Blog Citations or Tim Craig Drops The Ethics Hammer On Ben Tribbett

Oh, boy, is there a throwdown happening at Ben Tribbett’s blog Not Larry Sabato! Ben Tribbett started it by having the balls to attempt to call out Washington Post’s Tim Craig for supposedly failing to cite a blog source:

Lowell had a great scoop earlier that Mark Warner’s primary challenger has a criminal record. I’m not even mentioning the guy by name- I don’t think he will make the ballot, and isn’t even worth a mention.

Anyway, right away Tim Craigs teals Lowell’s scoop and runs an item on the new WaPo blog.

Did Tim Craig not attend journalism school? Does he not have a ETHICAL RESPONSIBILITY to site the published sources???? What a bunch of crap.

First, Ben Tribbett makes the huge assumption that Tim Craig found this via Raising Kaine. Someone signing their name as Tim Craig responded in the comments:

I did not get it from Raising Kaine. I got a clip of the Roanoke Times article emailed to me this afternoon from a Democratic source. I then had our Washington Post researchers independently verify the article through a search of court records After that, I called the gentleman in question to speak to him. I did scan Raising Kaine at one point this afternoon and never saw a headline about this matter.

As for you assertion, it is laughable for you to lecture me or any member of the Richmond press corps on journalistic ethics.

Oh SNAP!  Ben Tribbett then continues to whine that Tim Craig has never cited a Virginia blog on his blog posts.  Which leads to Ben’s second assumption and one that happens throughout the blogosphere.

While it is considered the polite and proper thing to do, bloggers are under no real obligation to cite their sources for their posts.  None at all.  And while this gray area might get a bit blurry when media outlets enter the blogosphere, they aren’t under any greater obligation than anyone else.  Especially if they end up doing the grunt work of verifying the tip, whether that tip came from a concerned reader, a blogger, or the man in the moon.

If someone finds something on my site and shares through theirs, do they owe me credit or a finder’s fee?  I guess if I had a ego that needed a bit of a stroke I could get upset about it, but with the way blogs work and the viral method of the spreading of information, it’s really hard to hold people on citations.  If I find something interesting on another blog that they found on another site that they found on yet another site, where do I give the credit?  To the place I found it?  To the real source?  And what’s to say I didn’t find it through some other means?

This is especially hard to hold people to when it comes to political blogging and the mainstream media.  The mainstream media may find something out the same time as or even before a blog, but because of their own guidelines and ethics, they have to do a bit of research to verify information.  Blogs by and large fail to do that, so if they get what looks to be an amazing scoop it’s up right away, truth and fact-checking be damned.  Hell, the majority of the time blogs fail to correct their own errors (something Ben Tribbett has NEVER done).

So folks need to hold up a bit before tossing ethical hand grenades (especially Ben Tribbett).  If you feel that a citation was missed or a blog has provided an insight that someone has missed, there are usually comment sections where you can add your own words.  Of you have your own blog where you can write and link around and do whatever corrections to the record you feel you need to do.

But if you’re going to go out on a limb and try and call someone out on ethical blogging you may want to first make sure you have some ground to stand on, whether that’s by checking your facts before making the accusation or just making sure you have any room to speak on ethics in blogging.