Left In Lowell

I took a break for the weekend from blogging (besides being really, really booked) but here’s an outrage for you. PBS’s Beat the Press (the Friday edition of Greater Boston) commited the same heinous act of stupid, wrong, buttheaded journalism that they accuse constantly bloggers of (and I am particularly glad to find out there’s an explanation for the accusation against MyDD’s Jerome Armstrong). Basically, on the show, John Carroll (who apparently can’t figure out snark if it womps him upside the head) charged Armstrong with blogging under pseudonyms when he worked for Ned Lamont, based on a very obviously sarcastic post by another MyDD blogger. At the time watching the program, I myself was shocked, because Carroll was citing a New York Times article, and so I thought there’d been some reporting on something Armstrong actually did that highly disappointed me at the time. Turns out, Carroll was an idiot, and I will never trust another thing that man says again. I didn’t much like him before (Dan Kennedy, where were you? The show desperately needed you!) but this is inexcusable.

My irony meter is in the red. The “learned” journalists on Beat the Press sat there tsk-tsking bloggers and their ethics as writers but using false truths to charge them with a lack of ethics (and no, you indolent blatherers, none of us claim to be reporters. Editorialists, occasional investigative journalists, and media critics, maybe, but not formal journalists).

Not only that, but they edited in a taped interview of David of BMG to look like he sort of supported such actions as they were accusing Armstrong of. Please call or write Greater Boston to tell them this is unacceptable. Ask for a correction and retraction by Greater Boston this week. In fact, I’ll be asking for them to request that Mr. Carroll to consider working elsewhere. If he’s such an esteemed journalist, then he should hold himself to as much a high standard, and he shouldn’t keep his own job if he’s going to slander obviously ethical bloggers without checking the facts. They have damaged their credibility and if they want some semblance of it back, they need to retract this immediately.