The Columbia Journalism Review weighs in on the self-boinking of Boing Boing, in which the popular aggregation site creepily disappeared a large group of posts mentioning a once-favored San Francisco writer and got its little ethical pork pie hat caught in an internets threshing machine.

The CJR piece has a fab hed (“It’s All Over Now, Violet Blue”) but I think goes awry in several places. There are minor inaccuracies (the word “unpublished” became notorious from a post by Boing Boing’s moderator, not site co-editor Xeni Jardin) and a major omission (the story doesn’t mention the Jardin-Blue personal relationship).

And, after some of the dopier Boing Boing commenters used the inapplicable word “censorship,” the CJR writer went down that rabbit hole, with predictably crazy results. It’s a good example how sloppy thinking can waylay the debate on an important issue:

The Boing Boing editors, who had previously chastised major news organizations for retroactively changing their archives, were called hypocrites. They were accused of censorship.If anything, the Violet Blue/Boing Boing affair involves a sort of reverse censorship. Usually, censorship involves authority figures who pass judgment on what members of the public can choose to say. But here, Boing Boing’s readers (the public) wanted to censor what the site (the authority figures) could choose not to say.

Leaving aside the intellectual incoherence of most of that excerpt, let me just point out that the part I emphasized is an incorrect encapsulation of the issue: Most of the intelligent comments on the site were about the site’s lack of transparency and related issues involving ethics and hypocrisy.

Also, frustratingly, though the writer, Joe Uchill, had the opportunity to talk to Boing Boing editors David Pescovitz and Jardin, he didn’t ask them the tough questions about the site’s um, erratic forthrightness during the affair.

I don’t have anything against Jardin, but remarks like this …

“There’s a big difference between working for National Public Radio, producing something that is a news piece for that outlet, and writing for Boing Boing,” argues Jardin, who currently works as a commentator for NPR. “They are two entirely different kinds of entities, even though they have really big footprints culturally. Boing Boing is not trying to be CNN or NPR or the Library of Congress.”

… display what at this point is almost a wilfull failure to address the ethical issues the matter has raised. The point isn’t holding Boing Boing to NYT-level standards. (And what would be wrong with that in any case?)

Blue herself, incidentally, posted an entertaining personal account of the fallout from the controversy yesterday.

n.b.: Jardin is a sometime contributor to an NPR show, but I had no dealings with her when I worked there.

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Previously in Hitsville:

Last thoughts on the Violet Blue affair

Boing Boing continues to self-boink

The self-boinking of Boing Boing