February 28, 2003

More email
So Slashdot has picked up the story of the Laurie Garrett email I pointed to the other day, and Lawmeme has a good essay on the subject here. The Lawmeme essay concentrates on the privacy implications---yeah, yeah, everything you write can be published easily nowadays...be careful, kids---but manages not to talk much about the thing that really worries me, which is that journalists, whose job it is to write clever, informative reports like the one Ms. Garrett unwittingly published, would become annoyed at its publication. Well, except that it was unintentional---that would be marvelously unnerving.

I understand that not everything is on the record, but is a report that names as few names as this one really all that tough to release? Is there some career-threatening shame in her note's absence of the stilted, unreasonably self-conscious attempt at the appearance of dry objectivity that pollutes almost all American news (but makes The Onion funny)? Or do I just wish I was as good a storyteller as she? Read up, y'all.
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