In response to my Nation pieces and a request from Markos Moulitsas, today Time issued a correction to its article about Netroots Nation:
The original version of this story said that Hillary Clinton’s appearance at a 2007 Netroots Q&A session was greeted by boos. The writer confused that event with accounts of another Clinton appearance that had taken place earlier. Clinton was not booed at the Netroots event.
The corrected article removes the entire passage about Clinton. Meanwhile, today’s Austin American-Statesman features an editor’s note informing readers that the paper "compromised" its standards by running a front-page news article slamming Netroots Nation as a virtual "faint-in" for "marauding liberals" to honor a House Speaker so liberal she could represent China. The paper also removed the article from its website, as Rachel Weiner reported. Editor & Publisher‘s Greg Mitchell, (who spoke on a panel with me at the conference), posted a blog diary about the "snarky" article on DailyKos. Today Moulitsas discussed the process:
After Mitchell’s diary unleashed … a torrent of letters to the editor directed at the newspaper, the story disappeared from the paper’s website, scrubbed clean of any traces of its existence. People emailing the author … received responses that they just didn’t get the hilarity of his humorous account.
The netroots activists’ pushback on these articles effectively combines fact-checking and advocacy. Bloggers can lobby for fair treatment, demand accurate coverage, and show readers whether the press is accountable.
