In an exchange about weblogs on Slate, Andrew Sullivan has this to say,
But the speed with which an idea in your head reaches thousands of other people’s eyes has another deflating effect, this time in reverse: It ensures that you will occasionally blurt out things that are offensive, dumb, brilliant, or in tune with the way people actually think and speak in private. That means bloggers put themselves out there in far more ballsy fashion than many officially sanctioned pundits do, and they make fools of themselves more often, too.
I hate to break it to Sullivan, but some of us do actually fact check what we write on our weblogs and feel a need to be as accurate as possible.
What Sullivan is describing here is a personal problem — Sullivan is simply a old school pundit exploiting the weblogging format and like all such pundits, the goal is to speak as loud as possible and make the most outrageous claims for attention, with things like accuracy and fact checking coming in second.
When Sullivan claims his weblog entries are more hurried and likely to be wrong than his old media articles, surely he is speaking only in degrees. Sullivan has never struck me as a particular stickler for accuracy, especially when that might interfere with a good angle.
It is telling that when Sullivan took a break from his weblog for awhile, he managed to sucker Camille Paglia into covering for him. Could anyone imagine a more perfect replacement for Sullivan?