Can ridicule be worse than litigation?
By Dave
March 4th, 2009 | Leave a comment
By Diane Evans
Sometimes girls just wanna have fun.
Take the case of the women who snookered The New York Times, which wrote a serious story about a supposed support group called Dating a Banker Anonymous, DABA, based on a fictionalized blog.
Blog co-founder Laney Crowell, and her cohort, lawyer Megan Petrus, concoct stories that mix their own experiences with stories of people who e-mail the site at http://dabagirls.com. Reports Newsweek: “They don’t fact check the e-mails, or the gossip, and the posts are embellished and exaggerated for added laughs. At times, details are plucked from thin air to give the stories a satirical edge.”
The blog could lead to bigger and better things for Crowell and Petrus, who are now signed with well-heeled agencies in Hollywood and New York publishing. Speculation is there will be a book, movie or possibly even a TV series based on the blog. (But not a documentary.)
In a story in January, the Times reported on women who “shared their sad stories . . . at an informal gathering of Dating a Banker Anonymous, a support group founded in November to help women cope with the inevitable relationship fallout from, say the collapse of Lehman Brothers, or the Dow’s shedding 777 points in a single day.”
The article further noted that “theirs is not the typical 12-step program,” and that Step 1 for DABA is Slip into a Dress and Heels.
The Times interviewed and photographed a real group of women. But they were friends sitting around a cocktail table with drinks.
At its Web site, the Times has two corrections accompanying the original version of the story. One notes a misspelling of “the surname of a prominent Wall Street investor.’’ It’s Warren E. Buffett, not Buffet.
The other correction, carefully worded, says that one of the creators of DABA since described the blog “as a satire that embellishes true experiences for effect. Had the nature of the blog been made clear at the outset, the article would have described it accordingly, not as a support group.”
Publishers Lunch, an online publication for the book industry, couldn’t help but say nyah, nyah. Its headline read, The Next Time the NYT Whines About Fact-Checking in Books.
“If published in a book the Times would call it a hoax,’’ wrote Publishers Lunch. “As
published in their pages, it is a satire that embellishes true experiences for effect.’’
The true effect of the Internet for anyone in publishing is that mistakes that may never have come to light before will come to light in cyberland. That means public humiliation may overtake the dreaded lawsuit as the new No. 1 fear.
Or as Newsweek said in tweaking the paper, did the Times get punk’d?
