The Blame Game: The Pink Headband Edition

Do you remember that story that you read on your facebook feed about the woman was confronted in Wal-Mart over the fact her son was wearing a pink headband? Sure you do. Everyone was horrified and talked about bigotry and why Florida (where the story took place) was the worst.

Yeah, turns out it was probably all bullshit.

(A lot of the heavy lifting on this one goes to the website Get Off My Internets which smelled the story as bullshit from the moment it hit)

Of course the Mommyblogging world has reacted to this news by recognizing that by creating a career out of being judgmental and self-righteous they created the conditions for something like this to happen by encouraging outrageous stories instead of well written true to life takes on parenting.

JUST KIDDING.

Melissa Ford at BlogHer just posted a story about how this is the fault of the people like GOMI for expecting these blogs to be truthful.

Then last week, as often happens after the Internet is stirred, a second wave comprised of skeptics started calling bullshit on the story. Prove it, some people said. People started combing Katie's past posts, looking for anything that could be used to discount her veracity. She's a pathological liar, some people said. She was debated and discussed.
What happened to simply clicking away?

Yeah. If you think something is a pack of lies then don't talk about it. And when it shows up on your facebook feed don't correct it. Don't demand for truth from the media. Just accept things because it is mean otherwise.

Ford compares the blogger who (allegedly) created this story to the girls at camp who would make up shit.

My friends and I sometimes privately joked about the stories, which always ended with someone pulling the girl back from the brink of death, but we never confronted the girl, or publicly humiliated her, or called her mother to corroborate the story. Mostly because ... what if?

First of all, no. This was not the nicer thing to do. Being all catty behind the back of Junior Miss Baron von Munchhausen was not a form of kindness. It would have been much nicer to go to her Mom (or some other adult) and explain what she had said. And either be told "Yes, Suzy was kidnapped 5 times" and know that it's true or given the adult a heads up that Suzy has problems.

Because if Suzy was telling the truth you all didn't really believe her and were bitchy behind her back for nothing. And if she wasn't, then you didn't force her to learn the importance of telling the truth. Something that probably harmed her through other parts of her childhood.

In fact, this response is the worst of all possible ones. Believe everything would be better. Believe nothing would be better. This is believe nothing personally but then believe everything to their face.

But I do agree that the blame in this doesn't sit mostly with the original blogger (who has since removed her blog and is trying to make the story go away). So, who is to blame.

70% goes to Huffington Post and AOL and the other major media outlets that picked up the blog and made it go viral without doing any basic fact checking on the story. The fact that something is printed on a blog does not mean that it is confirmed as true. I had a friend who worked for a newspaper mailroom and he'd tell me about the weird letters that they'd get from people claiming that the CIA was stalking them or that someone was peeing in the lemonade at the grocery store. These things are common to news outlets and if the blogger had gone to HuffPo asking them to write the story of her incident they would have declined because it couldn't be confirmed. But as soon as it is written on a private blog then news aggregators feel that it's okay to share. They aren't reporting the story. They are reporting what someone else said.

Without Huff Post this story would have gone to a few thousand people who follow the mommy blogging community. They could have believed it or not. To use Ford's camp analogy, what Huff Post did was take what Suzy told her friends and broadcast it to the world. Then, when it turns out to be a lie, they take no responsibility.

20% goes to the mommyblogging community. The blogging community in general rewards stories and blogs that highlight the unusual. The truth is that the day-to-day thoughts and experiences of most mother's will never reach the audience that this story did. BlogHer and other sites act as if blogging is a viable stay-at-home business but they don't point out that very few people will ever be successful at it. They will either need to be very good writers or they need to have something like this post which causes them to be discovered.

And 10% goes to the blogger herself. This story didn't just harm her but harmed a lot of people. It means that if this does happen to somebody they may not be believed. It means that people walked away thinking Florida is terrible (which pisses me off as a native Floridian). And it means that maybe parents of a boy who might want to wear a pink headband will convince him not to, because they are afraid of being confronted in a Wal-Mart.