Monday, May 29, 2006

The Deborah Howell affair: can bloggers improve a lazy (or corrupt) journalist?

DeLong makes it clear that the Washington Post's ombudsman, Deborah Howell, was either corrupt or lazy when she parotted the GOP party line.

She was pilloried by blog, and got some nastymail. She ranted about the nasty mail -- I suspect she's distorting how nasty it was but that's not the interesting topic.

The interesting question is whether this kind of feedback loop has any hope of improving someone who's a fairly weak journalist. If it does, that's something new in journalism.

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