(From the diaries. Congrats to the folks at Greater Boston, including Boston University's John Carroll and Emily Rooney for becoming national poster children for everything that is wrong with the traditional media -- arrogance, non-accountability, and lack of fealty to things like "truth" -- kos.)
Here's the mea culpa: qt video
This has already been diaried once, but the author came to the exact opposite conclusion that I did, so I thought I'd offer my analysis of the "mea culpa" show.
Short version of the show:
"We're sorry for the factual error we made, even though it's not our fault because the "satirical" post was neither satirical nor funny (with Emily Rooney even calling it "stupid".) As for quoting out of context, we're kinda disagree about whether or not we even did that. And the story itself? We still stand by it whole-heartedly, and if the NY Times got the story wrong, it's hardly our job to criticize the NY Times, even though we are a show about criticizing the media."
more below
Here's what the show didn't have:
- Any transparency about the motives of the hit piece
- Any criticism of either the NY Times piece or themselves for amplifying the NY Times piece
- Any criticism of themselves for buying into the "gist" of the NY Times piece without including the caveats that the NY Times piece itself included.
Here's John Carrol on what he "learned" this week about the blogosphere:
"I can say I am acutely aware of the speed and the range and the impact of the blogosphere and I think I'll leave it at that."
Naturally what he's alluding to is the fact that the blogosphere is full of mean people who send him e-mails that used the angry words.
Emily Rooney:
"It's all good in a way. ... It was an education in a lot of ways."
So we can get as much as we want wrong as long as we all learned an important lesson (someone cue the sit-com "learning a lesson" music)
Joe Sciacca:
"Frankly, I think you should be commended for fessing up to it immediately. You make a mistake. You correct it. Story over."
oh, but the reaction to it is "over the top" (stop with the angry words on the internets! oh my!)
Emily Rooney and Dan Kennedy riffing on the satirical MyDD post:
"It was incredibly stupid.
It was stupid. It wasn't satire. It wasn't a joke."
(so we can be forgiven for thinking that it was real because it was so unfunny - not really our fault if you think about it!)
Okay, finally, they bring up the NY Times piece, and all of a sudden they're not media critics, they're just sort of "commenters" that can't be expected to look at anything with skepticism:
Dan Kennedy:
"I don't know whether the NY Times articles messed things up or not."
Really? Didn't think that was pertinent to commenting on it? Or basing a story on it? Or doing a follow up about how wrong you were? Never occurred to you to look critically at the Ny Times.. okay.
Anyway, It's no fun to debate real people or ideas, so Dan Kennedy takes a denim shirt, some jeans, stuffs them with straw, sets it up next to him in the chair, and says:
"There's this notion that you were supposed to fact check every single aspect of that NY Times piece before saying anything about it. We comment on things on the media here. That was in the media. We commented on it."
Quote please? The ironic thing is that you ignored what few facts were in the NY Times piece (that few bloggers took money, that most of those that did disclosed the fact and that those few who didn't were browbeat by their peers into disclosing after the fact) and ran with the "gist" of the NY Times which they weren't able to back up with any actual evidence that bloggers were "on the take".
If all you had done was taken the facts presented in the NY Times and then taken their conclusions with a small grain of salt you would have been fine. Instead you ignored the facts blew up the conclusions and got called on it.
For that there was no apology and now that they are "done" with it, there never will be.