Yesterday, Breitbart.com editor at large Larry O’Connor picked up on a news piece about Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman:
Breitbart.com ridiculed Paul Krugman for filing for Chapter 13 bankruptcy protection in a since-deleted post whose claims originated with a satire website. Just last month, Breitbart.com castigated a news outlet for running with a story from that same website.
In the March 11 post, Breitbart.com editor at large Larry O’Connor mocked the Nobel Prize winning economist and New York Times columnist for his alleged financial mismanagement. Unfortunately for O’Connor, the report that Krugman went bankrupt is clearly a joke and originated from the satirical website The Daily Currant. O’Connor has since deleted the post without explanation. (Update: O’Connor tweeted, saying he “trusted Boston.com as the source for that Krugman piece, but they were duped by Daily Currant, therefore, so was I!”)
Most of the reaction has predictably zeroed in with glee on Breitbart’s error. Media Matters’ headline for the above article was “Breitbart.com Runs With Satirical Story About Krugman Filing For Bankruptcy.” Slate.com ran a similar piece titled “No Breitbart, Paul Krugman Hasn’t Filed For Bankruptcy.”
Granted, the original satirical article on The Daily Currant is pretty funny. (Krugman thought so too.) Sample segment:
The filing says that Krugman got into credit card trouble in 2004 after racking up $84,000 in a single month on his American Express black card in pursuit of rare Portuguese wines and 19th century English cloth[.]
But to me, it was far more disturbing that a Boston Globe site got the story wrong than that Breitbart’s faux-journalistic outfit did. (Hell, it was just a couple weeks ago that Breitbart got busted for creating the lobbying group “Friends of Hamas” out of thin air.) Media Matters has since run an in-depth analysis of how an Austrian blogger’s mistakenly serious reading of The Daily Currant piece snaked its way onto the Boston.com site, and it’s a bit disturbing:
The bogus story that New York Times columnist Paul Krugman had filed for bankruptcy appeared on Boston.com, the sister website of The Boston Globe, through a third-party content provider that posts content without editorial approval and provides such content to more than 200 web outlets.
That provider, meanwhile, took the story from an Austrian-based blog without any editorial review or fact-checking of its own, a practice that is becoming more and more common in the Internet content sharing world. The blog has since deleted its post and all posts from the author appear to have been removed from Boston.com.
Over at The Washington Post, Erik Wemple got in touch with Globe editor Brian McGrory:
Brian McGrory, the Globe’s editor, explains that no editorial official at his paper ever made a decision to post the piece. “The story arrived deep within our site from a third party vendor who partners on some finance and market pages on our site,” says McGrory. It was never on the Boston.com homepage, says McGrory. “We never knew it was there till we heard about it from outside.” Since the posting went up, McGrory attests to having done “urgent work to get it the hell down,” something that appears to have happened, though not as quickly as McGrory would have liked. “The idea that we’d have a partner on our site is actually news to me,” says McGrory, who vows to “address our relationship with that vendor.”
Granted, McGrory is new on the job. But it’s pretty frightening that even the Globe‘s editor has no idea what appears on its site. Then again, based on the steadily declining quality of Boston.com over the past few years, I guess this shouldn’t be surprising. As Mathew Ingram succinctly put it:
if you need a primer in why editorial oversight of syndicated content is important, look no further: http://t.co/1IInROF137 /via @shoq
— Mathew Ingram (@mathewi) March 12, 2013
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