Corrections and blogging standards

The New York Times’ Virginia Heffernan, blogging at The Medium on NYTimes.com, recently wrote that neo-Nazis were portraying Republican presidential candidate Ron Paul as one of them. She didn’t check with Paul. Hence the lengthy “Editor’s Note” that now precedes the item.

As it turns out, this is interesting fodder for a consideration of blogging ethics. If Heffernan had contacted neo-Nazi groups, gotten their version of events, and then failed to do the same with Paul, well, that would be an obvious journalistic lapse. But that’s not what she did. Instead, in classic blogger style, she pointed to accounts elsewhere, particularly in Little Green Footballs, which, as she notes, has a reputation for being “rigidly empiricist.”

Which means that I’m not sure how I come down on this. I don’t think any blogger believes you should have to verify independently everything you link to as long as you’re linking to a reasonably reputable source. On the other hand, there’s no question that the New York Times can do a lot more damage to someone’s reputation than Little Green Footballs. So perhaps the standard does need to be different.

There’s also the matter of how blogs root out stories. This became a subject for discussion at a New England News Forum conference at Southern New Hampshire University recently, as we pondered Talking Points Memo’s efforts to determine whether or not Mitt Romney had ever said he would never appoint a Muslim to his Cabinet. (As we now know from the Martin Luther King Jr. story, you would first have to figure out how Romney defines “never,” “appoint,” “Muslim” and “Cabinet.”)

TPM has been doing it open-source-style, putting half-vetted stuff out incrementally and letting the story emerge over time in a very public way. It’s a fascinating methodology, and one quite different from the closed-system model used in traditional journalism. But it can be pretty devastating to someone’s reputation if it turns out to be untrue — a position taken at the conference by, among others, David Tirrell-Wysocki, an Associated Press executive who’s also the executive director of the Nackey S. Loeb School of Communications in Manchester, N.H. From the “running notes”:

“I’m held accountable,” said Tirrell-Wysocki. “But who is holding the blogger accountable? That’s the downside as I see it.” He said blogs are akin to the conversation at the doughnut shop: “It’s what people are talking about.”

Essentially that is what LGF is doing, preceding its post on Paul by saying, “Take this one with a grain of salt, please,” but then laying out the accusation. Heffernan’s post is equally skeptical, as she concludes that “maybe it was only a matter of time before Paul got roasted on his own spit, i.e., the Internet.” Now Heffernan is getting roasted on the Internet, too.