Truth and Lies in Blogging

Two powerhouse (by which I mean always interesting and always eloquent) bloggers, Veronica Mitchell of Toddled Dredge and Bub and Pie, recently addressed the role and relativity of truth in blogging. Read on for both posts, and weigh in, let us know what truth means to you...how you read truth in other blogs, and the level of believability, the extension of trust (or gullibility) as you perceive it.

Veronica Mitchell of Toddled Dredge wrote 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.


Bub and Pie picked up the baton and ran with it in her Lies, Damned Lies, and Blog Posts:

What is the nature of truth in blogging?

(Veronica Mitchell threw down the gauntlet in her recent post on Truth and Blogging: Here’s my response, which outran comment length by a mile.)

For starters, truth in blogging has very little to do with factual accuracy. If I publish a post a few days after I write it, I may or may not bother to search out all uses of the word “today” and replace them with “two days ago.” Reported conversations are rarely complete, and the omissions may or may not be signaled with ellipses. Anecdotes are replete with alterations made for the sake of brevity: two separate events may be telescoped into one; three or more bit players may be merged into a single person. Personally, I avoid these kinds of inaccuracies whenever I can (I’m a bit nitpicky that way), but when I have to choose between deceiving my readers and boring them, I’ll usually opt for the former.

Bloggers also take on no obligation to be impartial. My representation of Dr. WRE last week was anything but impartial (and I rather depended upon Mr. B&P to show up and point that out). Perhaps an impartial way of characterizing the psychiatrist’s behaviour would be to say, “He wasn’t trying to humiliate me, but he couldn’t have done a better job if he had tried.” (Or maybe not – I’m still not quite impartial about that yet.) The anger in that post was real – the post was truthful in that respect – but as a representation of someone else, it was anything but objective.

The central subject of a personal blog is, by definition, the blogger herself. My theories and anecdotes are not scrupulously fact-checked; when I express an opinion I do not assume that I have an obligation to give equal weight to all sides. I am by nature an exaggerator; to curb that tendency here would, perhaps, elevate the truthfulness of my blog in general, but it would make it a less faithful representation of me.

The person I write about in this blog - Ms. B&P, Professor Bubandpie - is a construct. She leapt into being when I clicked "Create Blog" one spring day last year, and she has grown through a kind of awkward adolescence into what strikes me occasionally as a brash and over-confident adulthood. She is not me. And yet, my satisfaction in blogging arises almost entirely from my sense that she is me, a truer, realer me than the one who is so fettered by the conventions of real life. When I see my blog mentioned in a post, the little shock of recognition that goes over me is closely akin to the reflex that whips my head around when I hear my name called out on the street.

Truthfulness in blogging does not require objectivity, fact-checking, or even a willingness to lay bare the dark secrets of the soul. It is, I think, more social than that: it has to do with the claims we make on our readers. Even the most innocuous sort of fact-bending – the use of “today” for events that occurred yesterday – can be false if it elicits an outpouring of support for a crisis that no longer exists. Outright fabrications violate the spirit of blogging – but never more so than when they are employed to manipulate readers’ emotions, to elicit sympathy to which one is not entitled.

Our culture places enormous pressure on mothers to represent ourselves falsely – to smile stiffly when round-the-clock nursing has filled us with sleep-deprivation and rage, to mouth platitudes like “It’s all worth it” rather than speaking honestly about our fears, our obsessiveness, our chronic indecision and self-doubt. The blogosphere is not so much a place where we are required to speak these truths as an open invitation to do so. This kind of truth-telling isn’t an obligation – it’s an opportunity and sometimes even an addiction.

***********************************************************************************

What do you think?