Poltics.ie Debacle has spread across the Irish blogging world. For my non-blog readers basically Frank Wal & Co the firm of solicitors for the Taoiseach has written a letter to David Cochrane head of the site to demand that he remove alleged libelous comments and hand over names and address to them of various commentators. Now I have to say I have say i am more in  agreement with Conor McCabe on this issue then others. The thing is the whole thing has been dealt with Childishly.

Newspapers get these letters probably every other day. When is the last time you saw a paper put one of these on the front page of their paper? Never they deal with them in a mature professional manner. If they need to apologise they do, if they need to court they do, if they need not to act they do. They don’t frame it as some sort of mass defence of free speech and have people going “you the man” all day long. And saying that this is some sort of mass Fianna Fail conspircy to protect Berite. People always say what blogs needs to become more accepted. In my opinion it is maturity. Bloggers and commentators are too quick to insult too quick to type, I remember Richard Waghourne write about this before and one thing i remember most about this was that he said some thing along the lines of.

The reason that print journalism is better then blogging is that because you don’t publish immediately after you finished typing is that you get to think about what you wrote for a few hours and you often refine your view based on those few hours contemplation. 

That is what is often missing in blogging. If bloggers want to have the same respect as the rest of the media it needs to act like it.