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Saturday, November 08, 2008

FACTCHECK: Romney Adviser Fehrnstrom's Citizen Journalism Opinion Piece

Eric Fehrnstrom, senior communications adviser for Mitt Romney's presidential campaign writes an opinion piece in today's Boston Globe, Ups and downs of a digital-age campaign:
"The lesson for us media handlers: Beware the innocuous-looking person with the YouTube account silently taping everything. He could destroy your day. Far less threatening was the reporter who abided by the conventional rules of journalism and knew the meaning of 'off the record.'"
If you want something off the record, go someplace that isn't public. People with video cameras aren't breaking the rules of journalism.
Gatekeeping serves an important purpose in establishing the ethics of journalism. Sadly, it doesn't exist on the Web.
Yes it does. The web is just a platform for sharing stories. Some sites are edited, some are not. I guess you can make sweeping generalizations like that, which are not backed up by facts, in an opinion piece.
What can be done? Citizen-journalists and bloggers need to provide links to websites that contain factual data backing up their assertions.
Once again, you yourself are making a statement that has no factual data backing it up.

Probably because what you are saying can't be.

One of the foundations of blogging is the permalink which is used to link to facts.