Fraters Libertas

The Case Of The Mistaken Johnson: Lessons Learned

Yesterday, I received an e-mail from Gregg Knorn, who is a student at the University of Minnesota. Gregg wished to bring to my attention a post on his blog The American View. The post concerned an e-mail that Gregg had received from a David W. Johnson on an article that Gregg had written for the Minnesota Daily. Mr. Johnson was using an account on the University's e-mail system, and, after what he now admits was a minimal amount of research, Gregg concluded that the author of the e-mail was Professor David W. Johnson.

The e-mail was quite nasty and condescending in tone, and I, mistakenly assuming that Gregg was correct and that the author of the e-mail was in fact Professor David W. Johnson, put up a post (now corrected) taking Professor Johnson to task and including a link to his bio page at the University.

Since then, I have learned that Professor David W. Johnson did not write the e-mail in question. I have pulled most of the original post, leaving in place a correction, an e-mail from Professor Johnson explaining that he was being unfairly blamed for the original e-mail, and an apology to him for the error. I also sent him a personal e-mail expressing my regret for any distress caused by the incident. Mea culpa. It should be noted that Gregg has also pulled his post at The American View and apologized to both Professor Johnson and "the gentlemen at Fraters Libertas" (he obviously does not know us very well).

In order to ensure that we mend our fences with Professor Johnson, we are going to be adding twenty copies of his book Joining Together: Group Theory and Group Skills (7th Edition) to the prestigious Fraters Library collection, as well as letting him use Atomizer as a Guinea Pig for a series of lab experiments related to his Psychology of Conflict Resolution class.

One of the sticky wickets of the every evolving standards of the blogosphere is when to use information that is posted on other blogs. Is there a duty to first confirm that the information is correct yourself or do you just assume that the other blogger has already taken care to verify it? The best answer is probably the word that you see tossed around quite a bit in these sorts of conversations: trust. If you know and trust the blogger in question, you can feel much better about going with what they are presenting without having to check it yourself. Otherwise you proceed at your own risk.

In this case, I didn't know Gregg from a hole in the wall. And while he seems like a decent enough kid, I should have held off on weighing in on this matter until it was clear that the facts were in order. Lesson learned.

While this is certainly an embarassing mixup, I still don't think it reaches the level of confusing conservative activitist David Horowitz with consumer activist David Horowitz, as Syl Jones did in a Star Tribune editorial a few years back. And, unlike the Star Tribune, we have been front and center about publicly correcting the error.

At the end of the day, I guess the moral of the story is this: if you're going slap around a Johnson, make sure you've got the right one.

P.S. I humbly accept the first of the 2005 BODies. Saint Paul likes me, Saint Paul really likes me!