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December 11th, 2006 at 12:12 am
I wrote. I think I’m going to post a similar blog tomorrow. Greater Boston should be ashamed of itself.
December 11th, 2006 at 6:30 am
grammar police: “accuse constantly bloggers”? should that be “constantly accuse”?
To the point though, I don’t watch that show, but are you saying that they were attacking someone for blogging anonymously or were they accusing someone of using multiple ids?
As to blog ethics.. do you know of any local blogging conferences or local schools with evening journalism classes?
I’m always looking to improve.
Another thing I think should (or might already be starting to) be created are certifications that show a blog commits to a certain amount of ethical standards. I’ve been looking at mediabloggers.org and others trying to see if there is a national standard that is starting to emerge.
Blogging need to remain independent.. the constant back-and-forth discussion and competition brings forth the best (and sometimes the worst) in people who often were on the sidelines.
But I do think showing that you agree to certain standards also makes your opinion have more value to readers.
December 11th, 2006 at 9:38 am
here here! call in the left in lowell thought police! john carroll should be strung up by his nuts and beaten over the head with your ego!
give me a break. he fucked up. and you think he should be fired for it?????
you are the same person who wrote something blatantly, factually untrue about that kerry healey attack ad in the parking lot. and then in the comments, even after you admitted that (a) you’d never seen the commercial, and (b) you just assumed they showed a black man stalking the woman, even though they hadn’t actually done so…you still didn’t even bother to fix the inaccuracy in the original post.
waaaaaaah they got the story wrong. boycott john carroll. jesus christ, people screw up sometimes. he can and should apologize for it and leave it alone, but it’s hardly an indictment on the man’s career. get over yourself.
December 11th, 2006 at 9:46 am
Sorry Shawn, I was cutting and pasting words around and sometimes that happens.
They were saying that Armstrong was blogging under anonymous IDs for pay. He was talking out of his you-know-what. There have been bloggers caught doing that, but they are usually unknown shills who get caught really quick. (It’s not too hard to spot a real shill.)
I do think there are unwritten standards…disclosing conflicts of interest when working for a campaign, for instance. I think some of the power of blogs is that anyone can do it, bringing back the old tradition of anonymous pamphlets which people used to publish to stir up debate, but in a new format. Publishing a pamphlet was obviously much harder than being anonymous on the web, but it was used in a similar way. So I wouldn’t want hard-and-fast rules, frankly.
I do think blog readers are smart - they don’t take someone at face value until that person has demonstrated some history of writing to discern their biases and conflicts. In blogs, cream usually rises to the top, and the bad stuff sinks quick.
December 11th, 2006 at 9:51 am
Hey “person”: I make mistakes. And I try to admit them.
But I don’t get paid to have journalistic integrity, and I already thought John Carroll wasn’t that great to begin with. And frankly, unless you use a strong voice to oppose someone in the pundit class, no one listens to you. Yeah, I want at a minimum a retraction; but I think in general he’s not the top notch class of talking head to begin with. They need to examine their standards.
Actually, that whole show has glaring problems, this isn’t the first time I’ve been annoyed with their reporting. I like some of the people on GB and BtP, but quite a few of those pundits have bothered me a long time.
December 11th, 2006 at 10:23 am
I do not want John Carroll fired but boy am I glad his arrogance towards bloggers was finally exposed. If he and Emily Rooney were not so biased, they would have done their homework and probably decided that this story was not worthy of Beat the Press.
By the way, I believe his professional carreer started in advertising not journalism. I wonder if he discusses blogging in the Mass Communication courses he teaches at B.U.
Truthiness: What bothers me, isn’t that Carrol screwed up this one time, but it is Greater Boston’s (Rooney and Carroll) negative view of bloggers who are amateurs. If you are a member of the old media and have a blog, that is fine with them. Greater Boston has a blog on their site. The Dan Kennedys, the Andrew Sullivans, etc.. get a pass but the average Joe or Jane gets dismissed. They have little use for the citizen journalist, but they are not going away. They should try to understand the blogsphere and stop applying the standards of the mainstream media to it. (Also, go ahead and curse, if you want, but do not write out the whole word; it may prevent some people from accessing this website, thanks.).
Shawn: Last year, Lynne had organized a succesful conference for Lefty Bloggers where some of the issues you raised were discussed. I am trying to get her (when she has a few minutes) to organize another one.
December 11th, 2006 at 10:40 am
sorry about the cursing. it was unnecessary anyway, but i don’t see a way of editing the comment so i guess i can’t fix it. if lynne wants to somehow, she can feel free. please don’t change “nuts” though, as it provides an image that i consider essential to the quality of the comment.
December 11th, 2006 at 11:03 am
I think the salient issue here is the irony of journalists (who hold an allegedly higher standard of fact finding) poo pooing bloggers for the lack of accountability in posting while a) getting the facts wrong themselves and b) the debate on the blogs quickly got to the truth of what was going on.
And for the record… Lynne didn’t call for Carrol’s firing, she just said she wouldn’t trust him again. If jounalists do hold themselves to a higher standard then there should be no objection to the loss of trust when getting it wrong. If the dialogues that happens in blogs serve a self correcting mechanism, the the loss of trust for those who get it wrong is the correcting mechanism for journalists.
December 11th, 2006 at 11:16 am
“In fact, I’ll be asking for them to request that Mr. Carroll to consider working elsewhere.”
That’s not a call for a firing? I guess I’m too square like John Carroll and incapable of interpreting the language of the hipster blogosphere. Hopefully Santa will bring me a snark detector for Christmas.
December 11th, 2006 at 11:31 am
oops… missed that.
But again, this is exactly the mechanism that jounalists with their higher standards allege to operate under… that is when they get it wrong they should expect complaints and to the extend the keep getting it wrong, they should expect thier work to die a slow death in the marketplace of ideas and institutions who continue to back them should expect likewise.
December 11th, 2006 at 11:38 am
Well that’s it, I think he (Carroll) has gotten it wrong before, and as such, his talking head should be gonzo.
It’s not even that I disagree with Carroll most of the time, I just think he’s a little too much of a hack for a show that purports itself to have high standards (it often doesn’t, but it says it does).
December 11th, 2006 at 11:38 am
BTW I agree with some in that calling for his ouster isn’t something I would do, not at this point anyway. My opinion may change depending on what I hear from him by ways of a correction and/or apology.
Lynne, however, is entitled to her own level of discontent. Since it is her blog, she is entitled to express it, as you are entitled to disagree.
BTW for those who haven’t I recommend following the links the BMG.
December 11th, 2006 at 2:35 pm
Others apparently share Lynne’s level of discontent with Mr. Carroll
Greg Sargent at the American Prospect poses some questions to Mr. Carroll
http://www.prospect.org/horsesmouth/2006/12/post_445.html#014780
Kos poses his questions to the Dean at the BU school of communications
http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2006/12/11/121940/19
December 11th, 2006 at 3:03 pm
Saw this sentence from a commenter on Greater Boston’s blog and I thought it summed up perfectly why some (Lynne) might consider this a firing offense.
“As you know, Carroll committed a mistake which would be shame-making for a freshman reporter on a college paper, never mind an experienced professional journalist.”
I should also add that it looks like Mr. Mills, the executive producer, is handling this rather well. He says they will address this tonight. I have no doubt that the reporters themselves will publicly appologise, but I withold final judgment on Greater Boston (my judgement, you judge for yourself) until I hear it and judge it not to be of the non-apology apology type.
December 11th, 2006 at 4:43 pm
It’s the irony, stupid…
There’s going to be lots of emails to GB/BtP today, methinks.
December 11th, 2006 at 7:44 pm
Emily Rooney made her apology, but she apologized for the wrong thing. She apologized for the fact that they took the satire as real and as a result mistakenly reported that several bloggers didn’t exist when in fact they had.
I find this disappointing.
They did more that comit a factual error. They did indeed comit the error that she described and it is good that they recognize that they need to get their facts straight. But, in the original Friday show, this factual error resulted in a roundtable trashing of particular people’s integrity… in other words, they apologized for the error but not the damage. Its as if big dig engineers appologized for the design of the panels, but made no mention of the poor woman that died.
sheesh. I expected more from WGBH.
December 11th, 2006 at 8:22 pm
Dan Kennedy has checked in on the issue . Apparently this will be one of the stories covered next Friday on GB/BtP.
December 12th, 2006 at 5:12 am
Ridiculous. If he doesn’t know his facts, he shouldn’t bring it up. Truthiness Guy, your concern for the employment status of a guy who can’t do the job for which he’s being paid is touching, really. Of course it is his second job, maybe third, but “I like him, he’s pretty conservative, so he should actually be paid MORE for incompetence and slander, life long highly paid employment for the chronically unfit” is a concept to live by.
December 12th, 2006 at 6:50 am
if you find carroll to be “pretty conservative,” that says a lot about how much you’ve watched the show or carroll.
and your desire to lynch a guy for screwing up on the job is touching, really. to say he “can’t do the job” based on a screw-up is indicative of the reactionary hyper-paranoid response many of you have taken to this incident.
and by the way, even if he was “pretty conservative” - and i am pretty disdainful of pretty conservative viewpoints - that wouldn’t change my opinion, which is that this gang of bloggers really needs to take a deep breath and learn how to pick its battles a little better. this is not weapons of mass destruction. this is not the swift boat attack. get a life.
December 13th, 2006 at 7:24 pm
Lynne:
Surprise! I agree with you. Carroll screwed up. It didn’t smell right when I heard him (on the Sunday morning replay).
However … Lynne, you’re a journalist. You gather info about current events, trends, issues and people, and you put it out to the general public. It’s in a very different medium, but, it’s what you do.