I liked Emily Rooney’s brief comment on how the past week had been for her and for GB’s staff:
We talked a lot about this with our staff this week, and I ended up saying, it’s all good, in a way. And I know, I mean, it’s embarrassing to you, and to the rest of us, but it was really interesting, and it was an education, in a lot of ways.
Really, you can’t ask for much more than that. Political blogging is still a pretty new phenomenon; its reach remains quite small (certainly compared to the reach of the MSM), and its significance in the greater scheme of things political remains basically unknown (at least to me). To the extent that MSM folks are interested in learning more about who’s doing it, and why, and how it works, that is to everyone’s benefit — it’s certainly to ours.
John Carroll, in addition to issuing an obviously heartfelt apology for last week’s screw-up, had the segment’s most insightful comment at the end of the discussion in the course of talking about why the whole thing mattered:
One of the complaints about the Times piece, specifically from Jerome Armstrong at MyDD, was he took money, not specifically to blog about a candidate, but for consulting fees, for web, software, and that kind of thing. So, I mean, these are the things that make a difference — absolutely make a difference, number one, because they’re factual things, and number two, they make a difference for people who are carving out a new sort of place in the news media. So, you know, you can understand — there’s nobody who wants to be inaccurate here. I think, you know, it’s unfortunate that we were.
John’s exactly right here: this kind of thing matters because what Jerome specifically and political bloggers generally are trying to create really is “a new sort of place in the news media.” The old paradigms, like the by now tiresome discussions of whether or not bloggers are “journalists,” really aren’t very useful in understanding what the politico-blogosphere is about, and what its denizens are trying to accomplish. Kudos to John on that one.
I’m not going to get into yet another of discussion about the merits of Dan Kennedy’s comments about whether stories in the NY Times should be taken on faith (far too many pixels have tragically lost their lives over that one already), but I will mention that I continue to disagree with him on the question of whether my quote in the original piece about blogging-for-dollars would appear to the reasonable, non-journalism-professor viewer to have been part of a conversation about Jerome Armstrong. And rather than explain yet again why I think that the reasonable viewer would likely see things that way, I’ll just note that although Dan said that “other bloggers” and even “a lot of people” think that the quote wasn’t taken out of context, Dan has (to my knowledge) linked to precisely one such “other blogger”: the anonymous “Massachusetts Liberal,” who I’m sure is a fine fellow or fellowess, but who, on his or her own, doesn’t exactly represent a groundswell of support for Dan’s view. I do, however, agree with Dan that it’s “not a big deal,” so I see no need to further belabor the point. I’m pleased that GB aired my statement on the (mis)use of my quote, and I’ll leave it at that.
Finally, to this from Joe Sciacca:
SCIACCA: John, I knew that was satire. I mean, I didn’t want to raise it, because…
CARROLL: You didn’t want to hurt my feelings, right? I appreciate that.
SCIACCA: Because I didn’t want to, you know, embarrass you. And everywhere I’ve gone, diners, coffee shops, cab drivers, people say “how could John not have realized that was satire?” It’s incredible.
Well, I must say that I was shocked! shocked! to learn that Sciacca knew all along that the “we are all Jerome” post at MyDD was satire, but he never alerted John Carroll to that fact! If I were Carroll, I’d be really mad at Sciacca for hanging me out to dry like that! I mean, really, what has happened to professional courtesy? Has journalism devolved into just another rat race, where colleagues take every opportunity that comes their way to reduce one of their colleagues to a bloody heap?? Oh, the humanity! *dabs at eyes welling up with tears over the impending demise of a once-great profession*
Oh, wait a sec …
And with that, I give you my image of the day:
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Where is this, you ask, why it is none other than Dead Horse Point, in the great state of Utah. Credit: Weiwei Zhong, CalTech
You mean Carroll? Jon Keller has been on BtP in the past, but he hasn’t been involved with this situation. I don’t think he’s even commented on it, to my knowledge.
See, that’s what happens when you make a mistake on a blog – the first commenter to come along, just has to correct you! đŸ™‚
Good Lord! Point proven about the incredible self-correcting ever-reliable blogosphere. Must … have … coffee.
There’s more here than meets the eye: blog-literacy. Bloggers and frequent blog readers are familiar with the way minor errors in posts get corrected in comments (and not just errors; comments redirect misleading tilt, add new sources, etc.) Blog posters often expect it, to the point where they’ll post something partly in order to get corrections or amplifications or more detailed info about it. If you’re blog literate, you know that, and you don’t spread the contents of a post around until you’ve at least skimmed the comments. If you’re not very blog-literate, you might make the mistake of not bothering with comments.
I think they did a good job, though I’m disappointed that the correction steered clear of the most important larger issue, which is about whether bloggers are deceiving their readers by taking money from the campaigns they write about while their readers don’t know. Near the end of the segment, Callie even repeated that claim (in a conditional way, by saying that’s what the New York Times piece said), and then added that if only bloggers disclosed who pays them, she’d have no problem with it. It was John Carroll who corrected her.
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We still didn’t hear unequivocally that none of the blogs they singled out by name on the previous show, had done what they accused bloggers of doing; none of them had failed to disclose. We still didn’t hear that Jerome Armstrong stopped blogging entirely on MyDD when he was working for campaigns (twice!), even though his name came up the most. So that disappoints me.
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But the irony is that it was John Carroll who showed some understanding of blogs, while self-identified “blogger” Dan Kennedy did a great job of sounding reasonable and knowledgeable on the surface while actually showing no understanding of the issues whatsoever. While John Carroll and Emily Rooney did a good job here, IMO, Dan Kennedy was truly awful. That’s sad, because as I’ve said, we could have a valuable discussion about money & blogs, if this issue were raised without the distractions, conflations, and misunderstandings that Kennedy is still injecting into the conversation.
And now, to back up what I said about Dan Kennedy, I’ll respond to his three points.
So he didn’t get the satire, that “happens”, no big deal. And it “wasn’t funny” anyway. Very misleading. This isn’t a case of just not “getting it” at first glance. As we’ve pointed out, including in comments on Kennedy’s own blog, the third comment on that very post said “It’s a joke”! John Carroll understands, I think, that he should’ve done some cursory checking at the very least; Dan Kennedy doesn’t get it yet.
The main problem in the way David’s comments were used in the original show wasn’t whether or not he was talking about Jerome specifically, but that because it seemed that he was responding to the Jerome satire, the context made it seem that he was talking about the larger claim of the show: all these bloggers secretly on the take. In that context, his comment that “the truth will out” and that readers will figure it out, seemed naive, out of touch, and not a serious way of addressing the problem.
In truth, however, the “problem” is almost nonexistent. None of the major bloggers the show talked about had done what they accused them of. David, I believe, was referring to a few isolated incidents: the Thune bloggers in 2004, and two recent cases of Republican staffers posing as Democratic citizen commenters on Democratic blogs (in New Hampshire and New Jersey). In that context, he’s right on target: the blogosphere has gotten very effective at “outing” these things and hounding bloggers to disclose, and indeed the Republican fraudsters were outed and disgraced quickly.
The correction, in apologizing for using David’s comments out of context, focused on the Jerome satire connection, so Kennedy responded to just that. He says it didn’t sound to him like David was necessarily speaking about the Jerome thing. Okay, that could be, but it sure does sound like David is speaking about how all many of the major liberal blogs are secretly on the take and hiding from their readers, and David had no idea his comments would be in that context because he knows that the major liberal blogs are not secretly on the take and hiding from their readers and it would never have occurred to him to discuss that claim the way he did. If he’d thought he was speaking about that, he wouldn’t have said “the truth will out”, he’d have said “that isn’t true at all.”
I covered that in this comment thread. I think it’s a strawman. I said the same things on Dan Kennedy’s blog, before this second show aired.
Cos —
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1. It was corrected. Jesus Christ. I get it, but it was corrected as soon as John and company knew they’d made a mistake. After that, to keep harping on it is petty and stupid.
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2. You write, “He says it didn’t sound to him like David was necessarily speaking about the Jerome thing. Okay, that could be …” That could be? That’s what I was talking about.
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3. I’ve read your comments. You still haven’t explained how to do fact-checking without checking facts.
There’s a bit of a disconnect because in this case, people who have been reading political blogs closely for the past few years know the facts off the top of their heads and, as such, fact checking seems easy. Casual readers, however, do not have access to the entire context of each “blogging for dollars” without much and painful searching. Personally, if you showed me the list of bloggers mentioned in the article, I would have been able to explain what they did while they were being paid. No one on the panel had that expertise (such as it is) and those who knew better got upset because facts they were aware of were omitted.
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You’ll have to forgive Cos, Dan. This issue hits particularly close to home for him. He set an example here of how to do paid blogging right. Others, even those mentioned in the article, were responsible as well, and were unfairly tarred.
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Anyway, I agree with you. The latest dKos post on this is petty and stupid. The Friday show was completely appropriate, I thought, and much better than what I had expected.
Ahh, but you miss my point: my assertion is that they (John and Emily) did a good job, while you showed that you don’t understand.
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So, for example, when you say “It was corrected” so emphatically, what’s your point? I commended Carroll for doing so. But your point #1 on this past Friday’s show was that it’s perfectly understandable for him to not get the satire and it wasn’t funny anyway, as if those things make it not such a big mistake. Both of those things are irrelevant, because he could’ve seen it was satire with the most cursory effort taking less than a minute. As I said, I think he realizes this, and that’s why he apologized so profusely. Your point (again, the point you just made, a few days ago) is what I’m criticizing, not his initial mistake (that was last week).
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On to point #2: Yes, of course, that’s what you were talking about. You still don’t seem to understand why that doesn’t show that David’s comments weren’t taken out of context. You’re using a strawman again. Regardless of whether or not it seemed like he was directly addressing the accusation about Jerome Armstrong shadowing as other people (and I could see it either way), he was still taken seriously out of context.
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Given your response here, I’m pretty solidly convinced now that you just don’t get it. I’ll make sure to take anything you say or write about blogs with a lot of salt, and find it unfortunate that other people will take you seriously on the topic – because on the surface, you sound like you know what you’re talking about and are full of confidence. I’ve learned something (or rather, re-learned something I already knew) from this.
why something labeled “Op-Chart”—that is, opinion—was automatically trusted to be factually correct. It’s been my experience that anything with an “Op” in its header is not expected to meet the rigorous standards of news. One only has to read typical Op-Eds in many papers, including the New York Times, to see a fast-and-loose approach to factual accuracy.
And I’m quite sick of the media not going all the way and still acting high and mighty after all is said and done (like Rooney claiming the joke post wasn’t even funny – as if that were an excuse!). Furthermore, they shouldn’t keep doing stuff on blogs if they aren’t going to reach out and bring a blogger on the show to try to understand them. They obviously have a rudementary understanding at best. Why not invite someone on? There are a lot of great bloggers out there, both locally and on the national scene, who could do it.
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Whatever. I didn’t watch that show before and I doubt I’ll start now.
I agree that if they’re going to talk about bloggers, they should have a blogger on the panel. Dan Kennedy, who was on this past show, is a blogger, but his career has been in print journalism, so that doesn’t exactly count.
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That said, I think you attack the show with too broad a brush. “The media” isn’t all uniform in their behavior any more than the “the bloggers” are all uniform. That you don’t watch the show regularly shows. I watch Greater Boston most every night and Beat the Press every week, and it is consistently one of the better news shows on television, far above what much of the rest of “the media” offers.
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Greater Boston first corrected the error this past Monday, then they devoted about half of this Friday’s show to correcting it in which John Carroll gave a sincere apology for the screw-up. What more do you want them to do?
We want panelist Dan Kennedy (and to a lesser extent, Emily Rooney) to “take yes for an answer” and agree with John Carroll’s thorough apology, instead of continuing to rationalize the mistake eight ways from Sunday.
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PS: That’s not going to happen.
You used quotes this time. đŸ˜‰
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If BtP does a story they have a responsibility to make sure that the story is factual. From what I’ve read of Dan Kennedy’s remarks is that he believes that it would be too difficult to fact check the story on the program. So what purpose do they serve again?
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Never mind. It’s a wrap!