It must be true. I read it on the Internet.

Last week I made a point about how marketers use fallacious logic to sell all sorts of products and services. How ironic that I, a marketer, got my facts wrong the illustration I used to lead up to that point. The t-shirt is actually correct. In short, I had my conversion principles reversed -- Thanks to the readers who pointed this out. I should have looked it up before I posted. I did learn binary conversion at one time, but as I haven't needed to use it in about fifteen years, I would have been better served to verify my memory.

So rather than take the embarrassing post down, I thought I'd use the incident as a "teaching opportunity." Or, in my case, a "learning opportunity."

The mainstream media have, in the past, disparaged the blogosphere because, according to them, there are no rules of accountability. Anybody with a computer can say anything they want. There are no fact checkers. No editors. Just unqualified, pretentious blowhards with too much time on their hands.

To those who still believe that, I present to you: Factchecker "MasterQ" and factchecker "cppig1995." Don't worry about the fact that we don't know their real names. We don't know the real names of the fact checkers at the New York Times, either. All we know in this case is that MasterQ and cppig1995 were right, and I was wrong.

Now, obviously at this point I had a choice. I could have taken the post down. I could have revised it. I chose not to in this case.

I know there are some "mainstream" news outlets out there that just revise existing articles (and headlines) rather than post a correction to something that's already up. I've seen horribly biased headlines, made note of them, copied and pasted the headlines and links in a discussion forum to demonstrate the proof of the bias, only to go back a day later and see that they have changed. No explanation. No acknowledgment that the headlines were ever anything else.

But do I hold that against them? I make corrections and changes to headlines many times after I make the post live. I don't mention it when the change is otherwise immaterial. I suppose it depends on your perspective. If you're of the mind that the mainstream news media are biased, then changes to wording that would prove this bias seems like an attempt to cover it up. To those who work hard to eliminate bias from their stories, this is called "editing."

So what is accountability to you? How do you handle it when you make an error? Is the medium enhanced or degraded as a result of the way we handle mistakes?

- Cam Beck

P.S. Joseph Farah of WorldNetDaily recently posted an excerpt from his book Stop the Presses! on his website, where he wrote about how the mainstream media looked down at Matt Drudge and the blogosphere for a long time (not sure they're over that one...yet) for this supposed lack of accountability and accuracy. Drudge has a great answer for that. Check out the article when you get a chance.