Tuesday, May 20, 2008
The firing that wasn’t
Posted by Bryan TsaoBrew Crew Ball does a great job of breaking down how the "Ned Yost is fired" story got started. To briefly summarize the great investigative work done there, a reporter for the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel read an apparently bogus rumor on a random blog that gets no traffic, and then blogged about it himself on his Journal-Sentinel blog. The story was subsequently picked up by local and national news outlets.
A couple years ago I wrote a paper on how there despite their best efforts, it's basically impossible for newspapers to fact check everything, and at the risk of stereotyping, I'm going to guess that the J-S reporter is not as savvy about evaluating the information trustworthiness of things on the internet, as aren't many people his (presumed) age. This probably isn't an original thought, but I bet that accounts for a lot of the backlash against blogs in the so-called mainstream media—the people in the mainstream media today have a hard time distinguishing "good" blogs from "bad" blogs.
Bryan Tsao is the editor of The Hardball Times website. He welcomes comments, questions, and suggestions for both himself and the site via email.