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March 23, 2007BELTWAY BLOGROLL
Bad Journalism At The Politico
That's what editor John Harris of The Politico said yesterday to the reporter who, as Washington Post media critic Howard Kurtz aptly put it this morning, left egg on the face of the upstart political newspaper. And thus another mainstream journalist has learned the hard way that a blog item really isn't all that different than a story.
Listen up, my fellow newsies: A blog is just a publishing platform. If you want to retain your journalistic credibility, you should never publish anything on that platform that you wouldn't put in print or say over the air.
And don't think, like Harris, that you can "write what you know when you know it" and still maintain "standards of accuracy or fairness." You can't do it.
The Politico proved it yesterday in reporting that Democrat John Edwards would suspend his presidential campaign because of his wife's latest, and worsening, recurrence of cancer. The story cited one anoymous source and downplayed official, on-the-record comments from the Edwards campaign that the paper was about to report something false -- all because they wanted to break a story an hour before a news conference where everyone would hear the truth.
The paper deserves credit for quickly and openly admitting its error, and also for linking readers to criticism of the paper. But Harris' attitude about where the paper went wrong belies a belief that we journalists can be less meticulous online and in real time than we are when we're writing for print and on longer deadlines. The opposite is true.
News reported online can go viral within minutes, as evidenced by the mainstream news organizations and blogs alike that impulsively regurgitated The Politico's false scoop yesterday, so journalists need to be even more cautious in reporting for the Web.
If we don't, we're going to hear a whole lot more readers saying things like this from one of Harris' readers: "Politico has been removed from 'my favorites.'"
Posted by Danny | 10:45 AM
