A quick word on Ben Tate, or...

Bet you wouldn’t do it in person……..

I don’t want to fight about it.

for anyone who reported or RT’d Pancakes’ thoughts.

Really?

And I don’t see anybody here posting blatantly stupid tweets and trying to pass off medical diagnosis from afar as the truth, do you? I don’t see anybody here trying to imitate the Comicle in any way.

With Twitter, blogs, Internet, and 24/7 News Channels, the reporters want to be the one to break news first. There’s a lot of pressure to get it out there.

In this instance, McClain’s initial tweet said “I think” it was a broken ankle. People ran with it and it spread. Tate corrected everyone that it wasn’t broken. People spread it then McClain still claimed it was broken. At first, the fault were those who failed to read the initial tweet, but the blame now is McClain ignoring Tate’s own words.

I don’t think it lessens any type of media to hold the standard of “reporting the facts.” That’s what should be expected: facts.

You mean where he was actually right? Unless of course Kubiak was misquoted as saying Tate has a fractured ankle and will go on IR… Or maybe Kubiak is guitly of speculative slander too.

Maybe “Pancakes” had spoken to team trainers/coaches and was told “that definitely looks like a broken ankle”. He still fugged up by writing it as fact and for not naming even an anonymous source, but that could just as easilly be an example of bad writing as it is an issue of journalistic integrity. Obviously at the time of his writing he knew there were no xrays or doctors to verify the claim, so I don’t know you can say for certainty that he wasn’t aware that it was unverified information and is guilty mostly of poor wording. So really if you want to be a hardazz, you could say that by “speculating” that he had no credible information or source and was just winging it that BFD was actually guilty of the same thing he was accusing “pancakes” of…. And actually when I look back, in the original quote he even stated “it *looks” like a broken ankle", which is an admission of a speculative claim… so probably what he was most guilty of is poor writing and not disclosing the source of his conclusion that it was a broken ankle, which he didn’t have to do but would have made sense in this case.

What is a blog besides opinion? You can have accurate information in your posts, I never said accuracy wasn’t allowed on blogs, but your viewership stems for the sharing of “opinions” of that information. If not your own opinions, then the opinions of t he subscribers responding to the post. Opinion is the lifeblood of a blog, and many times opinion can’t be substantiated so making comments that speculation is not wanted on this blog to me threatens the vitality of the blog itself. I’m not saying you have to post only wild speculative pieces, just that they have a place in the blog universe and by discounting that speculation on one post invalidates all the others that have helped bring interest to the blog in the first place.

And for the link to the full story:

http://www.miamiherald.com/2010/08/08/v-fullstory/1766393/being-real-just-isnt-worth-the.html

I especially like the Roosevelt quote “`It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly; who errs and comes up short again and again; because there is not effort without error and shortcomings; but who does actually strive to do the deed; who knows the great enthusiasm, the great devotion, who spends himself in a worthy cause, who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement and who at the worst, if he fails, at least he fails while daring greatly. So that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who know neither victory nor defeat.”

In this case BFD has decided to be the prosecutor of McClain and pledges “journalistic integrity” from himself at the same time he’s making blind assumptions on McClain’s motives and lack of inside sources. People here don’t mind because he’s only echoing their own opinions, and I wouldn’t care either except that it’s a wee hypocritical to blast someone for not having all the facts and at the same time make assumptions without having all the facts himself. That’s not perception or opinion, that IS the cold hard truth of the matter. If you really want to take yourself seriously as a reporter of fact, you have to keep to the facts without adding in your own assumptions, even if doing so would provide your readers with what they want to hear.

I would like nothing better than just “agree to disagree”, however I don’t believe it’s right to ever overlook hypocrisy no matter how small. I know i’m not the poster child for journalistic integrity, or integrity in general for that matter, but I don’t claim it at the same time as I throw someone under the bus for not.