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.
