Beat the Press rapidly descends from ... well, usually it's from tragedy to farce, but they were already at "farce" ... where do they go from there?
They issue a correction on their "blog," and they get it wrong AGAIN (hey, who can believe what you read on a blog?) ...
Below the flip: (update: what follows is the original post, which they changed to fix the error ... although, in a supremely ironic twist, they break some blogger ethics while doing it
Here's the post:
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 quoted MyDD founder Jerome Armstrong as writing that he was actually the person behind several online pseudonyms, including Scott Shields. Armstrong’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 by Armstrong are actual bloggers. We should have checked those facts, and we regret not doing so.
We will run a correction on tonight’s program (Dec. 11), and discuss the story on Friday’s "Beat The Press."
The problem with that is neatly summed up in a comment by "BriVT" on their blog, which I think is me, but who can tell anymore?
sigh ... you STILL get it wrong, even in your correction. The satirical post on MyDD was NOT written by Jerome Armstrong; it was written by Jonathan Singer. I realize both of their names begin with "J," so maybe it’s easy to confuse. But they are different people.
On blogs, they have these things called "bylines" which are right there at the top of the post on MyDD. They tell you who wrote the post. I hear there may be something similar done in more traditional media outlets, so I trust you’ll be able to figure it out.
Now, I suppose I should commend them for being quick with their correction (although an apology to Jerome would be good, too), but ... WGBH is basically the big gorilla of the pubTV system. They have a good sized staff, they strive for journalistic integrity, etc, etc ... why can they not get this right? How can they get it wrong so spectacularly, and then, when correcting, not take the few minutes to look at the original post and figure out what happened?
Are they actually secret double-agents of the blogs working from inside the mainstream media to make blogs look good by comparison?
update: OK, so they changed the post. The attribution sentence now reads:
Reporter John Carroll quoted a My DD posting written by Jonathan Singer who claimed that he was actually My DD founder Jerome Armstrong, and that he had also written under several other pseudonyms
Now, here in the blog world, when you f*ck up like that, you strike the comment and correct it, but you leave the original mistake there as a record. And you don't hide/delete comments pointing out your mistake (as they did with my comment, it seems) ... but then, when you do a story about the lack of ethics in blogs, I wouldn't expect you to know about ... well, the ethics in blogs.
I hope this is an illustrative episode for them. We in the blogosphere are not mere children, unsophisticated rubes ready to be taken by the latest guy with a blog and five fake posters posting around the clock and from different locations. This is a rich world in the blogosphere, and you should approach it with a little more respect and humility. It ain't perfect, but it's ours.