Truth and Blogging

Penelope Trunk claims that it doesn’t matter if journalists misquote everyone.

The reason that everyone thinks journalists misquote them is that the person who is writing is the one who gets to tell the story. No two people tell the same story… Journalists who think they are telling “the truth” don’t understand the truth. We each have our own truth.

Now this is not a new idea, but I have not seen it asserted so baldly with regard to journalism. If it were true, it would dramatically change the nature (or at least the ideals) of reporting.

I suspect, though, that it is less a carefully reasoned viewpoint than a hastily constructed defense of Trunk’s own character flaws. She need not take care to be honest in how she represents other people, because she cannot be dishonest – everything she says is her own “truth.”

I thought about this recently when I read one of Leslie Bennetts’ posts at The Huffington Post. Bennetts wrote a book published this year called The Feminine Mistake: Are We Giving Up Too Much? You can read a review of her book at the New Yorker. I am not primarily concerned with her book here, but in her post about her book’s reception.

Bennetts, who thinks no women should stay home with their children, claimed that stay-at-home mommybloggers panned her book without reading it. She does not link to any such bloggers, but she provides several unattributed quotes as evidence that SAHMs were refusing to read her book without giving it a chance.

Google is a wonderful thing. A couple of searches on the quotes she provided were enough to find the cruel mommyblogger who was panning her book without reading it.

Only it turns out she wasn’t. The quotes come from KJ’s blog Raising Devils, where she writes about receiving an email about the book’s (then) future release, and how, despite her suspicions that some of it would be frustrating to her, she planned to read it anyway.

You can compare the Raising Devils post to Leslie Bennetts’ use of it. What do you think? Did Bennetts honestly represent what KJ was saying?

When Antique Mommy and I met for our baby-interrupted lunch, we talked about some of you. In between cries, we talked about bloggers we read and why, and bloggers we don’t read and why not.

Although AM and I are Christians (or maybe because of it), we each have a favorite atheist blogger. We both agreed that the ability to read the personal thoughts and experiences of someone with such different beliefs from our own feels like a great privilege. Blogging gives us a chance to know people on a level that we might not be allowed in person. The walls don’t go up so quickly. Small talk does not first weed out to whom we will reveal our true selves. The strange, instant intimacy of blogging gives us the opportunity to understand how other people see themselves and the world in a way that casual conversation does not.

But this only works if bloggers are honest about themselves (or as honest as sensible privacy concerns allow), and the community blogging has the potential to create only happens if we are honest about each other. We have not really understood someone until we can describe their thoughts or beliefs or actions in a way they recognize as themselves.

I usually shy away from this here. I try not to tell other people’s stories. But when I sum up someone else’s blog – or any other part of the person – I try to do it fairly, not least because I hope they will do the same for me.