Just once I would like to read a group of letters in the New York Times about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in which the pro-Israel writers do not have Jewish last names and the pro-Palestinian or pro-Arab writers do not have Arab last names.

Okay, it does happen — but rarely.

I wish we human beings were better at seeing past our own ethnic identities. I include myself in that.

The New York Times ombudsman has delved into the story of how Alessandra Stanley’s article about Walter Cronkite contained so many errors (previously blogged here):

The short answer is that a television critic with a history of errors wrote hastily and failed to double-check her work, and editors who should have been vigilant were not.

But a more nuanced answer is that even a newspaper like The Times, with layers of editing to ensure accuracy, can go off the rails when communication is poor, individuals do not bear down hard enough, and they make assumptions about what others have done. Five editors read the article at different times, but none subjected it to rigorous fact-checking, even after catching two other errors in it. And three editors combined to cause one of the errors themselves.

Oh, and yet another error in the original piece was corrected yesterday.

No! No! No!

The two bloggers most commonly recognized as the medium’s pioneers, Mickey Kaus and Andrew Sullivan, are, remarkably, still at it.

No, Michael Massing. You’re wrong. For the umpteenth time, blogging did not begin with political blogs. The media may not have paid attention to blogs until bloggers started to write about things the media cared about, but that does not mean that they did not exist or that people were not reading them.

I am so tired of this shit. Blogging was not always about politicos getting into pissing matches with other politicos. It was about people sharing cool stuff with each other on the web and forming a community. Christ — blogging had been going on for quite a while before political bloggers started in and then began claiming that they invented the thing. Read Rebecca Blood’s early history of blogging. The term blog itself was invented before Sullivan or Kaus ever started turning their thoughts into pixels. Jason Kottke has been blogging since 1998. Rebecca Blood has been blogging since April 1999. And a certain someone’s blog is turning 10 years old in a few weeks.

I’m sick of the pre-political bloggers getting short shrift. Andrew Sullivan writes an addictive blog and has done great things with the form. But he started in 2001 — just two weeks before I did, in fact — which was well after the blog pioneers.

Just because the media doesn’t care about something does not mean it doesn’t exist or matter.