This is the last word from me on the story involving the Kickstarter campaign for the nine-year-old girl. It's an excerpt from my back-and-forth with +Corey Brin, who hopefully has a long career ahead of him as a spokesperson for reasonable skeptics and consumer watchdogs everywhere:
... To call the story I wrote one-sided though seems a little crazy to me.
First, I should also be clear that the writing I do on CNET involves reporting, analysis, opinion and even a little humor. I consider this a form of journalism so long as it's done in a way that's fair and transparent and opinions are obviously labeled as such. Notice I don't include "balanced" because I don't think all arguments, facts and suppositions carry equal weight.
Not everyone agrees with calling what I'm describing journalism, and that's a fair and important discussion to have. But we can do that another day, just want to let you know where I'm coming from.
So, I'd think we could agree this story has two sides on the most basic level - there's the side that believes Wilson (not Lewis) is a liar, scammer, cheater, rule-breaker, millionaire, etc. The pretty wide majority of commenters in this camp definitely fit the definition of a troll, particularly the author of the original post on Reddit that I quote. It's unfortunate you were lumped in with that description, but I certainly think it's an accurate description of the overall attitude of the aggregated group.
That's side one. Side two of the story is represented by Wilson herself and Kickstarter. That side of the story says it's legit and earnest.
I got both sides of the story while others were just repeating from Reddit and elsewhere. Then I set to work on evaluating and analyzing them to form my opinion and weigh both those sides of the story. I believe from personal experience and past reporting that some of what Wilson says is true, as I mention in the article. Kickstarter isn't a democracy, it's a company, and their interpretation of their own rules is what matters in this case, so I asked them for that. That's another side of the story I got that no one else did. (BTW - it's fair to criticize them for uneven application of their own rules, which I do believe is a problem there, but I didn't see it as the issue in this case. This issue was about how Kickstarter sees Wilson's campaign).
So in my mind, on one side is a successful project that was approved by Kickstarter and run by a woman who now pledges publicly to put extra funds raised towards what will hopefully be a good cause.
On the other side is a group that waged a campaign of character assassination on an individual by making assumptions and drawing conclusions based on bits of disjointed information from around the web. This is not research. It's Googling. Research starts there and ends with questions and (ideally) confirmations, which is what I attempted to do.
Best,
EM
