Dangerous people of the internet

Here's an excerpt from a must-read piece by Salon's Glenn Greenwald on the hazzards of internet anonymity:

At least anonymous bloggers are very clear and truthful about what they are: often citizens whose jobs or other interests prevent them from attaching their names to their political expression. By stark contrast, all of these establishment media outlets perpetrate a total fraud on the public by pretending that they have standards for when anonymity will be used even though, as these examples from the last 24 hours alone prove, they routinely violate those alleged standards for absolutely no reason. It just never ceases to amaze how much establishment journalists like Roberts and Phillips love to rail against the Evils of Internet Anonymity when reckless, cowardly anonymity -- for purposes ranging from catty, trivial gossip to pernicious propaganda and everything in between -- is a central tool of their "profession" and of the political class they cover.

As always with this stuff, none of it is about "journalistic integrity" as much as it is about an entitled class of professional communicators and the businesses who own them who presume that they hold some sort of copyright on the truth. And by "truth" we mean whatever sounds most acceptable to the majority of the entitled class regardless of actual fact.

I know it's going on nearly a decade since these hypocritical elites began whining the way they do but I don't think that's any reason to stop paying attention. Sooner or later they're going to find some way to reestablish control over what it's acceptable to say and who's allowed to say it. Money has a funny way of establishing prerogatives.