NPR ombudsman slams blogs over ethics

National Public Radio ombudsman Jeffrey Dvorkin ranted against the blogosphere this week, dubbing it "an amoral place with few rules." Dvorkin was reacting to several blogs' publishing a Pentagon report that had been released in PDF format, then published on NPR.org.

The Pentagon had redacted information within the report it considered sensitive, but as many techies know, information redacted within a PDF often can be revealed, using relatively simple tricks. NPR's reporters missed the screw-up, but the bloggers did not. (NPR removed the document from its site once the flaw was exposed.)

Dvorkin piles on by bringing up Carnegie Corporation survey that reported younger people are turning more to the Internet than to offline media for news, and then by blasting blogs for conflating reporting with opinion.

Reporting the Pentagon gaffe had nothing to do with opinion. It provided another example of how aggressive readers can use the Web to report stories that reporters with offline news organizations sometimes miss. Perhaps that, and not a desire for humor or "ironic detachment," is why so many readers are finding a blogs a valuable part of their news reading.