http://epeus.blogspot.com/2007/09/journalists-slumming-online.html

Do you really think Rosen was trying to write a hit-piece – something designed to undermine Sotomayor’s candidacy? I think he was just pulling together a bunch of raw sources with the understanding that the readers can tell the difference between people who work directly with her and those that don’t. The tone of the article wasn’t overly critical – I think the fact that certain statements have been seized upon by Sotomayor’s critics have suddenly thrust Rosen into the “wrong” camp – and I’m sure he’s horrified at supplying Rush and O’Reilly with talking points.

From my perspective, the most interesting thing about this so-called controversy is the ferocity of the criticism of Rosen and his discomfort at being seen as someone trying to stand in the way of a president he is such a great admirer of.

Treating the web site differently from the print in terms of journalistic integrity just weakens your brand, which can be a dangerous trend if more individuals read your product online than in print.

But the distinction between “blogging” and “writing for a print publication” isn’t at issue here. Any reader of Rosen’s piece on the web might have assumed — as I did when I first read it — that it was republished from the print edition. Rosen wasn’t blogging, and the flaws in his piece had nothing to do with haste and everything to do with established journalistic practices. And if his piece *had* been a blog post, the issue would still stand: The problems were with the writer’s content and practice, not with his choice of form.

No one, least of all me, would suggest there are no differences between the culture of blogging and the culture of print. The pattern that’s worth noticing here is the self-contradictory stance toward anonymity on the part of the DC culture that the New Republic is a part of: We have a critique of the Web that casts “anonymity” (and “thuggish anonymity”) as one of its culturally corrosive characteristics; and we also have a culture of Beltway journalism that positions itself as more trustworthy than the blogging masses yet defends the use of anonymous sources to orchestrate character-assassination campaigns.

Rosen is trying to defend a piece of shoddy journalism — whether online or in print makes no difference — by saying “Gee, I was really only blogging, but I won’t do it again.” He’s an authority in his field (with a big piece in NYT mag today) and knew perfectly well that his 1000-word piece would play a significant part in the Supreme Court nomination discussion. Now he’s changing the subject from his own missteps to some putative generic failing of the medium. It’s a bit of divert-the-eyes sleight-of-hand — akin to the defenders of those newspapers that got taken in by the recent Wikipedia hoax who believe the incident primarily demonstrated flaws in Wikipedia’s process rather than problems with the newspapers’.

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Clearly, you went through this post with a fine-toothed comb before hitting the “send” button.

Of course blogging entails different norms and standards than does writing for a print publication. That doesn’t absolve writers of responsibility for what they write, but to gloss over the way the “say everything” culture of blogging shapes what’s published seems disingenuous.