Jay Rosen interviewed Jim Brady of the Washington Post- today to get some answers about his decision to shut down the comments at post.blog.
Jane responds: Blame the Barbarians
"Get it? No distinction between legitimate criticism over the Post's refusal to correct a blatant inaccuracy and the inflamed rhetoric employed by a few. We are all trolls....read on
Jane praised Brady initially in her post:
"I respect Jim Brady, he's made a series of smart decisions for the Washington Post online that have really given the paper an amazing internet presence, far ahead of the New York Times or anyone else. But the reason he gave for shutting off the comments to Deborah Howell's blog is just absurd..read on
Jim blames the hostility of the blogoshere, but not the reporting for closing down his the comments. If the debate didn't get "heated" do you think the Post would have responded? It's blame the readers again and Jay misses the point here and is being diverted away from the issue at hand which is Howell's reporting. I have to delete hundreds of comments off of my site constantly. I don't like it- I'm trying to work on a new story-I miss some-but that's the price I pay for having a popular blog. That's the internet. Brady diverts attention from the real problem when he says:
"The basic issue here is that she didn’t deliver the exact message her critics wanted her to."
She didn't deliver the truth, Jim! That's a lot different than what we want to hear. If Howell responded quickly and made a change to her initially "faulty" reporting this would have been averted, but she and the Post stuck their heads in the sand and attacked the messengers. It's a fairly typical Rovian tactic. We have to scream and yell to get anyone to start taking a look at problems, then are labeled as trolls.
Did the Washington Post label Power Line trolls for trying to coerce the Post into changing their story on the Terry Schiavo GOP Talking Points memo? Power Line made themselves look like fools because the memo was real, but I didn't hear an outcry from Howard Kurtz or The Washington Post establishment. I saw them try to work with Power Line, and I see Hinderaker on Reliable Sources constantly. Not in this case.
Atrios says: "The problem really is that no matter how many times we try to kill right wing horseshit (or as Media Matters delicately calls it, "conservative misinformation") it keeps coming back to haunt us. It infects the media bloodstream. We politely ask for corrections. They don't happen. We start screaming for corrections. They still don't happen. Eventually some half-assed weaselly blame-the-uncivil-critics statement is released. We scream louder. And, then, the horseshit pops up again on CNN....read on"
