Hearsay and the lack of credibility in the Blogosphere

hearsay according to the world book encyclopedia:

common talk; gossip; rumor (not the legal term)

This post is going to sound anti Waldo, but not on purpose, even if all Waldo claims is true. These issues with Waldo will still stand… I will be dealing with the blogosphere’s issue with hearsay.

(I will not be giving links to any members of the blogosphere in this post, only posts that are pointing out good ethics will a link be given. I am sorry for the inconvenience, if you feel I should put the links anyways, please contact me at Editor.bloggingethics@gmail.com. I would be glad to discuss the issue, but at this point I think this will be my decision.)

In journalism you must site sources, and have information backing up what you say, if you don’t you end up like Dan Rather. In the blogosphere this is normally the case, except when it is a struggle between bloggers, once it is a blog war, the conventional wisdom of journalism is thrown out the window, anything you say “can and will” be traced back to you, but how do we know this information is correct? Well, it seems Waldo Jaquith wants us to just trust him, he recently made a post titled “you’re never anonymous on the internet” which is partly true, but at the same time can never be proven, unless you go about a rather difficult process. Waldo on June 15^th claimed that a political blogger of the name “Carl Kilo” posted a “anon” comment on his blog under the post “hanger defeats Sayre” the pseudonym used was “teddy’s turds” according to Waldo, and it seems verified by other bloggers that this was the original name on the site.

“Teddy’s turds” said

“Hanger will destroy Cox. That is what matters. You happy democRATS?
You can talk about the SWAC all you want, but the fact is they took a unknown and came very close to beating a incumbent. The big losers are RK and NLS….Their candidates struck out. Why dont you talk about that? LOL!”

Waldo felt it was necessary to expose whoever made this “anon/pseudonym” comment for who they really were.

“Carl, I’ve taken the liberty of changing the name that you entered (”Teddy’s Turds”) to your real name. How embarrassing for you to have mistyped your name so severely. But, hey, mistakes happen, so I’ve got you covered.”

1. If you allow “anon” comments, you allow them, and are misleading commenters who do not realize they run the risk of you “exposing” them. 2. The comment wasn’t bad at all, it presented readers with two probable facts, 1. Hanger probably will win. 2. RK and NLS did get some things wrong this time around. The part that stated “you happy democRATS” made me laugh, it showed the intelligence of a two year old to think of that…my point is there was no need for Waldo to change the name to Carl Kilo in the first place, EVEN if Carl did post it!

Waldo in his post goes on to say all these things Carl said in an e-mail, the e-mails relevance was brought into question, til Waldo explained that Carl has had something happen of this sort before, whether Kilo posted the comment of not, I do not know, nor do I care, but the e-mail is real, as Carl admits in a comment on Waldo's site.

Another thing I find rather interesting is that Carl posted about it, if he did make the comment, why would he deny it, and post denying it? The only reason would be a strong vendetta against Waldo, if this is the case Kilo should be rebuked, but till Waldo can prove it, Kilo is innocent, the facts remain, that we do know that Waldo changed the name from “Teddy’s Turds” to Carl Kilo, and now has it as “Carl Kilo’s computer.”

The main point of this article is about hearsay and bloggers keeping there word, no blogger has the right to change a commenters name, no matter how sure they are that “this or that” person made it, if you don’t want anonymous commenters, you have the option of turning them off. To, this point this post has been very anti Waldo, but this is my main point about Kilo, WHO CARES! Other commenters, Although childishly, DO put your information in and make a comment “for you.” It really isn’t something easy to stop, but should be monitored by the owners of each blog.

Both Kilo and Waldo posted on June 15^th Kilo posted at 8:05 pm, I cannot find out when Waldo posted. So, who posted first will remain a mystery...

If I were to rank blogs, starting them all at a 5, having them either lose points for unethical behaviour or having them gain points by earning them, waldo would drop to a 4 for his use of hearsay/gossip, and changing an anon comment name. Kilo would drop to a 4.5 for making this into a big deal.

Things like this only hurt our Blogosphere, bloggers need to show the same professionalism when dealing with other bloggers as they do when breaking information about a candidate, they need facts and sources, witnesses and proof, if we lose that, we lose everything.