David's Medienkritik: another sad example of the kind of thinking LGF inspires.

In a departure from our usual fodder of Charles Johnson, lizards and rabid racists, we're taking a look at another weblog today, David's Medienkritik. DM, as it shall henceforth be know, pretends to be a serious obvserver of the German media landscape, but its subtext is that it will pillory anything that appears (in the eyes of David Kaspar, it's owner) to be anti-American or liberal. Fair enough, each to his own, you might say, and we would agree. Except for the fact that this blog makes claims to objectivity and impartiality where clearly neither of those attributes fit. What is more, DM quite simply gets its facts wrong and can therefore not be regarded as a trustworthy source of information of commentary. To illustrate the point, let us take the latest posting:

Poll Stop / Umfrage-Stopp

"SPIEGEL ONLINE has deactivated the online poll on President Bush's job performance. The folks at SPIEGEL ONLINE have the nerve to display the "results", describing it as a consequence of a "vote war"."

Indeed they have the nerve to describe the outcome of a poll THEY featured as a 'result'. Does Kaspar expect them to run the poll indefinitely? As for it being a 'vote war', well, that is a fairly accurate description of a poll in which proponents and opponents of a certain opinion go at each other like wolves by relentlessly clicking the most extreme opinions either way in order to see their view come out top.

"Fact is, the "results" were produced by massive use of technical manipulating by pro- as well as anti-Bush-programmers. We had no part in this. We had only called for participation, mainly among US internet users. That's not manipulation."

Fact is, DM started a thread on the website of Free Republic with the headline "Bush needs your help" explicitly calling for its (neo-conservative) readers to flock to Spiegel Online. Now if that doesn't indicate some sort of preference for which way people are to vote, I don't know. But it gets better: each day, Kaspar posted calls on his own website urging people to 'help Bush'. These were echoed on other sites, including Little Green Footballs, where the Ueber-Lizard rallied his minions with the battlecry: "Help Drive the German Left Crazy" (http://littlegreenfootballs.com/weblog/?entry=10047_Help_Drive_the_German_Left_Crazy). Charlie-boy then goes on to detail how LGFers who don't speak German can still make an 'informed choice': by selecting "1" and clicking on "abstimmen".

"At the end, the anti-Bush votes came in continuously at a rate of 200 or more per minute. Almost one million votes were "counted"."

In actual fact, the poll was stopped after votes reached 899,593 . That's a mere 100,407 votes short of a million, but who cares about minutae like that...? As elsewhere, David Kaspar displays little regard for facts or honest reporting. Or interesting reporting, but that's another matter...