After a number of bloggers went after kidnapped journalist Jill Carroll for saying nice things about people while they held her life in their hands, veteran columnist Ellen Goodman says this was one of the worst episodes of blogosphere ugliness so far.

"These attacks raise the question of what bloggery is going to be when it grows up," she asks, "An Internet op-ed page? Or a polarized, talk-radio food fight?"

Add this to the growing list of recent blog blunders:  the Huffington post's George Clooney debacle, the pro-Walmart bloggers' failure to disclose their reposting of company PR, and any number of others.  It's enough to make me give up blogging myself.  Not!  It would certainly be nice if we all behaved a little better so as to not reflect so poorly on the medium as a whole.  But this is one of the lessons that the public has to learn about distributed communication:  it's only as high-quality as the people who are using it.  Why is blogging getting a black eye instead of the pea-brained people who are responsible for these particular posts in question?  Would it be better for the vast majority of us to be silenced, for the public to only hear from well groomed professionals and thus to sustain some sort of delusion that the populace is made up of well reasoned thinkers?  I don't think so.  Dealing with low quality free speech is the price we pay for getting the good stuff.  Let's not let snobs tell us that those of us associated (via blogging) with the most unsavory don't deserve any credibility ourselves.  Those of us who earn credibility deserve it and obviously those of us who don't - don't.

Found via Morph