Reilly Issues Correction

(crossposted at The Blue Herald)

In this recent post, I criticized a piece by The Phoenix's Adam Reilly. I thought it only fair to leave a condensed version of my criticism in the comments for his piece, along with the URL for my post. To Reilly’s credit, he looked into the error I raised and acknowledged it. He also quoted a new blog comment to substitute for the problematic one. While I still question aspects of his original piece, and question his new quotation, he deserves credit for issuing a correction and being very civil in his comment thread. Feel free to read all the comments here. Here’s the response I wrote:

Adam, kudos for acknowledging the mistake. I went into more detail in my blog post, but the url is hard to see. Based on my research at least, the correction was posted close to 1:50pm EST (I wrote WGBH to confirm this but haven’t received a reply yet). The second quotation, as you note, did occur afterwards. I found it ironic that in a sense you repeated Carroll’s error by basing a large part of your critique (essentially, bloggers are churlish) on false information (although I do understand how it happened).

As an occasional blogger, let me weigh in. I believe your larger point is that bloggers and the mainstream media can have an uneasy relationship. That’s certainly fair and accurate. There are also certainly bloggers and commentators, who are immature, abusive, can pile on, or read conspiracies into everything. But that’s free speech, and other bloggers and commentators are free to call them on anything they think goes over the line. However, blog communities do develop standards and the coin of the realm for most political and news blogs is the same as it is for traditional media – credibility. As others have noted, if a major site gets something factually wrong, readers write in pretty quickly, and the good blogs always issue a correction. In my experience, most prominent liberal bloggers want accuracy and laud good journalism (although you can find bloggers of every political stripe who want advocacy versus “straight” reporting).

If I may make a few respectful requests: Please distinguish between blog posts and thread comments. Commentators tend to be much more extreme, and popular sites tend to attract “trolls.” Please consider whether a comment is representative of the thread before you use it. The range of opinion between blogs, or even in a single post’s thread, can be very diverse, and anyone can cherry-pick them. Most prominent bloggers, even when criticizing each other, tend only to quote someone else’s *post* versus a comment in a thread. (It’s my view that your quotations were not very representative. While some of the Greater Boston thread comments express the distrust you highlight in the first quotation and your new, third one, I found that overwhelmingly, the comments plead for accuracy and transparency. For the second, sarcastic quotation, the actual post it comments on is a pretty serious inspection of Carroll’s accuracy and the issue of disclosure, and most of the other comments are in the same vein.) Personally, I consider Carroll’s gaffe a dead issue now that he and Greater Boston issued a correction and apologized. As I mentioned before, however, Carroll’s disdain and his error fit a pattern of such incidents from traditional journalists, which is why he received the reaction he did. (Frankly, I feel you fell into some of the same pattern, but I also have to credit your correction.) Finally, I know the Phoenix is a physical paper, and adding hyperlinks for the web version could be a pain if you’re understaffed. However, it’s a wonderful feature to link any blogs you quote, because then readers can check out things for themselves.

Sorry, this has gotten long. I’d end by saying I’m a fan of good reporting, whether it appears in traditional media or on blogs. Best of luck in your future work.

I’ll say it again — the traditional media (in this case Carroll and Reilly), deserve to be challenged when they get something wrong. However, they also deserve credit when they correct the record. Proven hacks may not deserve mercy, but the entire point of engaging with traditional journalists is to encourage better reporting. Here’s hoping this incident leads to more of it.

Adam Reilly Repeats John Carroll’s Mistake

(crossposted at The Blue Herald)

Updated below

On the blog-smear front, one of the big stories this week has centered on John Carroll. Appearing on the show Greater Boston on famed PBS station WGBH, Carroll criticized MyDD’s Jerome Armstrong for scurrilous conduct, specifically, posing as different users on his site — the only problem being that Armstrong didn’t do it. Carroll misread a satirical post as serious. Had he bothered to read the comment thread, or contacted Armstrong or anyone else at the blog — y’know, that journalistic verification thing — he’d have caught his mistake. To their credit, Greater Boston issued a correction and apology, as has Carroll.

Considering the dismissive tone of Carroll and his tut-tutting about a lack of professionalism among bloggers, the ridicule and criticism he received from the blogosphere was justified. However, bloggers reported the correction and apology as well. Bloggers also noted that part of Friday’s 12/15 installment of Greater Boston is scheduled to address this entire incident, and were interested as to what would be said.

Of course, that’s not the end of it. As John Amato notes on Crooks and Liars, “Apparently, when we call for good and honest reporting we're hypocrites because we also praise good and honest reporting.” Amato links Adam Reilly of The Phoenix in Boston. For a column on the Carroll affair, Reilly noted Greater Boston’s correction, then wrote:

But the blogosphere (terrible term, but unavoidable here) wasn’t satisfied. Consider this response to Mills’s correction: “The ethics of those working at Greater Boston are now in question.” Or, from a comment on Blue Mass Group: “[H]ow can you blame John Carroll for not knowing that. [H]e is a journalist, and he merely repeated the innuendos and rumors he heard as The Wisdom Received. [H]ow could you expect him to do any better?” All told, the mix-up generated well over 100 comments on Boston-area blogs.

Obviously, Carroll screwed up — and the snarky discussion that followed his story certainly didn’t help matters. But what’s really fascinating about this whole episode is that it reveals the blogosphere’s profound ambivalence about traditional journalists.

Reilly goes on make some disparaging comments about bloggers. But guess what? Reilly repeated Carroll’s mistake! He didn’t bother to read the comment thread carefully and a key aspect of his central accusation is false.

Anyone can cherry-pick comments from a thread on a blog. The real question is how representative a comment is. It’s also been a common mistake of “old media” journalists to conflate blog posts with comments. In the case of Reilly’s piece, his central claim is that commentators were still railing against Carroll, Greater Boston, and WGBH after they issued the correction. However, one of the comments he quotes occurred before the correction, and the other comment occurred in a thread primarily about blogger disclosure issues and the inaccuracy of Carroll’s original report.

The Greater Boston comment thread (linked again here) is confusing to read at first because the post issues a correction while the earlier comments ask for correction as if one hasn’t been issued. It’s natural to wonder what’s going on. It turns out it’s because the actual post has been edited at least twice, as noted by webmaster Frank Capria in this comment. Many commentators take issue with this, noting that instead Capria or someone else should have posted an update to the original post, made a new one, or something similar. Of course this wasn’t a “nefarious” move by Capria, but it was a faux pas, because the earlier comments no longer refer to the displayed post.

John Amato reported Greater Boston’s correction at 12:32pm PST (3:32pm EST) on 12/11. The Blue Mass Group, which may have been the first blog to report on Carroll’s piece here, on 12/9, received the Greater Boston correction from Mark Mills, the Executive Producer of Greater Boston at 2:43pm EST, in the thread of this 12/11 post (and good for him). The first direct mention of the correction in the Greater Boston comment thread comes here at 1:56pm EST 12/11. A commentator asks for a correction as late as 1:45pm, so I’d guess the post itself was updated to print the correction at roughly 1:50pm. (I’m writing WGBH to confirm this, not that the exact minute is crucial.)

Reilly’s first quoted comment was posted at 10:53am on the Greater Boston blog, hours before the correction was issued. His second quoted comment was posted on Blue Mass Group at 12/12, 10:24am, after the correction was issued. However, the post it commented on was about the accuracy of Carroll’s report and blogger disclosure issues, not the correction. I suppose Reilly can lambast “Shai Sachs” for not immediately forgiving Carroll his mistake. However, at that point Carroll had not apologized publicly apart from Greg Sargent’s blog less than two hours earlier and I doubt Shai Sachs knew that. The post itself was about Carroll’s accuracy, not his or Greater Boston’s contrition. Most importantly, this was a comment, not a post, and as a casual read will reveal, Shai Sach’s quick, sarcastic comment was not even representative of the discussion in that thread! (Even if it were, personally I wouldn’t find a problem with it.)

Reilly’s piece was published on 12/13 and probably was written on 12/12. Consequently, he really has no excuse not to catch his error with the first quotation, since the post editing issue was clear in the Greater Boston comment thread by the afternoon of 12/11. The second quotation is just bad judgment on his part (that’s my judgment, anyway).

So, to recap, Adam Reilly chastises bloggers (although he only quotes blog commentators) in one case for not acknowledging a correction that hadn’t been issued yet, and in the other case just cherry-picks (I consider the first quotation something of a cherry-pick as well). Who really has the thin skin here? Irony of ironies. John Carroll slammed a blogger because he misread a blog entry, didn’t bother to read the comments, and didn’t research. Adam Reilly then enters the fray, slamming bloggers in part because he didn’t bother to read all the comments, and didn’t research. Apart from these issues, both seem to have started with their conclusions predetermined. Contrary to Reilly’s claims, as John Amato alludes to, the liberal blogosphere is overwhelmingly concerned with accuracy in the media, not in receiving praise. The reason the Carroll report attracted attention is because it fits a pattern of undue disparagement toward bloggers, and frankly, PBS and NPR typically uphold higher standards. It’s also simply good to be accurate, especially if you’re making a negative claim.

Personally, I love PBS and NPR, and WGBH produces many of PBS’ excellent programs. While I found Carroll’s initial report disappointing and dismissive, I credit WGBH, Greater Boston and Carroll for admitting their mistakes and correcting their errors. That sort of behavior should be encouraged, and assuming they’re more careful in the future, all is well.

As for Adam Reilly — we all make mistakes. However, the condescending tone coupled with a central error doesn’t really help your credibility or your appeal. Let’s see if you can follow Carroll’s example a second time, admit your mistake and apologize.

Updated 12/16/06

To his credit, Adam Reilly has admitted to his error about the first quotation he used. I have a follow-up post with more detail here. Thanks to C&L for the link, and to any readers for stopping by!

David Brooks Jumps In, Too

Disappointingly, David Brooks seems to have drank from the anti-blogger Kool-Aid as well with his piece today, 6/25/06. I suppose one could argue it’s primarily anti-Kos, but it depends on the premise that liberal bloggers are sheep, or more specifically, “rabid lambs.” The Agonist gives a run-down on it here and TRex has an entertaining send-up of it here.

Now, who are the sheep again?

Lee Siegel Puts Them Uppity Bloggers in their Place

The New Republic’s Lee Siegel has posted two ludicrous pieces deriding bloggers as angry, infantile fascists (6/22/06’s “Blog This” and 6/23/06’s “The Origins of Blogofascism”). It’s pointless for me to skewer his overall arguments (such as they are) since James Wolcott and Digby have done such a thorough and entertaining job of it already (hat-tip to guest poster Watertiger at Firedoglake for the Wolcott link and many other great ones in the same post).

Instead, I wanted to highlight a shocking failure of logic perpetrated by Siegel in his second post, “The Origins of Blogofascism.” In it, he quotes at length from a short profile of Markos Moulitsas Zuniga, better known as “Kos,” that appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle on 1/15/04. In it, Moulitsas explains:

"I believe in government. I was in El Salvador in the late '70s during the civil war and I saw government as a life-and-death situation," he said. "There was no one to root for. The government was a corrupt plutocracy and the rebels were Maoists. The concept of government is important."

He remembers bullets flying in the marketplace and watching on television as government soldiers executed guerrillas. He also remembers watching footage of the Solidarity movement in Poland.

He was 9, and he asked his father what that was all about. His father, a furniture salesman, said, "It's just politics."

The future blogger said, "Tell me all about it."

Siegel's interpretation immediately follows:

So he loves government, but hates politics. There's something chilling about that. I wonder, does Zuniga consider the Solidarity movement disgusting, compromising, venal politics, too? And was there really no one to root for during the Salvadoran civil war? It's hard to believe the usually inflexibly partisan Zuniga actually said that. The rebels may have been "Maoist"--whatever that meant to them in Central America at the time--but their goal of overthrowing a brutal, rapacious regime might well be something that a passionate political idealist and reformer like Zuniga, looking back at it in 2004, would sympathize with. Or so you would think.

Siegel’s interpretation defies common sense. How can one possibly take that passage and conclude that Moulitsas (incorrectly referred to as Zuniga by Siegel) “loves government, but hates politics?”

Let’s leave aside the ludicrous assumption that a nine-year old should form a nuanced understanding of the Polish Solidarity movement and the Salvadoran civil war, and in the case of Solidarity, to do so upon first encounter. The author of the Chronicle piece does not print anything to indicate what Moulitsas thinks of these movements now, if indeed he even asked him. While Moulitsas starts speaking about the past in the present tense, the bulk of the passage is about his perceptions when he was nine years old. For Siegel to extrapolate Moulitsas’ present views on these matters from such a scant passage is intellectually dishonest, poor reasoning or sloppy journalism. I view it as a deliberate misrepresentation, creating a straw man (or “chilling” snow man, in this case).

But more to the point, the actual passage describes a nine-year old whose father dismisses or minimizes the complexity of the Solidarity movement, for whatever reason (perhaps he thought it too complex or upsetting for his son, or he himself was not that interested, who knows? The article does not say). To which the boy responds, “Tell me all about it.” The boy, young Moulitsas, presses his father to explain to him about politics (and some rather complex politics at that!). How does this passage possibly indicate that Moulitsas “hates politics?”

Of course, it doesn’t. It shows exactly the opposite. The anecdote is used in the original Chronicle piece to indicate how Moulitsas became interested and engaged in politics at a young age. Considering his is the most popular political site on the web, and the fact that he worked for Howard Dean, to say that Moulitsas “loves government, but hates politics” is laughable.

"There's something chilling about that," opines Siegel. It's utterly craven to misrepresent Moulitsas' beliefs and then express shock and horror over them! Furthermore, where does Moulitsas use the terms "disgusting, compromising, venal" that Siegel attributes to him? It's not in the Chronicle piece. It's not in any linked post. Where's the research, where's the evidence? Did Siegel just make this up as well, as he telepathically divines Moulitsas' true intent?

I suspect Siegel was trying to paint Moulitsas as an idealist who loves the ideal of good government but cannot grasp the complexity of political realities. I’m probably being overly generous, since every mention of Moulitsas or bloggers is pejorative. At best Siegel’s being dense, but I feel he’s being disingenuous. My take is that he set out to slam Moulitsas, and then tried to gather his stones without doing a very good job. He earlier states that “Two other traits of fascism are its hatred of the processes of politics, and the knockabout origins of its adherents.” In order to paint Moulitsas as a representative “blogofacist,” which is the entire point of the piece, he needs to somehow establish that Moulitsas “hates politics” and that he’s ruthless or “knockabout” (New Republic writer Zengerle’s much-dissected posts about Moulitsas cover his supposed ruthless, dictatorial nature). Considering that in the paragraph immediately after Siegel slams Moulitsas for 'hating politics,' he slams three bloggers for using aliases when all three have their real names publicly displayed on their sites, it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that Siegel is just plain sloppy.

While I don’t want to pick too much on Siegel — and he’d no doubt be amused that a lowly blogger is parsing his, um, superior prose — two points remain inescapable. 1) His thesis is ludicrous. 2) He can’t support it (not surprising, given #1). In fact, one of his key pieces of evidence proves the opposite point! There's something unseemly about a man with a national platform decrying bloggers for not being able to tolerate Siegel when he doth "conscientiously criticize, in the form of a real argument" when he apparently cannot form a valid or sound argument himself.

(As a point of minor interest, Siegel slams bloggers but only features a single link in his five most recent posts, and that’s to another New Republic writer’s post, Zengerle's. Perhaps Siegel lacks the know-how to link the articles he cites, or he chooses not to because that would sully his status as a real writer.)

As reader "jfabermit" observes in the comments for “The Origins of Blogofascism”:

Honestly, the discussion threads here and elsewhere were much more reasonable than either post of his. If you want to see some actual intelligent commentary on the blogosphere, try the comment thread to the previous post, and ignore this drivel.

Well said.

(I should point out that I am not a regular DailyKos reader, and have left less than 6 comments on that site to date. DailyKos seems to have some very intelligent posters, great links, and makes great finds. It won Best Commenter (Georgia10) and Best Community last year from the 2005 Koufax Awards . However, I find that there’s a large amount of “venting” such as “Bush sucks” etc. and more conspiracy-minded material to wade through in the comments at both DailyKos and Atrios’ site Eschaton. I find the comments at Crooks & Liars, Glenn Greenwald’s Unclaimed Territory, and TPM Cafe to be more thoughtful on the whole. My point is that I am not a “Kossack,” but regardless of my feelings about the site or Moulitsas, both deserve to be criticized on their merits.)

Those Nutty Lefty Stalinist Bloggers

From The Chris Matthews Show this past weekend:

DAVID BROOKS: Whoever the Democratic candidate, that is the weakness of the Democratic party, they’ve got the blogs and the netroots who are semi-nuts and they insist on a Stalinist line of discipline.

CHRIS MATTHEWS: I love your objectivity.

DAVID BROOKS: It’s objectively true. I did a psychoanalytic test.

Crooks and Liars has the video. Brooks goes on to claim, when questioned, that there are more nuts on the left than the right. (And verily, there was much laughter.)

I try to respect David Brooks, because he tends to be more independently-minded than many of the conservative herd, and he occasionally makes some good points, as he did in two columns in the wake of Katrina asserting that compassion for the poor is a good thing. Yes, yes, it may be an obvious point, but it was nice to hear a conservative acknowledge it, since George Will and Rush Limbaugh (among others) took a stance opposed to Brooks. Plus, they were good pieces and it's always a small triumph when a pundit or columnist has neither drank the Koolaid nor taken a ridiculous contrarian position in a vain attempt to establish his or her free, bold thinking (see Richard Cohen).

My serious comment on Brooks is this... Okay, this is good-natured joshing on the one hand. On the other, how firmly does Brooks believe this? I'm not going to fault a conservative for thinking that that liberals are nuttier than his side. Still, speaking of "objective analysis," you'd be hard pressed to find racist posts or comments on a liberal site, whereas it's pretty commonplace on several prominent conservative sites such as Little Green Footballs. The same goes for expressing extremely violent thoughts towards one's political opponents. You can certainly find liberal bloggers and comments on their sites that use insulting language speaking about Bush and other conservatives. It can quickly become pretty infantile, even if the poster finds it cathartic... but you'll find this on sites of all political stripes. Meanwhile, it's commonplace for conservatives - but not liberals - to express a desire to see the opposition beaten, tortured, or hung. Ann "raghead" Coulter is not a fringe figure. Then there's Michael Fumento, who "joked" that if Cindy Sheehan did lash herself to the White House to protest the 2000th American soldier death in Iraq, it would be best to "Leave her there and maybe the crows will do the world a favor and eat her tongue out."

While the conservative netroots - and conservative media - consistently demonstrate views that seem much more extreme than those of any true conservative I know, I can't honestly say the same about the left. Does Brooks really think the liberal "netroots" are far outside the mainstream, and a weakness of the Democrats? I'd have to disagree... just as I'd have to disagree about there being discipline, Stalinist or otherwise! (Brooks was almost certainly indirectly referencing the Howell-Brady debacle at The Washington Post... of course, the underreported story of that is, when you're a major news source, get the story right, and when you make a mistake, admit it promptly rather than trying to defend it for two weeks!)

My less serious comment about Brooks (over at Crooks and Liars) was this:

Stalinist? Well, the neocons are mostly old Trotskyites gone hardcore right-wing, but I've always been more fond of Lenin myself. ;-)

At least Brooks avoided the classic Nazi comparison blunder! I'm hoping for a Mussolini reference next time!