Were Bloggers Right or Wrong? I Know One That Has Been...Me!

What this case has also shown is that both the traditional media and bloggers have a remarkable capacity to make fundamental errors in reporting information and then compounding those errors by drawing hasty and uninformed conclusions and then compounding those errors yet again by associating unrelated facts. As it relates to me personally, there were many false and unfair things said about me and my motivations and it is certainly unfortunate that my occasionally nonsensical, angry rants became a distraction from the fundamental issue here. I should take a moment to explain two things in that regard. There have been times when I have blogged in anger and posted things I very quickly came to regret, things I wished to take back. It has been my view, however, that I have to own my own words no matter how thoughtless and that no matter how despicable some of things I have written are that it would be far more despicable to attempt to hide that my trying to delete what I've written whether I actually meant it or not. On this last point, I often write things that are meant to be satirical, exaggerated, sarcastic or just plain silly. I have an entire web site - perhaps the worlds stupidest web site - devoted to obsessing about a particular television personality (the satire being that the only thing more obsessive about Keith Olbermann is Keith Olbermann himself). Not everything I write is meant to be taken seriously and sometimes, in different contexts, what was intended to be humor comes across as sinister. All I can say is judge me by actions not the dumbest things I've ever written on the web.

That my own checkered past of the occasionally stupid post, email or comment so artfully and misleadingly laid out by Teresa Nielsen Hayden could then be used to dupe unsuspecting, respected bloggers like Cory Doctorow would get in the way of what I believe to be laudable goals of the Media Bloggers Association is unfortunate. I am responsible for my own words and so all I can do is apologize for those whom I offended while not seeking to justify myself or dispute that their concerns are completely valid and promise to try and do better going forward. Sometimes I am a jerk, as people can now see. Usually, however, I am not and my heart is in the right place most of the time.