HIGH DUDGEON, LOW STANDARDS. This is making the rounds and is too funny not to share. On Friday, a WBGH (Boston, MA) commentator reporter named John Carroll ran an "investigative" piece about bloggers for the "Beat The Press" segment on Greater Boston, a local commentary program. Carroll's report was basically a distillation of the recent op-chart in The New York Times, but he tried to spice it up by doing some "real" journalism of his own -- and quickly got himself into trouble.
Carroll falsely reported that MyDD founder Jerome Armstrong is actually the person behind online pseudonyms Matt Stoller, Chris Bowers, and Scott Shields. (In response to the Times chart, Jonathan Singer had written this tongue-in-cheek post making that claim, which Carroll took literally and cited in the piece.) As anyone who actually spends time in the blogosphere -- you know, instead of cruising through for a drive-by "expose" chock full of high dudgeon but skimpy on reportage -- knows, all three men actually exist. A one-minute Google search would have turned up any number of photos of them. Carroll, who teaches mass communication at Boston University, then further misled his viewers by patching in a video quote from a Boston-area blogger named David Kravitz that made it sound like Kravitz was assuring him that Armstrong would eventually be exposed, when in fact Carroll never brought up Armstrong to Kravitz.
If this were not sad enough, coming as it did from an Edward R. Murrow award-winner, the high dudgeon didn't end with Carroll's set piece. His fellow Greater Boston roundtable guests chimed in with their unfiltered outrage. "I was shocked -- I think this is damaging, not that [bloggers] had great credibility anyway," scoffed host Emily Rooney. "There is no accountability in the blogosphere," sneered Joe Sciacca of the Boston Herald. "I think we're just scratching the surface of this problem of credibility with the blogs," lamented journalism professor Paul Niwa of Emerson College.
A final irony: Greater Boston has its own show blog. We'll see if Ms. Rooney or Mr. Carroll use that space to post a correction and an apology. It would be the blog-appropriate thing to do.
UPDATE: Carroll has emailed me to say that he believes the program will address the problem of last Friday's episode, both on-air and on the blog.
--Tom Schaller
