The poor old beeb can’t win: conservatives accuse it of being ‘red’, while those on the left think it panders to the tories, refusing to cover the recent anti-government protests. In relation to the middle east, palestinians accuse it of being ‘zionist’ while israelis say it is anti-semitic. As for myself, I think the bbc is, by and large, the most objective information source we have, impartial insofar as any source can be said to be impartial. One of the biggest lessons my ten years as an academic taught me, apart from to keep trying until I get there, is the importance of well-referenced materials and peer reviewed, respected authorities. Thus, it really got on my nerves when, this morning, I came across a piece of tripe about how Israel plans to dominate the entire middle east. Now, what the Israelis are currently doing is obviously completely out of order, and was interested to read how Professor Hawking has chosen to boycott israeli science as a justifiable reaction to their aggression. But that does not mean we can conclude that israel wants to conquer the entire middle east. When I came across this, then, I stated it to be the blatant bulshit it obviously is; yet the guy who posted it was having none of it. He dismissed the bbc as ‘zionist’ when I linked to it’s timeline of israeli history, yet insisted all sorts of unsubstantiated blog entries supporting his wild conspiracy theories were accurate. Any academic knows the first thing you should do is look at where a text comes from, who it cites and who wrote it. I suppose that is the danger of web-based debates.

Of course, you could dismiss all this, and point out that I have better things to do than talk to ill-informed idiots on the web; but what interests me is that it relates to the debate I touched upon the other day: how do we know what is real, what constitutes reality, who can we trust, and can anyone be truly objective? That debate is much more profound, and one should always be aware of it. It’s particularly interesting when it comes to the netherworld of the web, where only opinion, rather than fact, can be said to exist; that’s why I use sources firmly established offline and on, such as the bbc, and try not to just listen to one de of a debate. The danger comes when one sides completely with one viewpoint, dismissing all others, as the chap I encountered earlier was doing.