Declan is, rightly, incensed at the Council of Europe proposal that all online media be required to implement a "Right to Reply" so that people criticized by an article or posting are able to dispute that information.
The proposal is, as he states, unenforceable and ill-considered. I can hear the crys of "Get on the Clue Train" echoing across the electronic media.
Yet I like the idea behind it - that media outlets are capable of posting erroneous information which injures parties without providing them an ability to respond. I've often read the "corrections" section of a newspaper, buried on p 59, and thought - well damn if that little mistake don't make a great deal of difference - yet there is no respected norm, it seems, that a big mistake should be given similar promotion as the first image. SO the original story stands - quite possible uncorrected in archives and caches - wrong and unjustifiable.
A good example is the situation in which the pictures of the toppling of Saddam's statue where part of a a large protest - when in fact it was 100 or so Iraqi's encircled by American troops looking on with guns and tanks - as shown by this wider angle photograph.
Yet it was through blogs that I came to realized this - not through the media outlets that reported them in the first place. Blogs have developed a mechanism for linking the debates their stories create to the original story - so that one can see where the debate has gone - all without the original poster having to take any steps.
That mechanism is called "TrackBack" - if I post a story which references another (perhaps it is my right of reply to some slander) then I "ping" the original blog and it adds the link to my story so that readers of the original can follow the conversational thread. Trackback makes the links two-way along with Permalinks. If someone (hello out there) references this post then you'll be able to follow it through the trackback links below.
Unfortunately (and through no fault of Declan's) Cnet doesn't provide this capacity - so the link above is one way and unknown from the original story.
The Council of Europe should take a leaf out of the IETF's handbook and create a recommendation that all online media outlets implement Trackback - a strong voluntary recommendation that would support the development of a new ethic which strongly promotes the very admirable goal of the "Right to Reply" without to onerousness chilling effects of manual implementation. This is the "letter to the editor" for P2P journalism.
If the Council of Europe implemented this on their own servers they'd already know about my commentary ;)
Posted by james at July 2, 2003 05:17 AM | TrackBack