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Today Ellen Goodman takes bloggers to task for jumping the gun in condemning Jill Carroll, whose press conference, which she now claims was made under duress, was not sufficiently harsh on the terrorists or praising of the Coalition.
The printouts on my desk describe the 28-year-old journalist, a hostage and victim for 82 terrifying days, as something
between Patty Hearst and Baghdad Jane, between a traitor and “Princess Jill.” TBone posted a potshot, calling Carroll “a liar” and the kidnapping “a total scam.” PA Pundits said that “I still just can’t get past her being (for the most part) unharmed.” And Debbie Schlussel called her a “spoiled brat America-hater.”As Internet users, we’ve learned a lot about the good, the bad, the true, and the false in cyberspace. If you Google an illness, you get links to a cutting-edge cure for cancer or a website for pills made from apricot pits. Dan Gillmor, author of “We the Media,” says that “people are having to learn a new kind of media literacy” and that “quality will end up surfacing.” Maybe so. Maybe not.
If newspapers are the first rough draft of history, a blog is like reading a never-ending draft as it’s being written and published, mostly unedited, without standards or correction boxes. Defenders will tell you that blogs are “fact-checked” in the rough and tumble of the
marketplace by other bloggers. But don’t count on it.The difference between old media and new, MSM and blog, says Al
Tompkins of the Poynter Institute, is the difference between sitting at a restaurant and having your food delivered nicely plated or standing at a buffet nibbling constantly. It’s the 24/7 news cycle brought down to the 604,800 seconds-per-week cycle.
Yeah, darn those internet blahgerz, jumping to conclusions and posting false and premature judgment on a news story. Goodman gets in her pajamas jabs too. Of course, the MSM, in whose continued dominance Goodman has a vested interest, would never jump to conclusions or get a major story wrong like this, or spread false information around unchecked.
Well, almost.