The firing that wasn’t

Brew 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.