Blue Mass Group

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“Beat the Press” update

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Our little Boston-area brouhaha over Beat the Press’s take on political blogging has gone national, at least in blogworld.  Kos, Atrios, Crooks & Liars, and American Prospect (both Tapped and Horses Mouth) have all front-paged the story following MyDD’s front-paging of my cross-post there.  Most of those posts emphasize in particular the “we are Jerome, and Jerome is us” problem.

I’ve heard from WGBH that they’ve had a great deal of … uh … feedback on the show, and that they recognize that they made mistakes and want to rectify the situation.  No final word yet on what form that’ll take, but I’ll keep everyone posted.

UPDATE: from the comments:

The staff of Greater Boston made an error on the Dec. 8 “Beat The Press” program in reporting on bloggers accepting money from political campaigns. Reporter John Carroll believed he was quoting MyDD founder Jerome Armstrong as writing that he was actually the person behind several online pseudonyms, including Scott Shields.  The blogger’s comments were satirical, a fact that was not evident to Carroll as he read the posting.  Carroll believed he was quoting Armstrong accurately. Many people have written to tell us that with a little checking we could have determined that the individuals referred to in the posting are actual bloggers. We should have checked those facts, and we regret not doing so.

Mark Mills

Executive Producer

Greater Boston, WGBH

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  1. The staff of Greater Boston made an error on the Dec. 8 “Beat The Press” program in reporting on bloggers accepting money from political campaigns. Reporter John Carroll believed he was quoting MyDD founder Jerome Armstrong as writing that he was actually the person behind several online pseudonyms, including Scott Shields.  The blogger’s comments were satirical, a fact that was not evident to Carroll as he read the posting.  Carroll believed he was quoting Armstrong accurately. Many people have written to tell us that with a little checking we could have determined that the individuals referred to in the posting are actual bloggers. We should have checked those facts, and we regret not doing so.

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    Mark Mills
    Executive Producer
    Greater Boston, WGBH

      • If you saw the Last Laugh 2006 with Lewis Black & especially Patton Oswald last night, it was pretty funny. The montage at the beginning where they parodied REM’s “End of the World – As we know it” managed to work in Cheney shooting his friend in the face, twice.

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        And you had to be laughing your a$$ off when Rob Cordry did his ‘Mark Foley” like campaign commercial. Hilarious!

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        I would agree that WGBH would have been better served by letting Carrol poke some fun at himself while apologizing for his errors, but Liberals not funny? Nah, Jon Stewart & Colbert aren’t exactly the John Birch Society. Well, Colbert maybe. ok

    • You shouldn’t be moving comments around as this commenter is saying you are (and in reading the comments, which make no sense in that thread, I think you are). You know, we bloggers have ethics, both in our posts and in the use of the technology. Maybe you should convene a blogger ethics panel and listen in to learn something.

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      That last sentence was part sarcasm, just to be clear.

      • Do these so-called “professional journalists” have ANY freaking clue about blogging?

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        They ARE moving the comments around

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        #  Frank Capria Says:
        December 11th, 2006 at 2:46 pm

        Just a note from the webmaster? There’s nothing nefarious going on with the comments. Executive producer Mark Mills called this morning and asked if there was a way to move all the comments regarding the Beat the Press segment into a single properly titled thread. The goal was to increase transparency by making it easier for people to find and read the comments and add to the discussion.

        There may be a better way to have done this, but here’s what was done: Mark created a new post, called it “Vetting Romney,” and attributed it to Jeff Keating. He then edited Jeff’s original post to introduce the comments on last week’s Beat the Press.

        After all that was done, I went into the database and edited the timestamps so “Vetting Romney” had a date of 12/4 (it’s original publication date), and today’s post by Mark was correctly time stamped.

        This is a hot topic, and some people logged in while I was in the database making the above changes. That’s why posts appeared to disappear and comments moved. (It didn’t help that I made a typo and made the date stamp 12/14 for Vetting Romney, and had to go in and fix it again.)

        Best,

        Frank

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        The “increase transparency” part made diet coke come out of my nose.

        • Did they realize they made all those people calling for a retraction look like asses, because suddenly their comments were moved and were calling for a retraction in a POST that had the retraction in it, making them seem like they were either idiots or jerks?

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          A little common sense would go a long way, folks. It’s honestly NOT rocket science.

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          It confused the heck outta me, for instance, when I was reading that post with the (sort of) retraction. Until I read someone complaining about how comments had been moved around.

          • I have no problem with copy/pasting responses to make a more readable thread – but ALTERING THE TIME STAMP is inexcusable.  And the fact that they don’t understand WHY speaks vloumes.

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            Oh, and for GB – leave the original posts alone, and say, Hey!  Come read the well-organized thread!  But let people access the originals as well.  This isn’t like deciding if you want to print that extra page, or broadcast that extra minute – we have all the room in the world for redundancy here!

    • This partial correction isn’t very satisfying, in light of the false accusations that were made against the major liberal blogs.  MyDD and Daily Kos, which were singled out, have never had a case where any of the frontpage bloggers were being paid by a campaign and did not disclose it.  Jerome Armstrong, who was singled out, in fact has gone further, by not blogging at all on MyDD whenever he’s on a campaign payroll.

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      Personally, I think that’s unnecessary – when I was working for John Bonifaz as his campaign blogger, I didn’t stop posting on Blue Mass Group, I just made sure to add a note to any of my posts that related to that race informing people that I was Bonifaz’s campaign blogger.  Now, I’m not one of the Blue Mass Group frontpagers, just a user, and they get to decide which of my posts get promoted, so it’s not the same situation as Jerome was in with MyDD, but I still think he could’ve ethically continued blogging there as long as he made his relationship to campaigns clear.

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      Whatever you think of that, however, the point is that none of these major liberal bloggers have been “masquerading”, as your piece accused them of doing.  None of them have been hiding, and you suggested that a lot of them are.

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      Sure, the biggest most outrageous gaffe was that these accusations were supported with “evidence” that even a cursory, half-hearted few minutes of research would have shown was not true (all it would’ve taken was reading the comments on the very post that the piece quoted!).  But a correction that addresses only that, and ignores the fact that the main storyline was false, slanderous, and supported by no real evidence, is not much of a correction.

      • Before that, I got responses like – are you MAD????

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        You were always scrupulous in mentioning your Bonifaz ties, and even a casual reader know of your involvement, because of your careful stipulations.

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        I wish I knew if a major newspaper chain funds John Carroll’s university chair, or if Emily Rooney owns CBS stock, or if….

  3. Emily Rooney just gave the following statement to close out tonight’s Greater Boston:

    And finally tonight, we made an error on last Friday’s Beat the Press program during a report on bloggers accepting money from political campaigns.  Reporter John Carroll quoted a MyDD posting saying that MyDD founder Jerome Armstrong was the person behind several online pseudonyms.  that posting was meant as satire, and many people have written to tell us that with a little checking, we could have determined that the individual names referred to were actual bloggers.  We should have checked, and we regret not doing so.

    I’m looking forward to what they have to say on Friday.

      • If anything, it seemed like she was amused by the whole situation.

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        I guess we’ll find out on Friday.  My hunch is that it turns into a “those mean bloggers are attacking poor John Carroll.  How was he supposed to know?”  Expect liberal use of “over the top” during that segment…

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