The title of this post doesn’t actually mean what most people would think it means (i.e., the continual criticism about fact checking, and how MSM does it but bloggers don’t). No.

I ran across this post by Michelle Malkin, in which she republishes an email from Nick Kristof:

michelle,

thanks belatedly for your note about hillary and abortions. i was in zimbabwe, skulking around and pretending to be a tourist, and didn’t have web access. but now i did have a chance to look at your web link, and i’m afraid i disagree.

you’re right that it was stassen’s work that originally pointed me to this issue and that the data cover only 16 states. but stassen has considerable credibility, since he is himself pro-life and trained in statistics, and others in the repro health field have found his work sensible. moreover, while the data are incomplete, the states represented include a range of different geographic areas and seem representative. and among those 16 states, the trend was very clear. Stassen calculates that there are 50,000 more abortions a year than if the previous trend had continued.

I repost it here not because I have any interest whatsoever in the content (which is to say, the message), but rather (as McCluhan might have said) the media that is in this case the message. This is an opinion columnist for the New York Times, who doesn’t seem to know the location of the shift key.

I don’t want to single out Mr. Kristof here, but this just happened to catalyze my thoughts on this subject, that I’ve noticed in the past. Is it an email thing? Or does he submit columns like this, and let his editor clean them up? I’ve noticed the same thing when conversing with actual book authors–the email is often all lower-case. At least in Mr. Kristof’s case, the email is otherwise well-written and grammatical, but I’ve often received emails from so-called journalists for which this wasn’t even the case.

I would never send out an email like the one posted here–I’d be embarrassed for anyone to see my writing in such a form–and if I had no other knowledge of Mr. Kristof’s work, I wouldn’t be very impressed with him as a writer, or even thinker. Maybe this is an irrational prejudice on my part, but it seems to me that if you want to communicate as well as possible, you want people to focus on the message, and not be distracted by a poor presentation of it.

My point is that I suspect that many “professional” writers (which is to say that people, like reporters, who actually get paid to write, however amateurishly they may actually practice their craft, such as it is) also have professional editors, who serve as a backstop for them against grammatical and spelling errors. I can’t help but believe that this tends to make many of them sloppy.

I don’t have that luxury. Whatever I post is seen by no eyes except mine until it’s printed on line, for everyone who chooses to, to see. I know there are some blogs that disdain the use of the shift key, and perhaps if you can get past that, the writing is very good and interesting, but I have trouble getting past it. I figure that few people are going to be turned off by proper capitalization, and surely I’m not unique in that I’m turned off by a lack of it, so why not do it right, in both email and blog posts?

But I think that it points up just one more area in which (amateur) bloggers can (because they have to be) better writers than MSM journalists. It’s not just that we know more about specific subjects, but we also present it better, because we are our own editors, and we know that if we don’t get it right, in both fact and presentation, our hits will drop, or never appear at all. Contrast that to a writer in a one-newpaper town, like Los Angeles, to whom neither facts or grammar are important, because there are editors for that, and their stuff will get published and read regardless, at least until the owners of the newspaper finally decide to stop subsidizing incompetence and ideology.