Are We Deluding Ourselves?

Ryan Sager thinks so:

[The Iran blogging is] doubly biased: The bloggers are looking only for anti-regime information, and the readers are absorbing only anti-regime information. If there are mistakes, these mistakes will be remembered as the truth even if corrected. As we’ve seen, that’s the nature of human memory.

As long as we keep reminding ourselves of the partial truth these fragments of breaking news represent, and re-check them as we go along, we are not deluding ourselves. So far, over the last five days, the tweets have accurately conveyed what we have subsequently seen. The outside world seemed to under-estimate the widespread outrage in Iran. The tweets conveyed it. But, as always, due caution.