Steve Paikin thanks Twitter followers for catching his mistakes
“In the four and a half years I've been tweeting, I've managed to punch out 8,873 tweets. I try my best to make sure they're accurate, and useful to the 36,000 or so people that follow me. But every now and then, I blow it. And, thankfully, I have a quality control system known as you that lets me know.”
Agenda host Steve Paikin wrote that in a blog post titled “mea culpa” on Wednesday, apologizing for tweeting incorrect information during the Liberal leadership convention. Paikin says he tweeted what two Liberal party official said: that the convention had the most participation of any in Canadian history: more than 105,000 Liberal members and "supporters" voted.
[node:ad]“My inside voice said to me: "That doesn't sound right."[…] But I just as quickly concluded that the Liberals wouldn't put false information out there, and something like that would be easy to check. So I tweeted it,” Paikin said. “Why I didn't check that before tweeting, I'll never know. But I should have.”
Paikin also acknowledged he was wrong in tweeting that the figure of cancelling the Mississauga gas plant.
“Twitter is fantastic. It's allowed me to serve an audience in a different way from the way I do on television every night, and through my blog posts. But one of the best things about it is that you're there to set me straight when I screw up … which sadly happens far more than I wish it did. So, thank you.”
Read Paikin’s full blog post on the Inside Agenda Blog.
Tamara Baluja is an award-winning journalist with CBC Vancouver and the 2018 Michener-Deacon fellow for journalism education. She was the associate editor for J-Source from 2013-2014.