Kurt was one of the bloggers checking out the faulty claims that the Parks Service wasn’t letting its employees reveal the “true age” of the Grand Canyon. Today he earned an atta-boy from Daily Kos, the heaviest of the heavyweight anti-Bush bloggers.
It’s worth noting that all Kurt did was what any responsible newsie would do: start calling people to track down the verity of a dubious claim making the rounds. Lots of bloggers ran with the rumor and now they’re looking like, well, bloggers. As Kos put it:
Just goes to show you have to be careful with what you run with, no matter how “true” is sounds and who is saying it. I really admire Kurt Repanshek’s patience in that regard.
Kurt did the unthinkable: waited till he had the whole story from multiple reliable sources. I know, boring as hell, old-media stuff that has the small advantage of being the right thing to do. (Now let’s hope the Kos throngs don’t put Kurt over his bandwidth limit for the month).