Frightening Grant Wahl news

An apology owed over accusations of wrongdoing by Qatar over the death of a writer who wrote extensively about wrongdoing by Qatar?

Irony just suffered a massive stroke.

 

When you're wrong, you apologize. Always. There's no line where "well, he did xxxx bad things before, so who cares if we falsely accused him of yyyyy."

Truth seeking and erring on the side of caution cannot be allowed to be tossed out the window.

 

As one who tsk-tsked about the conspiracy theorizing that happened here, I agree with whoever said it was our version of newsroom banter - not for publication. Unfortunately, some other media folks blur the line on social media.

 

I don't know. It seeemed like more than newsroom banter to me -- the quickness, the tone,/stridency, etc. I'm sure it wasn't helped by Wahl's brother's initial, same reaction. In fact, that may have gone a long way toward prompting it. But I was still surprised, and not in a good way. We usually do more critical thinking, and are slower to jump even to more obvious conclusions. It definitely wasn't this site's finest hour.

 

Lincoln had Marfan's syndrome.

 

Seen a lot worse stuff here, including outing members and large Asian penis (spam attack of 2004).

Argue if you will that journalists should be held to a higher standard — perhaps, but no, we treat this as a bar. Some people use their real names, some people aren’t shy about sharing who they are, but for the most part this is an anonymous site. Anyone coming here expecting us to pretend that we’re in journalist mode 24-7 is mistaken.

 

Asian Dong will forever live in infamy.

 

To me it's not a "higher standard" thing.

I come here because the conversation tends to be a hell of a lot smarter than it is in other places. Reddit is a sea of edgy 14 year olds. Twitter is a hellhole if you venture past your own carefully curated follows. Most other boards are filled with people who are just dumb and loud.

The level of discourse here, for the most part, is smart, funny and thoughtful. There are people here whose voices I greatly respect. The number of just straight-up dipshits is mercifully low.

When a sportswriter died after being sick for two weeks, this board collectively decided the only explanation was that he had been murdered with poison by the nation of Qatar because they didn't like his t-shirt and he said mean things on Substack.

That's really dumb.

This doesn't require soul-searching on our parts, or some existential thought about what the board is, or what ethical standard we should strive for.

I would just politely suggest the next time some unexpected news hits, maybe posters should just give it five seconds of rational thought and be a little less dumb. That's all.

 

For what it's worth, I think there's a big difference between saying "I think this smells" and "Infantino offed him," and when it was found that he collapsed in the press box (which took an unusual amount of time considering it happened surrounded by hundreds of journalists) that kind of told me it was a medical. The bad guys in Bond movies don't even murder people like that.

Still, this is SJ, not even Twitter or whatever. I don't exactly go out of my way to conceal my identity or location.

 

Fixed.

 

This board didn't "collectively decide" anything there. Most of us just followed the story as it played out.

 

I’ll admit, I reacted to the brother’s video. Part of me says he should have been a little more responsible in how he handled it, given the high profile of who his brother was, but I’d probably do much the same thing if I were in his shoes. Also, agree with almost all of what PC said.