For the Boston Globe honchos to claim to have been shocked, shocked to discover such a columnist might have embellished a colorful story, gotten key details wrong because he didn't actually report on them and the like, is frankly pretty ridiculous.

Just to fill in the background, the column in question, if I remember rightly, was a heart-warming tale about two kids in the hospital, the teary denouement of which turned out to have happened not to these two kids but some other kid he'd heard about.  Both incidents were, I believe, quite a few years in the past, and Barnicle claimed, not unreasonably, that he had the details of the two stories mixed around in his memory.  Again, this was nothing he'd ever reported out, just a tale he was told somewhere in his daily schmoozing around town.

The hoo-rah over Barnicle came only a few months after the paper had had to fire another columnist, a young black woman, who'd been discovered to be regularly making whole stories up out of whole cloth.  Since Barnicle, a middle-aged white guy, had been discovered to have done something vaguely similar,  although on a far, far tinier scale, the Globe felt it had to come down very hard on him for what were, at best, extremely minor transgressions for the kind of stuff they paid him to do (and promoted heavily).

The business with the George Carlin quotes was along similar lines, and I'm sure rigorous fact-checking of any old-fashioned metro columnist of that sort would turn up lots of it.

You ought also to know that Barnicle had been a very irritating thorn in the side of the establishment in Boston politics and business for a very long time, and there's no question that that fact played heavily into the treatment he got.

His point was, if I read correctly, that bloggers don't have the same accountabilities as journalists and that most post to vent and to voice their own opinions.

I am not, none of the posters on this site are edited professionally or fact checked, save by the community, here.  That's a far cry from journalism.  Further, posting here IS therapeutic, to an extent.  Without question, many people come here and post because they want validation that they're not alone in holding their opinions.  (I also come here because I'm capable of being persuaded that some of my positions aren't clearly thought out, and there are intelligent people here making good points...)

There is a difference between a commentator and a journalist.  Commentators are wrong all the time, witness Ann Coulter or Buchanan.  Their job is to advance a point of view.  Now, it helps to always be accurate in that role, but never has it been deemed essential.  As fo his plagarism, the poster above got it right on the history...he was kind of screwed.

Crooks & Liars, FactCheck, Media Matters, PolitiFact etc., exist because of these fantasy island refugees & their fabricated views of the world.

Mostly, they aren't worth the bother.  It's amazing that pseudo-journalists of such low skill levels, limited intellect, & ridiculous prejudices can gain access to cable bandwidth.  The "show" pretends to offer a news format when, in fact, it's a sham, almost a parody of what an informational discussion round table would look like.