From columnist Ellen Goodman:
I AM SURE that Jill Carroll and her family are too busy inhaling the sweet spring air of freedom to spend time sniffing out the pollution in the blogosphere. Anyone who spent three months imagining the grimmest fate for this young journalist in the hands of terrorists can’t get too upset when a little Internet posse goes after her scalp.
Nevertheless, this is not a good moment for the bustling, energetic Wild West of the new Internet media. Remember when a former CBS executive described bloggers as guys in pajamas writing in their living rooms? Well, it seems that many have only one exercise routine: jumping to conclusions.
In the hours between captivity and true freedom, Carroll was seen in one propaganda film describing the mujahideen as ”good people fighting an honorable fight” and in another interview saying she was never threatened. An online jeering section bought it hook, line, and sinker without waiting to hear that the videos were made under threat. As Alex Jones of Harvard’s Shorenstein Center said, ”They were gulled by a clever piece of propaganda and ought to be ashamed of themselves.”
….These attacks raise the question of what bloggery is going to be when it grows up. An Internet op-ed page? Or a polarized, talk-radio food fight?
We’ve written about the same problem extensively here. And note that her column confirms what we have warned about: when something like this happens the general public and the news media don’t say “oh, it was only the right bloggers or the left bloggers that did this — it’s only one political point of view.” It strikes most people as a flaw of bloggers and the process of blogging in general — that people need to pause a bit and look before they leap to conclusions. She writes:
If newspapers are the first rough draft of history, a blog is like reading a never-ending draft as it’s being written and published, mostly unedited, without standards or correction boxes. Defenders will tell you that blogs are ”fact-checked” in the rough and tumble of the marketplace by other bloggers. But don’t count on it.
The difference between old media and new, MSM and blog, says Al Tompkins of the Poynter Institute, is the difference between sitting at a restaurant and having your food delivered nicely plated or standing at a buffet nibbling constantly. It’s the 24/7 news cycle brought down to the 604,800 seconds-per-week cycle.
In the wake of the Carroll story, a few — far too few — bloggers stopped stocking the buffet long enough to eat their words. But this case provides a juncture for bloggers who want a respected role in the public debate.
Read the entire column.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.