Not so fast: Blogs that speak too soon

I’m one of the pokier bloggers on the block, so I read with a dash of glee last month when New York Times reporter/blogger Andrew Revkin pondered whether now might be the time to consider a “slow blog” movement. I even thought about registering slowblog.com. (Someone beat me to the punch, unfortunately.)

Revkin’s suggestion came on the heels of a couple well-traveled incidents he observed of bloggers’ facilitating the “fast-motion flow of misinformation (and often disinformation).” One involved a partial and misleading Bill Clinton quote and the other an intentionally deceptive global warming report designed to dupe like-minded bloggers and talk radio mouths.

Six weeks later, I’m finally getting around to writing something about Revkin’s slow blog post. What jogged it back into my brain was reading about last week’s online hubbub over a comment made at the ECO:nomics conference by Wal-Mart CEO Lee Scott Jr.

Continued: Click “Read more”In a flurry of cutting and pasting and gloating, blog headlines from TreeHugger to our own local Maria Energia universally latched onto four words from Scott’s presentation: “We are not green.” “Surprise! Surprise!” snarked AlterNet. “Wal-Mart Stores not Green,” shouted Green Girls Global. “Wal-Mart Admits ‘We Are Not Green’,” chimed Green Options.

Grist, an environmental news and commentary site, initially joined the chorus with a sarcastic blog post titled “Well, That Changes Everything!” Later, however, one of its reporters actually went back and found Scott’s complete quote, which makes it appear as if he was making a different point entirely:

“It has been positive from a PR standpoint, but one of the things we learned is that we are not sophisticated enough to spin a story — ultimately, we’d get hammered. We are not out saying we’re a green company. We are not green. We have an extraordinary distance to go.”

As far as I can find, Grist is the only site that’s reported the full quote. To omit this important context here seems sloppy and deceptive, because we don’t know what Scott means when he says, “We are not green.” The writer or reader is free to invent whatever meaning is convenient to their own personal or political beliefs.

If Grist’s follow-up article Monday by David Roberts is accurate — and it certainly seems more substantive than the blog posts that rattled around the echo chamber last week — I think I have to agree when he writes about Scott’s remarks that “I found this to be a fairly refreshing lack of BS. It’s a little irritating to see it used as a gotcha.”

Does that mean I think Wal-Mart is green? No. But that blog post is going to take some time to write.