Joho the Blog
An Entry from the Archives

It's not just Dana; my last name is Reeves, and people are always mistakenly commenting that it's the same name as Superman's. Obviously one would hope that the mainstream media would get it right, but I often have the sense that the online publishing departments don't have very tight editorial controls when it comes to writing the headlines for stories ready for posting.

I completely agree with the author. I hope it still will write.

David, you're right that daily newspapers are under incredible deadline pressures and that mistakes are inevitable. (I understand that the dailies don't actually do fact-checking, although the Law of Irony suggests that I'm wrong about this.) I'm not asking them to be perfect. I'm asking them to stop beating up on bloggers because we get things wrong sometimes. We are all human.

Absolutely. It's pretty shocking how some people, espcially those in the mainstream media, feel so free to draw vast generalizations about bloggers as a class.

I also think that the mistakes and questions of disclosure -- both by bloggers and the mainstream media -- are very, very healthy for us as a culture. It's training us all to look at every source critically, and to see how its perspective and motivations of the source might have shaped what we're reading or seeing. Can you tell I was a history major? :-)