Confessions of an Opium-Eater

If you’re like me, Conservapedia had you at “Kangaroo.” Now, though, you can’t stop reading the site’s ongoing debate about the merits of colonialism, you appreciate its warnings about how teh gays might kill you, and — most of all — you’re grateful for their helpful one-line summaries of Adam Sandler films like Big Daddy.

Sadly, though, the world’s premier online encyclopedia now leaves you strangely unsatisfied by day’s end. Even the site’s entry on Barack Obama — though steeped in God’s own bongwater — can only bring a smirk to the lips (e.g., “Senator Barack Obama’s political views have been a matter of controversy even before he put himself forward as a Presidential Candidate. Former House Majority leader Tom DeLay has described Obama’s record in the Illinois Senate as that of a “Marxist leftist.”)

Fortunately, a number of renowned citizen journamalists — including Lorie Byrd, Bob Owens, and Kim Priestap — have stepped in to fill the void with Circle Jerk 2.0 Media Mythbusters, a wiki site with modest aims:

To be the Internet source [sic] of comprehensive facts and links chronicling major journalism’s treatment of certain stories in which questions have arisen regarding facts or methods of reporting. These treatments of news events by major media have direct and significant impact upon public opinion and upon policymakers. Careful consideration of the way these stories were handled by the media is essential to both a well informed public and policy, and are [sic] intended to contribute to a more reliable and responsible major media desired and needed by all. The goal of this site is to be a reliable resource, accessible to all, to provide news consumers with a tool and information to allow them to determine how best to process information they receive through major media outlets.

The group’s “mission statement” is also rich with insight:

It’s difficult enough to prove medical malpractice, given the infinite variety of humans and their reactions to varying treatments, the range of acceptable medical practices, and the difficulties of gathering evidence. It’s even more difficult with respect to the media. The added difficulty is because [sic] journalism is much less a well-defined and regulated profession than medicine. So, the standards and their application is [sic] less precise and the enforcement of standards lacks an authoritative body. Nonetheless, journalism and its major practitioners have developed and propounded standards that, for the most part, are fairly comprehensive and tried. It is against those standards, journalism’s own, that we measure [sic]. It is also usually more important that we pay more attention than we have to media malpractice. While medical malpractice may affect just one, or thousands, media malpractice affects many millions of media users, and many millions – if not billions – more of earth’s inhabitants whose governance, security, economic advancement, and freedoms (or opportunities for those) is [sic] affected.

I, too, have always believed the accumulated sins of Matt Lauer and Stephen Glass to be of significantly greater public interest than medical malpractice, which my president has told me is really not a problem to begin with. A trip to the hospital might leave you with a deadly staph infection, or your doctor might amputate the wrong leg, but — unlike our media — America’s health care professionals will never stab the nation in the back.