Blogs and credibility

The issue of making corrections hasn't always been a big issue in the blogosphere, but I think it's likely that, as time goes on, if blogs want to become a major legitimate force in public discourse, it's going to become a much more important. Ryan at the Dead Parrot Society has a post today on this issue, looking at the recent story about the White House website and their robots.txt file.

One of the things he points out is that even after the story was published in 2600 Magazine that they had spoken to someone in the White House who had offered an explaination as to why the change was made, many of the sites that had posted about the original story hadn't made note of the correction. In particular, the DNC blog, Kicking Ass, which has been largely responsible for how widely the story was spread, had no indication of the additional information.

Personally, I'm not sure I would categorize the 2600 information as a "correction", since that would indicate that it conclusively shows that the other theory - that they were trying to block the potential caching of pages that they might need to "update" in the future - is wrong - but it certainly its a plausible and reasonably legitimate explanation for the White Houses actions and at the very least offers a viable alternate theory of what happened. As such, even if a full-blown "correction" might not be warranted, I do agree that the information should be brought to the attention of people looking into the story.

That's why when I found out about the 2600 story, I decided to not only post an update to the blog itself, but also added a "Note" to an earlier post I'd written about the White House having edited certain web pages back in August to change headlines and other statements saying that Bush had declared "combat operations" as having ended to showing that he'd declared "major combat operations" had ended. That post had been linked to by the DNC's original story on the robots.txt file, and since I knew it was still getting a lot of traffic, I wanted to make sure that people coming to the site knew there was more information on the story.

Now, I'm not perfect at getting corrections posted (or at anything else for that matter), but if I know I've made a major screw up, I do try to get some kind of an update posted. What worries me, though, is that there are many blogs on both sides that don't ever seem to make note of any new information that might contradict something they've said before, or acknowledge if they're wrong.

The thing is, the only way blogs will have any credibility and be able to live up to their promise as a tool to help with promoting issues and agendas or helping lesser known - but important - stories break into the mainstream, is if authors and editors make a genuine, good faith effort to present valid information and to let their readers know if they've gotten something wrong. Readers need to be able to put reasonable trust in blogs. I'm doubt we'll ever have the credibility of the mainstream press - but we need to be more credible than the tabloids.