Facts unchecked, swift judgments based on rumours and misinformation. Smear campaigns. Blogs can supply all these things, and they will. Maybe it’s time to talk more about that. The occasion is Jill Carroll’s release and subsequent soul-searching among some bloggers – or lack thereof. Right Wing Nut House:
In people’ls haste to be first, or different, or just plain ornery and contrary (all the better to get links and readers) a culture of “shoot first and ask questions later” has arisen in the blogosphere that quite frankly, is proving every bad thing that the MSM has been saying about blogs from the beginning. Many of us – including myself – have been guilty in the past of hitting that “Publish” button when perhaps it would have been prudent and proper to take a beat or two to think about what we just wrote and the impact it might have beyond the small little world we inhabit in this corner of Blogland.
The advantage of the media principle of editing becomes clear here: With no editing and free supply of “printing presses”, it’s inevitable that there will be more cases like this one. But since it’s impossible and undesirable to lock up the presses again, the media ecosystem will have to find a way to deal with such issues. An effective mechanism would be that bloggers who do not respect basic ethical standards, simply lose their readership. As Bloggers Blog asks: “Can these bloggers really expect to continue to have a readership beyond this incident?”
One of the reasons why some people have trusted blogs more than traditional media has been the perceived honesty of bloggers: Always correct mistakes, don’t hide the mistake, explain why you did it, be transparent about your own biases and assumptions. Many bloggers have shown that credibility can be built with individual voice as well, an alternative to the institutional credibility of hierarchical media organisations. Now if the bloggers who made wrong accusations against Jill Carroll – and then refused to apologize – were left reader- and link-less, that would be the new, richer and more chaotic public sphere self-correcting.
(see also: Bloggers own Jill Carroll an apology. And the Christian Science Monitor’s Jill Carroll update blog.)