The Poison, The Banned.
As blogs "grow up," they are evolving an ethic. It will be a knotty process, but in some cases we can learn from the experience of MSM journalists.
One question that came across the bow here at "Done With Mirrors" this week is of corrections. I had written a convoluted sentence in one post. It was just a bad sentence that I should have pulled apart and re-packed. In it, I used a phrase that could have been interpreted as, "I support everything up to, and including, X," when what I meant was, "I support everything up to, but not including, X."
That was called to my attention by a commenter. I went back in and changed the text. Did I do wrong?
I work in newsrooms. Corrections in the newspapers where I have worked are serious business. You want to put out the fire you've accidentally set, and squelch the false information before it spreads.
Errors are caught at every step of the process -- copy editors, proofreaders, even pressmen catch them. And you fix them. But some get through and make it onto the printing press.
Every night, some editor sticks around till 2 a.m. or so and gives the first run another look-through as it rolls off the press. If he catches an error, he'll open up the page on his computer, fix it, and substitute the corrected plate when the press stops for a roll change. If it's egregious enough, he can "stop the presses" and make the fix at once, even though this likely will make the paper late.
Sometimes, though, even this last line of defense fails, and the error doesn't come to our attention until the next day. In that case, you run a print correction in the next available edition. But in that case, some damage has been done.
The fear of errors is well-founded. I remember working for a newspaper that, in one article, confused the names of a local police chief and his brother, a trash hauler who was charged with illegal dumping. Though a correction was printed as soon as possible, the story with the wrong information was archived, as are all stories, and later reporters digging for background on the police chief sometimes would put into their stories the false information that he had been charged with a crime. Even attaching the correction to the clip of the original story in the archives didn't entirely prevent this. It was a nightmare, an error that just won't die. And frankly if that chief had had a good lawyer he could have been proud owner of a newspaper.
So intense is the desire to avoid making such mistakes, among honest journalists, that the newspapers I have worked for have a policy of "not repeating the error in the correction." In other words, if I write that someone lived at 1313 Mockingbird Lane, and it turns out he lived at 3131 Mockingbird Lane, when I come to write the correction for that, I'd write, "So-and-so lives at 3131 Mockingbird Lane. The address was given incorrectly in yesterday's edition." The wrong information has become taboo.
The Internet seems to present the same situation. People turn to it for research, and they find what is there. If someone googles "1313 Mockingbird Lane," they would find the incorrect name I listed for it, if my article was online. Even if I repeat the error in the correction (as probably should be done in this case, because of how Internet searches work), the searcher might see that later correction, or he might not.
Yet there's another side to this: When it comes to people's opinions, in many cases I do want to know what they've said, before they discovered they were wrong and patched it up.
When I used to run an editorial page, I was sorry I couldn't somehow print the letters exactly as they came to me, without the spelling and grammar standardized. They all look the same in newsprint, but one might have been done on company letterhead and the next in purple crayon.
Most blogs are a mix of opinion and fact. Does it matter to you that I wrote an ambivalent sentence? Does it matter that my fingers slipped and I left the "l" out of "public?" Does it matter that I might have dropped a negative I meant to use, and thus reversed the meaning of what I said? Simply tired, or Freudian slip, you decide? Is hitting the "publish" button on a post a moment of no return, or can you go back in and make a fix on a post 5 minutes later?
Any thought-out policy on corrections will have to balance the blogger's need to correct mistakes with the reader's right to detect tergiversation.
***
Anyway, the person who happened to call my attention to the error in this case is a blogger who is banned from this site, and that brings up another ethical issue. He earned that ban long ago, on a previous blog. He's a Chomskyite of the Inner Circle -- that is, one close enough to ask questions of and receive direct answers from The Master -- for so he tells me and I have no reason to believe otherwise. He appears to have imbued the nastiness of his Master along with his world-view.
[If you want a sample of what I'm sparing you from, you can find it here, in the site of this blogger who was kind enough to link to one of my posts, and paid for it by having Mr. Chomskyite track back the link and dump his stored-up flames in this fellow's "comments" section, along with the ubiquitous multiple links back to his own site.]
None of that is why he's banned. He's actually the kind of opponent who's useful if you're on the other side from him, because his tone is so odious that he can't help but alienate reasonable people. Voltaire said it best: "I have never made but one prayer to God, and a very short one: 'O Lord, make my enemies ridiculous.' And God granted it." [Letter to M. Damilaville, May 16, 1767.] My friend José, a gentleman from Spain whose views on many topics are closer to my Chomskyite commenter's than to me, pegged him exactly: "There are two kinds of fascists: fascists and anti-fascists."
No, he's banned for:
1. Spoofing -- posting under names of real people who use the blog, as though the words he wrote were theirs.
2. Making threats against other commenters.
Those seem to me to be valid enough reasons for banning, and a good beginning of a list of ban-worthy offenses. But there could have been others. How about repeated posting of irrelevant comments that amount to little more than links back to his own site? Every blogger who begins to draw traffic probably recognizes this type: every successful system attracts parasites. But is it right to ban based on that?
How about a continuous stream of insults aimed at other commentators, which intimidates people who aren't spoiling for a fight from making comments? Is habitual uncivil discourse cause for banning? Yeah, I know, it's a rough-and-tumble world, and free speech means you get your ass handed to you sometimes, but does the most caustic person in the room have to automatically set the tone for everyone?
It seems to me that opening a blog is like opening a tavern or a museum or some other semi-public space. You have an obligation to make sure that space stays as decent as you want it to, and not let it deteriorate into a monkey house, unless you want a monkey house.
A blog without comments is basically just a Web site, but a blog without some decency standard after a month will invariably look like a clogged toilet. Enforcing standards for comments is not restricting someone's speech. Comments on a blog aren't like letters to the editor. Letters to the editor are asymmetrical warfare. In this corner, Joe Six-Pack: in that corner, people who buy ink by the barrel.
But anyone can start a blog. (And eventually probably will.)
[UPDATE: 12/23, fixed typo in graph 19]
One question that came across the bow here at "Done With Mirrors" this week is of corrections. I had written a convoluted sentence in one post. It was just a bad sentence that I should have pulled apart and re-packed. In it, I used a phrase that could have been interpreted as, "I support everything up to, and including, X," when what I meant was, "I support everything up to, but not including, X."
That was called to my attention by a commenter. I went back in and changed the text. Did I do wrong?
I work in newsrooms. Corrections in the newspapers where I have worked are serious business. You want to put out the fire you've accidentally set, and squelch the false information before it spreads.
Errors are caught at every step of the process -- copy editors, proofreaders, even pressmen catch them. And you fix them. But some get through and make it onto the printing press.
Every night, some editor sticks around till 2 a.m. or so and gives the first run another look-through as it rolls off the press. If he catches an error, he'll open up the page on his computer, fix it, and substitute the corrected plate when the press stops for a roll change. If it's egregious enough, he can "stop the presses" and make the fix at once, even though this likely will make the paper late.
Sometimes, though, even this last line of defense fails, and the error doesn't come to our attention until the next day. In that case, you run a print correction in the next available edition. But in that case, some damage has been done.
The fear of errors is well-founded. I remember working for a newspaper that, in one article, confused the names of a local police chief and his brother, a trash hauler who was charged with illegal dumping. Though a correction was printed as soon as possible, the story with the wrong information was archived, as are all stories, and later reporters digging for background on the police chief sometimes would put into their stories the false information that he had been charged with a crime. Even attaching the correction to the clip of the original story in the archives didn't entirely prevent this. It was a nightmare, an error that just won't die. And frankly if that chief had had a good lawyer he could have been proud owner of a newspaper.
So intense is the desire to avoid making such mistakes, among honest journalists, that the newspapers I have worked for have a policy of "not repeating the error in the correction." In other words, if I write that someone lived at 1313 Mockingbird Lane, and it turns out he lived at 3131 Mockingbird Lane, when I come to write the correction for that, I'd write, "So-and-so lives at 3131 Mockingbird Lane. The address was given incorrectly in yesterday's edition." The wrong information has become taboo.
The Internet seems to present the same situation. People turn to it for research, and they find what is there. If someone googles "1313 Mockingbird Lane," they would find the incorrect name I listed for it, if my article was online. Even if I repeat the error in the correction (as probably should be done in this case, because of how Internet searches work), the searcher might see that later correction, or he might not.
Yet there's another side to this: When it comes to people's opinions, in many cases I do want to know what they've said, before they discovered they were wrong and patched it up.
When I used to run an editorial page, I was sorry I couldn't somehow print the letters exactly as they came to me, without the spelling and grammar standardized. They all look the same in newsprint, but one might have been done on company letterhead and the next in purple crayon.
Most blogs are a mix of opinion and fact. Does it matter to you that I wrote an ambivalent sentence? Does it matter that my fingers slipped and I left the "l" out of "public?" Does it matter that I might have dropped a negative I meant to use, and thus reversed the meaning of what I said? Simply tired, or Freudian slip, you decide? Is hitting the "publish" button on a post a moment of no return, or can you go back in and make a fix on a post 5 minutes later?
Any thought-out policy on corrections will have to balance the blogger's need to correct mistakes with the reader's right to detect tergiversation.
***
Anyway, the person who happened to call my attention to the error in this case is a blogger who is banned from this site, and that brings up another ethical issue. He earned that ban long ago, on a previous blog. He's a Chomskyite of the Inner Circle -- that is, one close enough to ask questions of and receive direct answers from The Master -- for so he tells me and I have no reason to believe otherwise. He appears to have imbued the nastiness of his Master along with his world-view.
[If you want a sample of what I'm sparing you from, you can find it here, in the site of this blogger who was kind enough to link to one of my posts, and paid for it by having Mr. Chomskyite track back the link and dump his stored-up flames in this fellow's "comments" section, along with the ubiquitous multiple links back to his own site.]
None of that is why he's banned. He's actually the kind of opponent who's useful if you're on the other side from him, because his tone is so odious that he can't help but alienate reasonable people. Voltaire said it best: "I have never made but one prayer to God, and a very short one: 'O Lord, make my enemies ridiculous.' And God granted it." [Letter to M. Damilaville, May 16, 1767.] My friend José, a gentleman from Spain whose views on many topics are closer to my Chomskyite commenter's than to me, pegged him exactly: "There are two kinds of fascists: fascists and anti-fascists."
No, he's banned for:
1. Spoofing -- posting under names of real people who use the blog, as though the words he wrote were theirs.
2. Making threats against other commenters.
Those seem to me to be valid enough reasons for banning, and a good beginning of a list of ban-worthy offenses. But there could have been others. How about repeated posting of irrelevant comments that amount to little more than links back to his own site? Every blogger who begins to draw traffic probably recognizes this type: every successful system attracts parasites. But is it right to ban based on that?
How about a continuous stream of insults aimed at other commentators, which intimidates people who aren't spoiling for a fight from making comments? Is habitual uncivil discourse cause for banning? Yeah, I know, it's a rough-and-tumble world, and free speech means you get your ass handed to you sometimes, but does the most caustic person in the room have to automatically set the tone for everyone?
It seems to me that opening a blog is like opening a tavern or a museum or some other semi-public space. You have an obligation to make sure that space stays as decent as you want it to, and not let it deteriorate into a monkey house, unless you want a monkey house.
A blog without comments is basically just a Web site, but a blog without some decency standard after a month will invariably look like a clogged toilet. Enforcing standards for comments is not restricting someone's speech. Comments on a blog aren't like letters to the editor. Letters to the editor are asymmetrical warfare. In this corner, Joe Six-Pack: in that corner, people who buy ink by the barrel.
But anyone can start a blog. (And eventually probably will.)
[UPDATE: 12/23, fixed typo in graph 19]
