Here’s a tip for you kids who might be considering a career in journalism: Not everything you read on the Internet is true.
In fact, if you spend a lot of time reading liberal blogs — which too many kids who might be considering a career in journalism seem to be doing lately — you might be consuming large quantities of what veteran journalists call “complete dishonest bullshit.”
This point is worth emphasizing in light of a column by Patrick B. Pexton, ombudsman of the Washington Post, that carried this headline:
The Post fails a young blogger
Pexton’s column is a sympathetic account of the unfortunately brief tenure of a 20-something blogger for the WaPo, Elizabeth Flock.
Apparently, it sucks to be a WaPo blogger: The demand for output and traffic is insane. Flock’s blog “was supposed to attain 1 million to 2 million Web hits a month, Flock said, a huge number.” And she was averaging nearly six posts a day — some pretty heavy-duty aggregation, with a bit of actual reporting and fact-checking expected as well, the kind of remorseless grind that makes Nick Denton’s blog empire such a notorious hellhole.
So I was reading Pexton’s column and feeling a good deal of sympathy for Flock until I got to the seventh paragraph and read this:
She did a roundup on Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney allegedly using an old Ku Klux Klan slogan in his stump speech — a story that went viral online yet was untrue — and she didn’t call the Romney campaign for comment, nor did any editor make sure she did.
This is what veteran journalists call “HOLY FREAKING CRAP!”
Not exactly a minor typo to falsely accuse a candidate for President of the United States of recycling KKK slogans in his stump speech. Where on earth did Flock find this? From “political commenters,” according to her story, and when you clicked the link . . .
John Aravosis.
Yeah, him — the deranged poofter who makes Andrew Sullivan look sane by comparison. The item by Aravosis got picked up and repeated by MSNBC, which subsequently apologized. Twenty-seven hours elapsed between the time Avarosis posted that and the time Flock “aggregated” it at the WaPo. Flock did not bother to contact the Romney campaign herself, but instead cited the HuffPo, which said a Romney spokeswoman “declined to comment on the matter.”
Believe it or not, after the HOLY FREAKING CRAP incident, Flock was not immediately fired, but continued on until a week ago when, in an item about possible life on Mars, she committed plagiarism:
Flock says that in haste she read about 10 stories about Mars life, including some of the research papers, and forgot to credit and link to the originator of the story, Discovery News. It appears that she copied, pasted and slightly rewrote two paragraphs from the Discovery story. Plagiarism perhaps, but also a perpetual danger in aggregated stories.
After Discovery News raised objections, Flock resigned voluntarily.
Fare thee well, Ms. Flock. And in your next job, if you ever call John Avarosis a “deranged poofter,” please make sure to credit me.