In most of the conversations I have with the occasional media person or associate about weblogs, the one thing that always comes up is how can people possibly know whether or not weblogs are accurate. It doesn’t help that Jayson Blair’s errors have now been exposed.
Blair, of course, wrote for that daily weblog known as the New York Times, and actually reporting on events was too hard so he plagiarized stuff from other newspapers or simply made things up. And even though the NYT had to issue numerous corrections to stories by Blair that should have tipped them off, they kept letting him plug away until another newspaper complained of an obvious case of plagiarism.
The real problem is that although “don’t believe everything you read” is so commonly heard that it is a cliche, the fact is that many people do assume that since the newspaper they’re reading is well-packaged and presented and obviously has a serious organization behind it, that what’s printed in it must be true.
In fact, it was the New York Times who gave America the biggest liar ever to appear in a mainstream newspaper — Walter Duranty. Duranty was the Times’ start reporter in Soviet Russia where he became a shill for Stalin’s regime. Duranty perpetrated a number of lies in the pages of the Times. He put the paper on record as saying the Ukranian famine simply wasn’t happening, although he knew this to be untrue. He reported on the Show Trials as if the absurd plots spun in Stalin’s rigged courts were real and the defendants guilty of the bizarre crimes they were accused of.
And not only did Duranty spin lies for the paper of record for over 10 years, but he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for his deception — others in journalism looked at his lies and gave him their most prestigious award for it.
Which is why I always find it annoying when someone like Dave Winer refers to his critics as “weiner boys” and simply ignores even polite criticism and suggestion. Much better to allow a thousand weiner boys to bloom than perpetuate the sort of insulated environment that allowed Duranty to win American journalism’s top prize.