Connie Schultz, Cleveland Plain Dealer columnist and Very Serious Person, reflects resentfully on the new media landscape:
Certainly, we are concerned about job stability. But veteran journalists are equally troubled by the online threat to standards we hold dear.
If anyone had told me five years ago that newspapers would allow anonymous comments and that we would have to respond to them, I would have invited them to come for a walk with me to the land of grown-ups. Now, I regularly address authors of online comments by their made-up names and pretend this doesn't feel like junior high school all over again.
The so-called citizen journalism of most blogs is an affront to those of us who believe reporting and attribution must precede publication.
Fact-checking is tedious; it often derails juicy rumor and deflates many a story.
Ah, yes, that tedious fact-checking thing that only upstarts in new online media avoid.
Oh, wait.
Correction: July 22, 2009
An appraisal on Saturday about Walter Cronkite’s career included a number of errors. In some copies, it misstated the date that the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was killed and referred incorrectly to Mr. Cronkite’s coverage of D-Day. Dr. King was killed on April 4, 1968, not April 30. Mr. Cronkite covered the D-Day landing from a warplane; he did not storm the beaches. In addition, Neil Armstrong set foot on the moon on July 20, 1969, not July 26. "The CBS Evening News" overtook "The Huntley-Brinkley Report" on NBC in the ratings during the 1967-68 television season, not after Chet Huntley retired in 1970. A communications satellite used to relay correspondents’ reports from around the world was Telstar, not Telestar. Howard K. Smith was not one of the CBS correspondents Mr. Cronkite would turn to for reports from the field after he became anchor of "The CBS Evening News" in 1962; he left CBS before Mr. Cronkite was the anchor. Because of an editing error, the appraisal also misstated the name of the news agency for which Mr. Cronkite was Moscow bureau chief after World War II. At that time it was United Press, not United Press International.
But it's all good. At least the "journalist" at the New York Times wasn't forced to answer questions by people with made-up names in the comments. That would have been so ... junior high. Thank God the Times was allowed to preserve its standards, like the one where reporting and attribution precede publication.