Checking your sources:blogs and newspapers

On 9 July the Lib Dem Voice ran a piece by Stephen Tall. The heading was David Davis: a bounder and a braggart.

Stephen was commenting on a piece in the Guardian that quoted Davis as saying: "I’m sorry that Labour and the Liberal Democrats funked it, but we’re still having a good argument and getting the issue raised."

Now this appeared rather odd as Davis had spoken to Nick Clegg about resigning and Clegg had said the Liberal Democrats would not field a candidate against the then Conservative Shadow Home Secretary. Davis never expected the Lib Dems to contest the seat. So why was he now claiming the party had flunked it?

On 10 July Stephen ran a correction and apology. He reported that the Guardian was apologising for the quote. It had got it wrong and Davis had never said it.

Stephen is an excellent blogger. He quickly corrected the mistake once the journalist who wrote the original piece emailed him.

But this episode raises an interesting question. Newspapers are expected to always check their sources before running stories. Of course, they sometimes make mistakes. That is only human. But is there an ethical duty for bloggers to also check what they are reporting on?

Presumably, Stephen trusted the source because it came from a national newspaper. But this incident goes to the heart of what blogs are.

If you see them as personal riffs where bloggers respond to what interests them, whether it is politics, celebrity or their own lives then it is natural for someone to respond quickly and, at times, in anger.

It was clear from the first post that Stephen was annoyed by what David Davis was alleged to have said about the party that Stephen is a member of.

But if you see blogs are part of citizen journalism, as commentary on political news, does the blogger then have to abide by a code of conduct? Should Stephen have merely reported the quote and perhaps called David Davis to check? Are bloggers journalists, diarists or something else? Is this even an issue? Something was written in haste and then corrected when new information became available. How do ethics apply in all this?

I don't ask any of these questions as criticicms of Stephen. I merely use the example to illustrate the issues. And I don't claim to have the answers.

What I do think is that the more popular and influential blogs become, the more important these questions will be and the more necessary it will be to have answers.