Jeffrey Goldberg Battles Manfully Against Internet's Glaring Flaws

Journalist Jeffrey Goldberg has a new blog at the Atlantic.

This is great news, because Goldberg is one of the few people anywhere willing to grapple with the horrible weaknesses of the internet. For instance, here's Goldberg writing in Slate in October, 2002 in support of the Iraq war:

There is not sufficient space...for me to refute some of the arguments made in Slate over the past week against intervention, arguments made, I have noticed, by people with limited experience in the Middle East (Their lack of experience causes them to reach the naive conclusion that an invasion of Iraq will cause America to be loathed in the Middle East, rather than respected.)

Yes -- Goldberg would have demolished the ridiculous arguments against invading Iraq, if only there were enough space on the internet. Man, he would have ripped them to shreds! But that's the problem with the online world, one that no one but Goldberg is willing to face: the internet has an extremely limited space for words.

Goldberg ran into exactly the same roadblock in one of his first posts:

I was telling Andrew about an on-line mugging I experienced at the hands of a person named Matt Haber, who is associated with the New York Observer...What bothered me about Mr. Haber's post was not its insults (a couple of which were funny) but that he repeated a discredited accusation made by an ethically-challenged journalist about my reporting without having sought my comment.

You can understand how frustrated Goldberg would be by this. Matt Haber had quoted Ken Silverstein of Harper's saying that Goldberg's pre-war Iraq reporting "relied heavily on administration sources and war hawks (and in at least one crucial case, a fabricator)."

God, it would be SO GREAT if there were some invention that would give Goldberg enough room to demonstrate with evidence that Silverstein is ethically-challenged and his claim has been discredited. Even better would be if this invention allowed Goldberg to easily direct readers' attention to such evidence elsewhere, thereby "linking" his post to it.

Perhaps someday science will provide us with such a glorious new means of communication. Certainly if it ever exists, Jeffrey Goldberg will make full use of it. He hates being forced to baldly assert things as fact and expect everyone to take his word for it. But given the internet's terrible shortcomings, he has no other choice.

IT'S A COMMON PROBLEM: Other people who desperately wanted to explain themselves but just didn't have the space include Madeleine Albright and Saddam Hussein.

Originally published on A Tiny Revolution.

Comments

[Ramirez]

This blog reads like there's a personal thing going on.

[dadw5boys]

It would be a good idea to delete a lot of postings on the web by individals that is over 10 years old unless it it government related the archive it. It is eating up a lot of space on servers.

[EvgenyLibek]

Having limited space, in HuffPo comments, to fully marvel at Jeffrey Goldberg's ability to hold a Ten-Trilli­on-Terabyt­e argument (for invasion of Iraq) fresh on the tip-of-his-tongue, let me turn to an elegant, one-word encapsulation recently discovered by a revered plane demolition acrobat: Oil.

Also known as "Texas-Tea."
Also known, apparently to Goldberg, by a much bigger name.

More recently, Tens of millions have co-discovered a refutation to the refutation, which, again, having limited space, I shall present here in sumarized form: Hindsight.

Also known as "oops."
See also debacle.
Refer also to the "memorable" expression of Forrest Gump's mother.

If only we'd invaded some country with greater storage capacity -- we might now have the space to detail a proper justification.

ps: How about that "Mission Accomplished" image compression.

[deke33]

A second thought. Maybe Goldberg did not have the time to justify his assertions because he may have been looking at photos of that other Jeff, you know the one who got a White House press pass and no one knows who issued it and gave him other access to the White House, even on days when there was no press conference scheduled.

[deke33]

I just love it when Jeffrey's own words jump up and bite him in the ass.

[burnt]

ha! Yes, some bloggers are "virtually" so limited.

It's one thing to be denied facts by those who would willfully withhold them... as we do now live in a nation governed by The Rule of (secret) Law. It's entirely another to lied to by those who practice disinformation, spin and propaganda... or who insist upon excusing themselves from full disclosure due to an inability to disseminat­e/publish.­.. for whatever reason. Almost every citizen now has the ability to spew in volumes, whether content is based upon fact or fiction.... those who insist otherwise, should be called on the lie every time.

However, we still are in early stages of defining roles in the blogoshpere. If we want to encourage blog reporting, we'll have to start insisting that opinion stay on the other side of a factual story. As you suggest, there's plenty room for both, but they do need some clear delineation.

[LittleBrother]

It just flashed upon me that Jeffrey Goldberg is a living Bizarro version of Ignatius J. Reilly, the main character in "A Confederacy of Dunces".

His only achievement is that he outdid his namesake by remaining for nine months, and not a mere three days, inside the belly of the Leviathan.