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Over at Slate, Mickey Kaus dings the LAT's Mark Z. Baraback over some political analysis, and predicts that Wonkette (and by extension the other Nick Denton-run gossip site, Gawker) could run into libel trouble someday over not caring enough whether those juicy items about people are true. The observation grows out of a Sunday New York Times piece on Wonkette's Ana Maria Cox in which she describes the blog as "a blend of gossip and satire and things I make up." In the piece, Denton also blithely dismisses the threat of libel suits and quips that for his blogs, "immediacy is more important than accuracy, and humor is more important than accuracy." Denton responds to Kaus that the NYT quote was "abbreviated" into inaccuracy by the paper, but Kaus is not wholly moved. (Interestingly, on the same day that Kaus tweaks Wonkette for putting snarky above honesty, he leaps to an insinuation that the NYT kowtowed to an advertiser simply because he couldn't locate a certain story on the paper's website. It was there, of course -- he just didn't know where to look.)
Is that Cox and Denton don't understand the concept of credibility or just don't care?
Posted by: Tim McGarry at April 21, 2004 10:14 AMTim -- It's more that they both have a functional sense of humor, and know precisely which journalistic-outrage buttons to push. Denton was a terrific correspondent for the Financial Times in Budapest, London and San Francisco, and once wrote a book about rogue trader Nick Leeson. Cox I'm less familiar with, but she has "credibility" in many circles as a valuable and witty web/magazine writer & editor.
Posted by: Matt Welch at April 21, 2004 12:50 PM
of LA Observed
I don't think I'm giving away any trade secrets when I say that Mickey tends to worry about certain things (like getting sued up the wazoo) more than most folks do.
Posted by: Matt Welch at April 20, 2004 11:22 PM