What's the Score?
Is it Blogs 1, NY Times 0? Well the score may be more lop-sided than that and the Times probably hasn't been shut out. But in any case the Times today announced a new corrections policy for their Op-Ed columnists, and it's hard to conclude anything but that the policy directly results from criticism of it's columnists in the blogosphere. (I'm not particularly fond of the new word, "blogosphere". It sounds pretentious and well, made up. But it's better than blogiverse -- blog + universe -- so I guess I'm stuck. Anyway . . . .)
Daniel Okrent joined the paper as its Public Advocate after last year's Jason Blair scandal, and in today's edition Okrent does a good job of even handedly exposing the problem with the Times's prior policy (there was none) on correcting factual errors in opinion columns. A few weeks back a Times lawyer tried to drop a 16 ton weight on Robert Cox of The National Debate for his parody of a non-existent Times Corrections page for its columnists. With Okrent's piece today, the book on complaints about the failure to correct factual misstatements by columnists is closed and put back on the shelf (at least until we finish reading the rest of today's paper?)
But it was a good read. My favorite chapters dealt with carving up quotations to strip them of their context, thereby creating a whole new meaning. Scroll to the bottom of the parody corrections page and you'll see how last year Maureen Dowd converted a statement by President Bush that captured or killed Al Qaeda members were "not a problem anymore" into a quote that meant all of Al Qaeda was not a problem anymore. Spinsanity dissected not only how Dowd created a meaning that didn't exist but also how that meaning was picked up by CNN, MSNBC, and newspapers around the world.
It is difficult to escape the fact that this change in policy was driven by the internet in general and blogs in particular. In the past, all one could do is send off a letter to the editor. Today, folks can have a big fat loud long distance conversation about it, and that conversation can matter.
Still and fair enough, Jeff Jarvis has a cautionary note to add about the entire episode:
And Okrent says this about columnists in today's column:I sometimes think opinion columns ought to carry a warning: "The following is solely the opinion of the author, supported by data I alone have chosen to include. Live with it." Opinion is inherently unfair. The same could be put over the door of many if not most weblogs. But the real question is how often it should be used over news reporting. Yup, that's the real question.