Wizbang has had 237,000 visitors today, and the day is only half over. This is a result of a my post linking to the video of the execution of Nick Berg (the video is now available directly as well).
What has happened here is the media has really missed the Nick Berg story in a big way. Go read this post and follow the linked trackbacks to this post and see all of the other bloggers getting insane (for blogs) amounts of traffic. Even Glenn Reynolds is wondering where his 200,000 page views yesterday came from. Since I can't access e-mail at all until this evening I can't send him a note and tell him, but most assuredly it's the Nick Berg link he had two days ago.
There are millions of people looking for news on the Nick Berg execution today, and big media is not serving them. Those millions of people are visiting blogs today instead of The New York Times, The Washington Post, CNN, MSNBC, Fox News, etc.
See Paul's post below on why the video remains available here. Unlike the networks, we expect that you can decide for yourself whether you want to read about and watch the Berg video.
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Comments (6)
You hit it on the head with... (Below threshold)1. Posted by Fritz | May 13, 2004 4:08 PM | Score: 0 (0 votes cast)
You hit it on the head with this one, Kevin.
On the Today Show this morning, Katie Couric interviewed Dr. Phil for his "expert" opinion on how Americans are handling all of this bad news -- you see, we're not supposed to have bad feelings and get angry. That's just not healthy.
Big media has done more than fail us. They tell us that we're all too fat, that everything is going to kill us, and that we're too weak-minded to handle the gruesome details.
Yet, they'll show a very realistic autopsy on CSI in which someone probes around in a corpse's brain for 3 or 4 minutes.
I don't need Dr. Frickin' Phil to "counsel me through this" and I don't need to have my news filtered, strained, and turned into pablum.
Here's a question: When the Lynndie England sex video makes it online, will you link to it? That's got to be one scary movie!
1. Posted by Fritz | May 13, 2004 4:08 PM |
Score: 0 (0 votes cast)
Posted on May 13, 2004 16:08
2. Posted by Fritz | May 13, 2004 6:03 PM | Score: 0 (0 votes cast)
Kevin,
I'm getting nasty e-mail messages that I'm certain are related to my recent comments on your blog:
Subject: American beheading
From: "khemare safu"
Date: Thu, May 13, 2004 3:44 pm
"The KKK hid in the same fashion. The beheading is a classic example of the chickens coming home to roost. Good riddens!"
This is the third e-mail like this. Are American blogs being visited by Arab trolls? Is anyone else getting these?
2. Posted by Fritz | May 13, 2004 6:03 PM |
Score: 0 (0 votes cast)
Posted on May 13, 2004 18:03
3. Posted by Kevin | May 14, 2004 12:53 AM | Score: 0 (0 votes cast)
Fritz - I lost track of the e-mail stream yesterday. I got so many I could barely scan the headers. Thanks for the kind words though.
3. Posted by Kevin | May 14, 2004 12:53 AM |
Score: 0 (0 votes cast)
Posted on May 14, 2004 00:53
4. Posted by me | May 14, 2004 5:14 AM | Score: 0 (0 votes cast)
Those 237,000 people aren't looking for information, they are looking for pornography, i.e., definition 3 here:
http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=pornography
4. Posted by me | May 14, 2004 5:14 AM |
Score: 0 (0 votes cast)
Posted on May 14, 2004 05:14
5. Posted by Fabiana | May 14, 2004 10:51 AM | Score: 0 (0 votes cast)
Maybe the media is 'filtering' the video out of respect for Nick and his family. Come on, it's a human being being executed there and not a horror movie!!!! Fair enough posting it on theinternet so that people who actually search for it will get to see it, but having it on the news would be extremely disrespectful!
5. Posted by Fabiana | May 14, 2004 10:51 AM |
Score: 0 (0 votes cast)
Posted on May 14, 2004 10:51
6. Posted by Desert Cat | May 15, 2004 12:04 AM | Score: 0 (0 votes cast)
I'm getting nowhere near 200,000 hits, but for my humble blog, the traffic is way up. I appear in the top 4 or 5 pages on a Google search for the video using various keywords. All I made was a passing reference to it.
Now I posted all the links I could find, including yours. Thanks for doing a great job of rounding them up.
Given the way the Abu Ghirab photos were shoved into our faces over and over, I do think it's a bit hypocritical of the mainstream media to wish to sanitize this story.
6. Posted by Desert Cat | May 15, 2004 12:04 AM |
Score: 0 (0 votes cast)
Posted on May 15, 2004 00:04