Bloggers can be such gutless wonders
While everyone on the web seems to have been captivated by BalloonBoy and the story’s love affair with cable news there has been another potential story waiting in the wings that could send BalloonBoy and family back to the minor leagues while they wait to be charged.
You see back on October 16 a woman and her young son were in line at an airport waiting to go through security when the TSA decided to separate the two of them – even though they are not suppose to. Now as usual in this era of The Web the woman was a blogger and everything that transpired that day was recounted every tearful word by every heart-wrenching word in a post on her blog.
Of course in the uproar that followed everyone came rushing to her side and cursing that big ol’ mean TSA in such a way that memories of the Motrin Affair all came flooding back. In addition of course this it the Twitter Age so the whole thing began to play out there as well. The only thing that was missing was the CNN truck in the front yard but apparently there is a writing deal in the works.
Sufficiently worked up?
Well, take a big chill pill folks because there is a very good chance that this is all bullshit. In other words it never happened. In fact in an unprecedented move the TSA got out in front of this right away by releasing a video disproving the woman’s story. The TSA Blog followed that up by posting the nine additional videos of what happened but from different camera angles. Nine videos … damn folks talk about making sure that the truth is out there if you can get up off your ass long enough to actually watch them.
Now just as interesting as this story may have been on the surface it really is just another case of blogger sexism and we’re better than old media so we don’t have to play by the same rules game that I talked about last week at various places, including here. In this case we have a woman blogger who writes what could have been an incredibly incendiary post about something that the already hated TSA had done. It was guaranteed to get people inflamed and rushing to their keyboards to publish their god-given right opinion on the matter.
Which it did for a short while sending her blog pageviews from a reported normal of 200 per day to over 40,000 but then people started to question her version of the truth – especially in light of the TSA videos.
Now this is where we begin to see the wagons begin to circle in the blogging world as people who were calling the whole story into question began to be attacked by other bloggers. From outright stupidity of suggesting the TSA had doctored the videos through to bloggers suggesting the woman might have other problems and that we should take it easy on her.
The woman lied folks.
Yet bloggers are suggesting that she be given a pass on the whole thing. While some of the comments and posts about this whole story have condemned the woman even more of them are suggesting that we are getting all worked up over nothing and that we should just let it all blow over.
Excuse me but No. Bloggers are having a hard enough time trying to get and keep any kind of respect for what we do without someone lying about what could have been an extremely disastrous action by a Federal agency. As Paul O’Flaherty noted in a post
We are, for the most part, a pack of attention seeking wannabes. We have proven ourselves time and again to be willing to post information that is unresearched and uncorroborated. We’ve proven that we are willing to be shills for as little as $5. We’ve proven that we act as mob with knee jerk reactions. As of today we’ve also proven, not for the first or sadly the last time, that we are willing to lie just to get a bit of attention.
We can’t be trusted! Until we prove that we can be then we have no business claiming we should be taken seriously and treated the same.
If it had been a man who had pulled this stunt we’d all be handing him his balls on a platter by now. However it was a woman so this makes it different but really the only difference between the hoax this woman tried to pull over on us all and the one that will see BalloonBoy’s family in court is that CNN isn’t here – yet.
