Lord Eric trained his nanobots to form this message before the Czar:

Being a strong advocate for crowdsourcing, and also being mildly amused at the media’s general seething bloodlust around Sarah Palin (Whom I’m personally ambivalent about, at best), I wanted to take a look at how the media outlets were handling it.

A quick Google search popped up the Guardian’s page for Palin’s e-mails first, so off I went.

The mechanism is as follows:

The user is shown an e-mail that hasn’t been looked at yet and asked to fill out two sections:

1) There are six tags that can be applied to categorize the topic of the e-mail via checkboxes:
– Politically significant
– About environment/oil
– About money
– Personal
– Just funny
– Nothing of interest

So far, so good. Not a terribly well-rounded tag cloud, but it covers a fair amount of ground.

Then there’s this:

2) The rating of the e-mail significance. The user may choose one of the following:
– Not very interesting
– A bit fishy
– Highly suspicious
– Palingate!

That’s right, your choices are three flavors of “bad for Palin”, or “Not very interesting”. There’s no way to indicate that an e-mail is admirable or commendable in any way.

I suppose I expected no better from the Guardian, but all the same, I’m disappointed.

-Eric

The Czar doubts Eric is surprised over a liberal media outlet relying on false choices to steer an argument. Really, didn’t any of them take debate? Or rhetoric? Nothing that told them the futility of using them? If nothing else, her advocates could mark everything as Politically Significant and Highly Suspicious just to muck up the results.

Nothing wrong with that. But Eric is right that, in their polarized attitudes, they unwittingly found a way to screen out people from stacking the deck in Palin’s favor. After all, she is either an idiot or she is an evil genius based on whatever you have to work with. And the email choices pre-suppose that.

Thanks for checking into this!

The Czar of Muscovy

Божію Поспѣшествующею Милостію Мы, Дима Грозный Императоръ и Самодержецъ Всероссiйскiй, цѣсарь Московскiй. The Czar was born in the steppes of Russia in 1267, and was cheated out of total control of all Russia upon the death of Boris Mikhailovich, who replaced Alexander Yaroslav Nevsky in 1263. However, in 1283, our Czar was passed over due to a clerical error and the rule of all Russia went to his second cousin Daniil (Даниил Александрович), whom Czar still resents. As a half-hearted apology, the Czar was awarded control over Muscovy, inconveniently located 5,000 miles away just outside Chicago. He now spends his time seething about this and writing about other stuff that bothers him.