This one is about as incestuous as it gets. But before I get to all the disclaimers, I have to say I was pulling rotted fascia boards off a shack yesterday while the kerfuffle over KMSP Fox9 was exploding, at least among a tight crew of media colleagues, counterparts, and competitors. In other words, to quote Woody Allen, "I was nowhere near Oakland."

David Brauer, a central figure in the inside-baseball drama, lays it all out in its blow-by-blow glory over at MinnPost, and his reconstruction/rethinking strikes me not only as honest but an excellent example of what we have a right to expect from "quality journalism."

OK, so . . . quickly . . . I have done some paid bloviating for Fox9. Brauer and I go back twenty-five years or more, to nights and days of bad behavior (all of it David Carr's fault). I'm pinch-hitting for him a couple days a week on his Daily Glean, and among the commenters to Brauer's post are a couple more long-time compadres of mine. So, caveat emptor, baby.

My point here isn't so much whether Fox9 had an even half-assed realized plan to play cruising predator in Edina, although I'm with my buddy Jim Leinfelder (commenting to Brauer), who does a lot of work for network news operations, when he says that whatever they were thinking quite obviously went past the "spitballing" phase. Although just about everyone in the news business has been a part of bad-to-very-bad ideas at some point in their careers, I find it hard to believe that a veteran like Van Pilsum—albeit a veteran with enough theatrical DNA in her system to stay viable in the show biz of local TV news for as long as she has—would have followed through with luring kiddies from an SUV.

Rather, my interest here is in drawing attention to (and commending) the transparency at play in Brauer's post today . . . and rip the nobs who point to it and sneer about bad journalism. One of the great upsides that should come along with the 24/7, online blog world we have entered is the ability to correct mistakes ASAP in the same place they were committed. Brauer flogs himself a bit overmuch, considering the murkiness of the sequence of events, but the point is he's being as transparent as possible, which to my mind is good journalism, not bad.

TV news has always been notoriously bad about admitting any kind of error, short the kind that comes with a lawyer and a gun to the head. Where newspapers have a regular corrections slot, TV almost never corrects any error and certainly not on air where it was committed. (Very hard on the anchors' heavily promoted reputation for avuncular infallibility.)

Traditional newspapering usually lets a terse re-statement of fact suffice for correction, with rarely any explanation of how it happened. A media blog obviously has a special responsibility to transparency. But as every news entity moves most if not more of its news production online, there is no good reason why more correction and "amplifications" can't bloom with it—with readers' attention drawn to it as a "correction" not an "update" or some tacky, cloaking euphemism.

There is no such thing as perfect journalism, and there won't be when the HAL 9000s take over the news business. The intensely competitive 24/7 Internet cycle creates more opportunities for misstatements, etc. That's human nature. One of the toughest decisions any reporter makes is telling himself he's got the whole story. The good ones will tell you they often press the "send" key when they've got the story as best they can . . . as the deadline comes down.

So, conflicts of interest withstanding, I submit Brauer's post today as a prime example of how twenty-first century journalism can enhance its credibility with a simple act of humility. I mean, ask yourself, among the people you know, who are you more likely to respect, the person who occasionally says, "I was wrong?" or the one who never betrays a second thought on anything they've ever said or done?

The former is human demonstrating respect for the truth. The second is a figment of marketing.