So the Patriots have completed a perfect season, scratching, scuffling, surging all the way tonight on their way to this historic first. Of course they still have the playoffs and the Super Bowl to get past, but there can be no denying that the level of their accomplishment is extraordinary and energizing. And with the Red Sox the 2007 world champions of baseball and the Celtics on the move for the first time in years, Boston, my home city, is shining on.There is something pure and reassuring and uniting about these achievements , existing as they do in a context larger than sports itself. Because they allow a real and welcome diversion, a few moments of pleasure, an opportunity to focus on something other than the ugliness that usually leads the newscasts and roars from the front pages these days, and is sure to do so again soon enough.
I read through Dan Kennedy's excellent Media Nation blog this morning that there is a big problem with a recent post in the New York Times by their media person, Virginia Heffernan, in which she passed along accusations that GOP presidential hopeful Ron Paul was being supported by neo-Nazis. The result has been a lengthy Times Editors Note now added and attached to Heffernan's piece excoriating her for lack of due diligence before writing it.
I won't belabor the major points in Heffernan's blog, which Kennedy explains in some detail. He also does a little dance about what the true responsibility of a blogger needs to be when writing or passing along a story, particularly one as odious and harmful as the one about Paul.
Kennedy says she wrote in "classic blogger style." (How interesting that someone as new and emerging as a blogger can already have a "classic style.") But Heffernan is really not your normal blogger. No. She's an employee, hardly in a free-lance venue, just hanging out there on her own in the blogosphere. She's not simply posting and letting the chips fall. Her work is underwritten, supported, and made available right there, in the NY freaking Times.
And the Times clearly has not figured any of this out yet. It wants to appear new-ish, relevant in the current media battleground. So it encourages and heavily promotes its own proprietary bloggers. But as soon as there's some trouble with one it reverts to "classic newspaper style," insisting that old fashioned journalistic vetting should have taken place. And in so doing, now it publicly and professionally humiliates Heffernan who, it would appear, was just doing what bloggers do.
What I want to know is where was the Times, where was that Editor before the damn thing got published? Who read and checked the piece before so much blew up about the accuracy of what Heffernan wrote or passed on, and before the paper felt that Editor's Note had become necessary?
It's the Times I fault in all of this. The paper is like an old dude who tries to pass simply by putting on a young dude's clothes. No one is actually fooled, and it's all sort of sad.
It has been almost exactly 2 years since I posted here. Frankly that's because I found I could whisper my thoughts out my window at 3 AM and more people would be exposed to what I had to say than were stopping by this place. And I would have remained silent, sulking about the lack of response but still silent. If something hadn't changed.
And that is, my brother --- a trouble maker from way back --- has started a blog in which he takes on certain purveyors of goods and services who annoy him with their uncaring uncommunicative manner. And by so doing, attempts to get them to treat him, and all other consumers, with respect and dignity. And he wants you (and anyone passing by my window) to join him in the good fight. A worthy endeavor it seems to me.
So why am I back here? Well, in the course of setting up his blog my brother invited me to assist him in a variety of ways, happily none of them involving cash. And, in so doing, he has posted a link to this space, making it necessary for me to revive this moribund site if only for the moment. So, to keep family harmony, and because I think he might be able to beat me up, I am checking in. (And, now that I have, I might even return from time-to-time with new media stuff as well.)
What the hell, I was always interested in what I had to say.
So the Patriots have completed a perfect season, scratching, scuffling, surging all the way tonight on their way to this historic first. Of course they still have the playoffs and the Super Bowl to get past, but there can be no denying that the level of their accomplishment is extraordinary and energizing. And with the Red Sox the 2007 world champions of baseball and the Celtics on the move for the first time in years, Boston, my home city, is shining on.
