Just A Random Observation

*Obligatory Warning*: I had no dog in the Terri Schiavo fight. I did not pen one post about it. I stayed the heck out of it. Wasn't going to touch it with a ten foot pole. I made one comment on someone else's blog about an obscure part of the case and I got my head bit off for the effort expended. After that, I kept quiet and watched. Because we all know I'm something of a voyeur when it comes to Internet catfights. So, I make this observation not to get a "nanny-nanny-boo-boo, you suck!" shot across the bow, but rather to simply make the observation. Let me repeat that: Kath did not have a dog in this fight. Got it? Good.

Now for the observation.

Ahem.

Terri's autopsy report came out today. Terri's battle really brought out some of the worst behavior I've ever seen in the blogosphere. If Rathergate was the high point, this was most definitely the low. Perhaps it was simply meant to be that way, to show us the glaring failures of this new medium we're so very fond of proclaiming is the new information revolution. I don't know. I don't read entrails for a living, so I couldn't tell you for certain: this is just my gut feeling. Anyway, a lot of people made hay on this issue. Serious amounts of hay. Enough to feed all the livestock for a very long winter. But, and here's where the observation comes in, very few seem to be chiming in now that the autopsy report is in. Perhaps this is because the actual science of the report goes against what they were proclaiming to be the truth to her condition back when she was alive.

I know whom I'm looking for to chime in on this one, and they haven't. They've been silent all day long about it. I'm not going to name them, because they're very middle of the road bloggers. Not freepers. Not moonbats. They don't deserve the ignominy of being called out for this one. I felt that perhaps they were a wee bit overwrought about the entire deal. Say whatever you will about the entire situation, but you cannot deny that Terri brought out people's passion. And it brought it out in both beautiful and incredibly ugly ways. It was personal for these bloggers and that passion, perhaps, sometimes, I thought, got the better of their usually calm, reasoned rhetoric.

A friend of mine likes to remind me that this is a very new medium and that we'll never really replace the mainstream media, or even really make all that big of a dent in it, because bloggers, as a whole, aren't really held accountable. A reporter is held accountable to an editor, who is held accountable to the publisher, who is held accountable by the paying public. We're just spouting off here and are accountable, in only a very limited sense, to our readers and our blogging compadres. But since we can delete our blogs with the click of the mouse, and we'll never really face any real-life consequences if we've spouted off about this, that or the other, unless we're blogging at work and have been fired for it. That's about it. In other words, we really don't have an obligation to say "we were wrong" if we should be proven to be wrong. Audiences, as anyone who's been doing this for a while can tell you, come and go. You may be someone's favorite one week, and they might lose interest the next. Publish something your reader disagrees with and the beauty of the blogosphere dictates that there's probably someone out there who's said exactly what they want to hear, and has done it even better than the blogger they just abandoned. That's fine. As far as I'm concerned, readers are allowed to do that. What I do wonder about is this, though: there are plenty of blogs, this being one of them, who proclaimed the information revolution was well on its way when Dan Rather resigned because of the ball that started rolling in the blogosphere. Some of these very same blogs made some specious claims about Terri Schiavo. And today they've been proven wrong. Will they feel the obligation to say they were wrong?

And if they don't, what happens to the information revolution?

Posted by Kathy at June 16, 2005 12:19 AM