogs embarrassing Big Media, but it is roll-on-the-ground funny. The mainstream media reported yesterday that an American soldier had been kidnapped by terrorists in Iraq and would be beheaded. Here's an AP link from yesterday.

However, almost immediately the blogosphere recognised and published the fact that the picture released by the terrorists was actually of a GI Joe action-figure doll!

The significance for us here? Well, it is in the place of fiction in the discourse of truth. Until the blogosphere became a force, Big Media presented a narrative whereby truth came from watching or reading their News. Fiction, where talked about at all, was just stories. But now, blogs are revealing hoaxes such as this GI Joe doll, and the fraud perpetrated recently by Dan Rather and CBS news. The result is that people increasingly see that Big Media just tells stories of their own.

As I hope we are starting to see in our course, the stories that fiction tells are a discourse of truth: truth told in a unique and uniquely important manner.